University Holds Memorial Services For David Ecker

The University held a memorial service yesterday for David R. Ecker '81, who died of leukemia on February 26. Over 100 of Ecker's friends and classmates attended the afternoon service.

Reverend Peter J. Gomes, minister in the Memorial Church and Plummer Profesor of Christian Morals, conducted the service. Several of Ecker's friends, David Feinberg '81, Joanne Burger '81, Susanne Coates '81, and his proctor, Jeff Sonnenfeld '76, spoke of their memories of Ecker.

Ecker's friends who spoke at the service stressed that Ecker taught them all a new way to experience and live life. "His philosophy wasn't an intellectually contrived, pretentious philosophy," but one that made each moment of life special in some way, Burger said.

Despite his illness, Ecker was a person who tried to fill every moment of his own life and the lives of others with a sense of uniqueness, his friends said. "I have learned to savor little things," Sonnenfeld quoted Ecker as saying just before his death.

The University has established a short story prize contest in Ecker's name for freshmen. Ecker enjoyed writing fiction and helped his friend Alfred E. Lewis '78 with a story which appeared in 1975 in Harper's magazine.