Deceased Date Unknown
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In Memory
Mark Sterling Han Htoo died on 16 February 1995 at the age of 41. Mark has been gone from us for twenty-five years and it has taken that long for me to be able to put words to screen. I lost my best friend. I lost the best man at my marriage. I lost the brother I never had. My daughters lost the uncle he could have been to them. The rest of mankind lost a most remarkable person.
Mark Sterling Han Htoo came to our shores from Burma at the age of eight an orphan of bigotry. His American mother had died, so his Burmese father sent him away to live with his aunt Patricia in Manhattan. Busy with her editorial job at Fortune Magazine, ‘Auntie’ Patricia sent Mark away to boarding school across the Hudson River from West Point. And then, he came to Amherst.
I first met Mark in the fall of 1972 in the basement of Converse Hall standing next to the college’s poor excuse of a computer. Both of us were working on a physics assignment. The due date was rapidly approaching. My program was not working. It seemed Mark’s program was. It’s the early morning hours of the due day and I’m still in the Computer Center seemingly no closer to success. As I stood in in front of the computer wondering if I should give up, Mark walked in and dumped his punch cards into the card reader. Moments later a jumble of ragged lines appeared on the Calcomp plotter. He winced and, with amused anguish, groaned. My immature 18-year-old mind cheered. He was suffering at least as much as me. As we worked side-by-side mumbling back and forth about how that darn computer couldn’t-wouldn’t do what we wanted, the ice began to melt. It was morning when we reached the finish line together. Our programs worked. We showed them off to each other, then walked up to Valentine Hall for breakfast.
For the next two years Mark and I grew close often meeting in Valentine for lunch or dinner. To our delight we found that we shared identical interests: mathematics, science, science fiction, modern art, electronic music, military history, war games, and, of course, computers. Mark was one of the kindest people I ever met. Always positive and generous, always expressing wonderful joie de vivre. He looked upon the world around him, no, the universe around him, with a combination of intelligent wonder, childlike joy, and a certain amount of lighthearted ‘what the?!’.
Mark spent his Junior year as an exchange math student in Oxford England. We wrote to each other on occasion; I letting him know how crazy things were at the pressure cooker called Amherst; he letting me know how different and laid back it was at Oxford. In one letter I broached the subject of rooming together senior year. He wrote back an excited yes and then, asked me to send him an application for medical school. He had decided to be a doctor. So, in our senior year, I had the honor and pleasure to room with him along with Howard Martin and Tony Edmondson also close friends. And our home base? 203 Coolidge. It was a wonderful year for all of us in great part due to Mark.
Mark had what I can inadequately describe as an intellect that traveled along dimensions not fully understood by me or anyone else. It was unique but not distant, prodigious but not flaunted, sharp and incisive but not heavy handed. No matter the subject, he mastered it ably in the shortest time. Yet, despite his incredible intelligence Mark didn’t suffer from social isolation like many genius’s I’ve known. He was always able to descend from whatever plain of existence his mind happened to be traveling along to interact with great warmth and interest. Complementing this wonderful personality and brilliant intellect was the driest sense of humor I have ever experienced. Humor that, at times, was so acerbic I think it could have burnt through ten inches of tempered steel. But he never used it to denigrate anyone, just…everyone…in a nice sort of way. Once finished he would snicker like a mischievous child. His humor grew on you as you got to know him and to appreciate the subtle undertones of what he was getting at. I miss that most of all.
Senior year, we took Biochemistry together teaming up on the weekly homework problems and the laboratory sessions. The homework problems were legendary for their difficulty. We were told no one had gotten them all. But we did. Even the one that had yet to be solved by any prior class. I remember sitting in the corner of our social dorm in frustration the day before that problem was due. At that moment Mark came walking in from his Middle English class singing Beowulf by heart in perfect cadence and with perfect vowel shift. He had been discouraged the day before because it had taken him more than a few hours to memorize it all but now, he was his usual jaunty self. As he passed by, he glanced backwards and upside down at the pile of papers lying around me scribbled over with a jumble of variables and constants. In his signature off-the-cuff manner, he said: “Oh, the equation that describes that is…”.
We ran to the computer center, locked everyone out (we were both computer supervisors and had authority to do this; I think), and wrote a program to confirm Mark’s solution. The lights on the computer panel blinked and the IBM chain printer chug, chug, chugged away. We waited, occasionally glancing at each other in anticipation. Then, the answer came up over the top and…the undoable problem was done. Off to Valentine for a celebratory dinner.
Academic laurels were not important to Mark. He rarely looked at what was written by his professors on his papers and never challenged an unfair grade. Instead, living and experiencing life to the fullest through the application of his intellect and sense of humor was what motivated him. A good way to illustrate this is to go over Mark’s daily schedule senior year: Up at 11:30 am for lunch; attendance of afternoon classes if any; then back to the dorm or the computer center for relaxation; then on to dinner; then a bit of socializing with me, Howard, and Tony in our dorm. Next, Mark would lie down on his bed and read a 200-to-300-page pulp science fiction cover-to-cover. Eventually, he would turn to his studies and complete them by about 3:30 AM when he would flop down on his bed until 11:30 AM to start it all over again.
After graduation Mark went to NYU Medical School. During these years I periodically visited him. We would stay with his aunt in Central Park West. Mark knew every inch of Manhattan, and he would take me on day-long tours of the best pastry and candy shops so we could indulge our most important mutual interest – sugar and chocolate. On one outing we decided to co-author a science fiction. It was our intention that it become a great classic in that genre. However, the pace of medical school left us no time for such things, so the project never got off the ground. At graduation I contacted Mark and suggested we revisit the sci-fi during our residencies. To my surprise, he demurred but would not tell me why. Correspondence languished. He didn’t visit despite my being stationed in Hawaii. It seemed our friendship was at an end.
In 1984 I was posted to West Point right up the Palisades from Mark who lived in Kew Gardens. To my relief, when I contacted him, he invited me down. I could not wait to experience that intellect, that humor, that wonderfulness. But, when he met me at the door of his condo, something had changed. Gone was the wonderful outlook on life, the great energy to see and do, the child-like playfulness that illuminated his wit. Although I didn’t know it, Mark had become chronically ill. Despite this, we spent many wonderful weekends together in Manhattan slumming on Canal street, eating dim sum in Chinatown, and ogling the cameras and computers at 47th Street Photo. Occasionally, his humor would peek out from under his hidden burden at some unusual situation or person. And then, he met my fiancé and, for a short period of time, came completely out of his funk. He traveled down to Washington D.C. to be the best man at my marriage and welcomed my new wife and I with open arms whenever we could make it to Kew Gardens.
My professional life took me to many places and, over the next decade, I watched from a distance as this wonderful person I knew become less and less himself. No amount of encouragement could get him to visit us for a vacation even when we were in Florida. And, when we flew up to New York City with our two daughters he seemed to distance himself from them. Then, on New Year’s Day 1995 I woke up in the early morning hours with a feeling. I turned to my wife and told her that Mark was in trouble. How I knew I don’t know. Disregarding the time of night, I called and asked if I could fly up to see him.
“Today?”, he asked.
“Yes. Today,” I answered.
“Okay.”
I booked a flight to New York and drove as fast as I could to Mark wondering why I was doing this. I got my answer when the door opened. What I saw cut a swath through my heart that remains to this day. It was someone else who answered my knock. A person whose facial features were distorted. A person who had shrunk down to a frail apparition. A person who was already dead and knew it.
This was going to be our last time together. As a comment on our long friendship, Mark mobilized all the energy he had for my impromptu visit. Together, we went out to frequent the pastry shops, to sample chocolates at the candy stores, and to ogle computers at 47th Street Photo. As we walked from place to place Mark let me know about everything that had happened over the prior decades and apologized for having been, perhaps, too private a person.
While in 47th Street Photo I suggested that he replace his old computer with a new one that we would build from parts. A faint light rose in his eyes and he made the purchase. That evening we got the computer assembled. A final spark of his intellect flared as he instantly figured out the Windows minefield game and won the first six before getting blown up. At that point he turned to me and closed the circle of our friendship that had started twenty-three years earlier.
“Mark?”
“Yes?”
“You know, I was quite envious of your computing prowess when we were working on our physics project.”
“Gosh. I was feeling the same way about you.”
“Really?”
I left Mark, happy to have brought some joy to him and closure to me. The next day, Mark collapsed. He was rushed to the hospital, but it was soon clear they could do nothing for him. He returned to his home where he passed away surrounded by a few close friends. His untimely death was a loss to all of us who knew him and to those he could have helped had he not been stricken down before his time.
Mark Gusack ’76
June 1, 2020