Herb Turetzky — now never to be forgotten

Herb Turetzky was a lucky man.

Not only did he get to  see every Nets’ basketball game for some 54 years – he had a wealth of tremendous friends.

Turetzky, a 1963 grad of Brooklyn’s Thomas Jefferson High School, was the official scorer for the Nets since their inception in New Jersey as the Americans.

He passed a year-ago April at the age of 76 – the cause was primary lateral sclerosis, which causes nerve cells in the brain that control movement to fail. In fact, in his last several years as Nets’ scorer, he attended games in a wheelchair.

But it was the friendships he made while a student at Thomas Jefferson High School, that will keep the Herb Turetzky name alive for years.

“I went to see Herb about three weeks before he passed,” friend and Thomas Jefferson classmate Ira Cohen told the Brooklyn Eagle. “He told me, ‘I just don’t want to be forgotten.’”

He won’t – thanks to Cohen, Larry Tischler and Harvey Jackson.

“We could not think of a better way for us to keep his memory alive than by creating the Herb Turetzky Scholarship Fund in partnership with Medgar Evers College, part of the City University of New York,” Cohen said.

But why Medgar Evers?

“Herb had a passion working with young people,” Dr. Kimberly Whitehead, Senior Vice-President for Strategy and Chief of Staff, Medgar Evers College, told the Eagle. “With permission of the Turetzky family,” she said, “Both Ira Cohen and Harvey Jackson approached us. And we thought it was a wonderful program.”

Cohen says the scholarship idea was on-going for some nine months. “In fact,” he added, “It was Harvey (Jackson) who walked over to Medgar Evers and met with Dr. Whitehead.”

The Herb Turetzky Scholarship Fund will commence in the Fall of 2024,…