Ray Irani

MainGate_summer12

A Man of Wisdom and Vision
Main Gate Magazine
American University of Bierut
Ada Porter, Editor

 

It was 3:00 am when young Riyad “Ray” Irani arrived at the Los Angeles airport from his home in Lebanon. He was headed to graduate school at the University of Southern California (USC), but first he had to find a place to sleep.

The year was 1953, well before propeller aircraft were supplanted by commercial jets. For the 18-year-old Irani, who had never traveled out of the Middle East, it was a memorable adventure. He flew from Beirut to Cairo; from Cairo to Rome; then to Shannon, Ireland, where a transatlantic flight took him as far as Bangor, Maine. He flew from Maine to New York City, landing at the old Idlewild Field (now JFK).

There, he had to change airports to board his westbound flight. “It was kind of confusing,” Irani recalls today, nearly 60 years later, “but I carried my three suitcases— one of them filled with books—over to LaGuardia Airport for the flights to Chicago and on to Los Angeles. When I got to LA in the middle of the night, I found a taxi and told the driver, ‘I want to go to a reasonably priced hotel not far from USC.’” After catching a few hours of sleep, Irani found a pay phone to call the Chemistry Department at the university. “I had never dialed a telephone,” he says, “so I had to ask a passerby to dial the number. Several people passed this up, but someone finally helped me.”

These days, Ray Irani doesn’t have to rely so much on the kindness of strangers. [Read more:PDF]

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