Webb School classmate and lifelong friend. The friend Fred has known the longest.
Born Marvin Corwin Jr.; went by Kip through his Webb years and for decades after — people teased him: “Kip, kip, kip!” He changed his name to Nicholas in 1989, after his great-uncle, movie mogul Nicholas Schenck. Webb friends, the Doofs, and Fred’s family still call him Kip. I suggested “Starship Captain James Tiberius Corwin.” He chose Nicholas for his own reasons.
Grew up in Midtown Manhattan, at 45 Sutton Place South. His father Marvin Corwin Sr. was a Madison Avenue adman who led the Coke “Hilltop” campaign and worked the VW “Think Small” and LBJ “Daisy” accounts. His mother is Ellen Zimmerman, who is 92 and still worth talking to. He married Anett Enzmann in 2018.
He picked a German-language book off my shelf at some point. That was enough. He taught himself German, got a law degree, got licensed in three states, couldn’t stand arguing over money, and now lives in Germany with his wife Anett as a German-to-English translator. This is a coherent life path if you follow it step by step.
We’ve agreed to drop the preface “I’ve probably told you this story before,” since we invariably have and if we left out those stories we’d have nothing to talk about whatsoever.
At Webb we had “birthday tables” — you could invite a group of friends to a table on your birthday. Kip’s was December 12, mine December 13, Rick Shull’s December 14: three in a row made a great week.
~767 emails plus letters from 1985 onward. He’s pedantic, academic, verbose, near-eidetically precise about dates, and loyal in his way.
He came to Burning Man with me in 1997 — my first, his only — and hated it. He took long hikes off-playa and rode his bike all the way to Gerlach.
He had a midnight blue Jeep CJ7. We drove it to Oklahoma once to see Richard Holley, stopped at the Route 666 sign for the mandatory photo.