Norwalk High School to honor pharmaceutical executive – Thehour.com

NORWALK — It is difficult to believe now that Martin S. Gerstel of the Norwalk High School Class of 1959 didn’t think very much of himself as a teenager growing up in this city.

His father, Sydney Gerstel, had died when the son was four years old and he and his sister were dependent upon on the earnings of their mother, Etthel Kurtz Gerstel, a bookkeeper with a local bank.

“We were very poor and lived in an old house on East Avenue (opposite St. Paul Episcopal Church) where there were large rats in the basement,” he said in a recent telephone interview. “I really didn’t look forward to attending college or having a meaningful career.”

Something changed that outlook and created a new attitude that will bring Gerstel to the Norwalk Inn & Conference Center for installation to the NHS Alumni Association Wall of Honor.

That something was the fortuitous influence of two mentors who assisted him in choices of college and career.

He met his first mentor mowing the lawn and shoveling snow at the Blackberry Road home of Harry A. Becker, Ph.D., the legendary Norwalk Public Schools superintendent (1953-1970), who expressed such surprise when told that Gerstel had not applied to college that he immediately encouraged him to try Yale College, his alma mater.

The Norwalk boy had done well enough at NHS to gain admission. He had been elected to the National Honor Society and, with the help of science teacher William Gilmore, had won the chemistry prize awarded annually by the Southwestern Connecticut Chapter of the American Chemical Society. He’d also been elected vice president of his class, a representative on the student council, co-captain of the track squad where he performed in the field events and had been selected for the prestigious Boys State. He had also used his 6’4” height to be second highest scorer and strong rebounder on the basketball team.

Getting Gerstel into Yale was one thing, but keeping him there was another. The young man had trouble adjusting as a freshman and left New Haven. However, Becker convinced him to return and Yale to readmit him after changing his major. Gerstel went back to take a bachelor’s degree in chemical engineering and was hired immediately by a manufacturing company in the Midwest.

After noting that he was doing more work there than his peers but not being promoted, he learned that promotions were dependent upon having a graduate business degree. He soon had that degree from Stanford University and graduating first in his class found his picture on the cover of Business Week magazine as a representative of that year’s nationwide crop of MBA recipients.

That brought him to the attention of Alex Zaffaroni, Ph.D., a South American research scientist who preferred working in his laboratory to running a business. He had created the first birth control pill and was marketing it through his Syntex Corporation. Preparing to start another company based on a new invention, controlled slow release drug delivery, he selected 25-year-old Gerstel to run the business to be known as ALZA. Gerstel struggled for 15 years to make the new company profitable, but eventually it became worth billions.

“Dr. Zaffaroni and I worked together for several years, and I learned a lot from him,” Gerstel said recently. “I’ll always be grateful.”

In the course of his international travels, the Norwalker arrived in Israel in early middle age and was smitten by a highly regarded physical therapist who became his wife. Shoshona returned to live in Menlo Park with him for a decade until he “retired” at the early age of 51 and they returned to her ancestral town of Jerusalem.

“I was really tired by then and had no plans to do anything but philanthropic consulting,” Gerstel said.

But his presence in the small country as former CEO of a very large American pharmaceutical company attracted many entrepreneurs. He soon became CEO of two fledgling pharmaceutical companies with bright futures. The Gerstels maintain a California home and reside there every August with their young adult son.

The public is invited and tickets at $ 50 each may be obtained by calling Charles Yost, NHSAA president, at 203-856-7391 or Pat Street at 203-858-0916.