Epstein’s Early Teaching Career Links to Prominent Media and Elite Families

The captain of the math team at Lafayette High school in Bensonhurst, he went on to Cooper Union where the tuition is free. He dropped out after two years and began taking classes at the NYU’s Courant Institute of Mathematics. Then, without a college degree, hence by a slight of hand, he got a job teaching math and physics at Dalton in 1974. (A few years ago, during a chance encounter with a former Dalton math department chairman, Margo Gumport, I asked her about Epstein. She said he was the most brilliant math teacher at Dalton in her 50-year career and that she had often wondered what had become of him.) Dalton was his first exposure to the wealthy. They have, he concluded, just as many problems as the people in Coney Island, but different ones, almost invariably involving divorce and money. “I found it interesting as a science experiment,” he recalled recently as we chatted about his life. “It did not really involve me. I could just stand back and watch.” Dalton fathers were attracted to him as a young man clearly on the make. Punch Sulzberger, the publisher of the New York Times, and a Dalton father at the time, tried to recruit Epstein to come to the Times. (Epstein recounts a story of riding with Sulzberger in his wood paneled station wagon to the family’s country estate and Sulzberger talking to the chauffer on a phone from the backseat to the front.) But he wasn’t interested in being a journalist. HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_022878