Graham Berkeley
From September 11 Memories
Graham Berkeley (January 12, 1964 - September 11, 2001), a Briton, had lived in the United States for 10 years, and for 10 years he had been trying to get the green card that would grant him resident status. It came at last in June, and Mr. Berkeley had started making plans to move to New York City from Boston when, on September 11, 2001, he boarded United Airlines Flight 175 for a business trip to Los Angeles.
"It's like fate playing tricks on you," said his friend Christian Winslow. "His fight for that green card had been so intense."
Mr. Berkeley, 37, was director of e-commerce solutions for the Compuware Corporation, but his friends remember him as a classical violinist, an opera buff and a world traveler. "He loved the freedom that America has," Mr. Winslow said. "He loved the openness of our society and the friends he had here. America, to Graham, was almost like the cliché — a land of endless opportunities."
Tributes
Graham Berkeley was a musician, a zealot, a raging intelligence, a bon vivant and a clown. He was above all a man who lived in vivid, three-dimensional color that paled much around him to washed-out shades of grey.
Those of us who worked with him were by turns charmed, intimidated and enthralled.
We were blessed and challenged by his presence; we are diminished and bereft by his passing.
May we remember him well and long.
I studied at the Royal College of Music with Graham in the early 1980s, and we even lived in the same student hostel (Victoria League Hostel) in Bayswater, West London, for a year. He was a funny guy. I remember walking with him to school many days, across Kensington Gardens.
Graham and I met again in the mid-1990s, when both of us had relocated to New York City. We literally ran into each other one day on Fifth Avenue, stopped and looked, and realized that we knew each other "from a previous life." At that point, he was living on Sixth Avenue, downtown. He had also "come out."
I did not find out about his passing until today, November 10, when speaking to my ex-professor at the Royal College of Music. This is very sad news.
JL
