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Herb Strean loved his work. He was a second year graduate student and I, a first year student in the Graduate School of Social Work at Boston University, when we met in 1953. As an inexperienced social work student, I found Herb's insights into my patients' psyches helpful; they were undoubtedly a motivating factor in my growing interest in him. Herb never deviated from his work in the psychological field, ever deepening and widening in the same subject: people and what made them tick. He was interested in and wrote about many aspects of relationships, and, of course, we had to talk about ours. I dreaded that in the early years, wondering what he understood about me that I didn't know myself, but we got really good at it; being able to admit our vulnerabilities led to a more loving and better working relationship with each other.
If Herb hadn't been a therapist, what would he have liked to be? A comedian! He had a phenomenal memory, not just for all the jokes he had ever heard, but who had told them and when. He would laugh at a joke even when he knew it already. Among the many reasons he was sought after as lecturer in school and professional seminars had to be that there was always humor to be enjoyed. Herb's love of puns did not permit him to screen them, so our sons and I sometimes had the nerve not to laugh at the “groaners.” Some of the puns were incredibly clever, but it was always a disappointment to him that we didn't think all of them were funny-especially since the students in his classes at Rutgers always laughed. (We tried to explain to Herb that this might have had something to do with their getting graded by him).