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August 22, 2003/Av 24 5763, Vol. 55, No. 52
Nautical museum in Sonoran Desert?
BARRY COHEN
Editor
Ray Arenofsky has collected hundreds of items, transforming his office into a nautical museum.
Photo by Barry Cohen
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Ray Arenofsky, personal injury attorney, relates an anecdote involving a client.
"This guy had misery in his life. He had one accident after another. He had lost a child. He was at his wit's end," Arenofsky recalls. "He came in the office. He was in terrible shape. ... Then he started to cry."
The client explained his tears were tears of joy because he felt like he was back on his boat on New York's Sheepshead Bay, says Arenofsky.
The client was sitting in an office surrounded by hundreds of items devoted to the ocean. Arenofsky had transformed his office into a makeshift nautical museum.
The collection started 17 years ago, when Kerry Milhon, Arenofsky's paralegal, gave him a clock of a rotating ship's helm.
The collection now includes such items as a replica of the menu of the last meal served on the Titanic, a chain from a ship in Pearl Harbor, a pickled shark embryo, salt from Salt Lake City, an alligator's head from the Louisiana Bayou, Soviet nautical badges, a can of Popeye the Sailor's spinach, a lobster crab trap table, mermaids, a puffer fish and a turtle tank.
One of Arenofsky's favorites is a painting from a client who is paralyzed.
"He paints with a paintbrush attachment in his mouth," he notes. Though the painting originally was of the forest near Flagstaff, he added an ocean to fit the theme of the room, Arenofsky explains.
Arenofsky, native of Bayonne, N.J. - former home of a nautical base - moved to the Valley in 1979, after graduating from Rutgers University Law School.
Arenofsky notes that the room provides his clients with a needed distraction from their pain.
"We try to break the normal setting - the pinstripe suit, the books, the white walls."
Arenofsky, member of Animals Benefit Club of Arizona, has added birds and dogs to his collection. More than 80 breeds of dogs - made by Sandicast Sculpture of San Diego - cover and surround his desk.
"Most people are warmed or softened by dogs and the ocean," he says. "This (room) softens them in a tragedy."
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