Bill and his wife, Connie personally ran US Fencing from their home in West New York, NJ
A brief biography which Bill wrote in a letter to Andy Shaw:
Connie and I have been in fencing since the early fifties. In fact, we met at a fencing meet in Connecticut. I started to fence in 1946 at Fordham As team manager, I learned a lot about the Epee scoring machines from Charly Willous, their inventor. When Charly retired as the AFLA Technician, I was asked to take his place. Jimmy Castello and I worked together to keep the equipment working. Jimmy continued when Uncle Sam needed me in Korea.
When I came back from Korea, Joe deCapriles asked me to run for Secretary of the AFLA (now USFA). I could not do it at the time since I was going to school. However, Connie undertook to become the Recording Secretary, a post which she held for many years. As such she did what the Colorado office is doing today. Of course, there were only about 2,000 members at the time. It was BC (before computers) and Connie kept all the records by hand on card files. I can’t imagine how the organization could have gotten along without her.
I became Secretary after I got my MBA. Around 1961 or 1962, I persuaded Columbia Record Club to use the AFLA list to check the speed of mailing records from their Terre Haut facility. With the approval of the Board our members received free records and did a great job in giving us responses. As a result, the membership list was transferred to my staff at Terre Haut and put first on EAM (Electronic Accounting Machines) and later on computers. At the same time, Norman Lewis and I introduced the three year membership. The net result was to double the membership.
Later I became Treasurer of the USFA. While I enjoyed fencing personally, I was better as an administrator than as a fencer. As treasurer I worked to set up the system for our then new office at Colorado Springs. When the result of the Los Angeles Olympics gave the USFA 2 million dollars, I put these in Treasury bonds and with the help of Steve Sobel and Irwin Bernstein made sure that the principal remained in tact and we used the income to promote fencing. This upset some people who wanted to spend it all.
Connie in the meanwhile worked hard to keep the New Jersey growing. For a long time we were very active.
The Metropolitan Saber Trophy that you just acquired brought back to me that I may have been the last one to run the tournament. I dimly remember that the NYAC won the trophy with a Team of Dr. Tibor Nyalas, Dr. Jimmy (Doc) Flynn and Norman Armitage.
