My brother, Michael Asher Reuben, was a talented, passionate, virile, handsome young man who wanted to write scripts, produce movies, compose music and do great deeds. Like many young people, he longed to make the world a better place. He despaired of the ugliness and immorality around him, and he agonized over the incurable horror of being twenty years old, an ailment the only remedy for which is growing up. Mikey, with his big, beautiful hazel eyes surrounded by the longest and curliest eyelashes ever known to man, died in a boating accident on March 3, 1974, shortly before his twenty-first birthday.

The light went out behind Samuel Reuben’s eyes when his oldest son died, because he had lost the joy of his existence. And Mikey was a joy. There was an innocence and a vigorous purity about him that was a delight to behold. There was an originality and an irregularity in his way of doing things that made one realize that iconoclasm was not going to die with my father.

His death broke was the fissure into my father’s well being through which crept an array of ailments that prematurely ended his life.