Jack Embersits
by Peter Tveskov
Jack Embersits '58 died this month. Jack was captain of the '58
football team that vanquished Harvard in the fall of 1957 in a manner
not to have been surpassed since.
Jack was Director of Operations at Yale - a position later elevated
to Vice President by Bart Giammatti - from 1966 till 1976, a period
that included the revolutionary days in New Haven - Black Panther
Trial, Viet Nam War demonstrations, as well as the trauma of bringing
Yale Operations into the twentieth century. The latter involved
several long and painful strikes with Vinnie Sirabella heading up the
Union, Vinnie being truly a worthy opponent.
One of Jack's major accomplishments was to successfully face the
Energy Cost Crisis at Yale - for budgetary, not political reasons - a
couple of years before the so-called Arab Oil Embargo.
Jack left Yale with the change of Administration when Kingman
Brewster retired and started his own successful company which
parlayed the energy management lessons learned at Yale to improve the
operations of a large number of other institutions such as Vassar,
Brown, Connecticut College, Bryn Mawr, Barnard and many others. The
basic principle was to recycle easily achieved energy cost avoidance
into facilities improvements, especially to address deferred
maintenance.
I was fortunate to work for and with Jack for over 20 years at Yale
and later with Facilities Resource Management, Jack's company. He was
a great leader and a great asset not only to Yale, but to higher
education.
As footnotes I must add the memory of having to close steam valves
in the Yale buildings that obviously never had been closed since the
buildings were built in the thirties and walking across the New Haven
Green with Jack when a French intellectual was giving a political
speech and nearly getting high from the marijuana clouds that hovered
over the multitudes gathered there, never mind the night when they
blew up Ingall's Rink!
Yes, books could be written about those days and I am looking forward
to see how Gaddis Smith deals with that era in his forthcoming Yale
history!
Peter
