Tony Bennett’s death at age 96 opened the floodgates of many personal memories.

When I was sixteen years old, I entered a college located hundreds of miles from my home town of Alexandria, Virginia. Once there, I joined a fraternity, and the recording of Bennett’s first hit song “Because Of You” was a central feature of every weekend “frat party.”

Each time I hear that Bennett standard today, I am transported back in time to the Beta Theta Pi house where I am once again surrounded by my fraternity “brothers” and a host of  young women who traveled to our campus from nearby colleges and universities. “Because Of You” will forever evoke the sweetness of that long ago and far away  time and place.

A decade later I was a United States Air Force Chaplain based in Japan and Korea. Each month for two years, I visited the Kunsan Air Base  on the western side of the Korean peninsula where I conducted a religious service for the Jewish personnel stationed there, taught a class on Judaism, and performed other rabbinic duties.

In the early 1960s, Kunsan near the Yellow Sea was a bitterly cold and barren place.  We were constantly aware of the erratic and dangerous North Koreans who continually threatened a new outbreak of war. We also had doubts about the military capabilities of our South Korean allies, and we suffered grim living conditions at our base. Little wonder why Korea was such a depressing place back then.

The Kunsan AB Officers Club, a shabby structure, was sardonically dubbed “The Bottom Of The Mark,” in contrast to the famous San Francisco “Top Of The Mark” bar and restaurant in the Mark Hopkins Hotel.

It was not an accident that the most popular song among Americans stationed in Korea during those bleak years was Tony Bennett’s wistful “I Left My Heart In San Francisco.”

Rest in peace, dear Mr. Bennett. Because of you, my life was enriched in so many ways.