Remembering Stan Charnofsky
It is with a very sad heart that we share the passing of Dr. Stan Charnofsky on December 29th, 2024, at age 93. Stan led a legendary life, starting with a successful baseball career at USC and then with the Yankees, and later as a successful CSUN Matadors’ baseball head coach between 1962-66. Stan was ultimately inducted into the CSUN Athletic Hall of Fame in 2016. As his career evolved, Stan moved into several CSUN academic leadership roles, including the CSUN Educational Opportunities Program (EOP) Director, the Educational Psychology and Counseling Department Chair, and the founding coordinator of the Marriage, Family, and Child Counseling Program (MFCC ) in 1970 – now called Marriage and Family Therapy (MFT). In 1983, he founded the MFCC/MFT Alumni Network and the Center in Educational Psychology’s Workshop Program. Stan received the CSUN Distinguished Teaching Award in 2016 for his dedication to the MFT program for 50 years and retired from his faculty position in 2021 at age 89.
As a strong proponent of Humanistic Psychology and unconditional positive regard, Stan’s life work was all about supporting the students of CSUN in pursuit of a career in Education, Psychology and Counseling, and the student athletes he mentored as a Matador baseball coach, many of them going on to be professional athletes. In partnership with his family, a scholarship has been created in his memory to continue his legacy for those who will follow in his footsteps. If you would like to make a gift in Stan’s honor, please consider donating to his scholarship, and checking the “tribute” box to indicate In Memory of Stan Charnofsky.
Stan loved butterflies and often wore a butterfly pin. Students, staff, and friends are invited to leave a tribute to Stan on a paper butterfly which can be taped to Stan’s office door, Education Building room 3126. Paper butterflies, tape, and a pen are available and waiting for you there! More information will be forthcoming regarding a memory book and a memorial for Stan on campus later in the semester.
For the family condolences: Family members can receive condolence messages by email at RememberingStanC@gmail.com
Stan’s family members have created the following biography to share with his colleagues and friends.
“Stanley Charnofsky and his identical twin brother, Harold, were born into a close-knit, ethnically Jewish family in Trenton, New Jersey, to immigrant parents Sophie (Mackler) and Michael Charnofsky. The twins were the first boys and the youngest of five children, with the oldest daughter 17 years their senior. The children were Beatrice, Charlotte, Leonore, Harold, and Stanley.
Sophie and Michael had emigrated from shtetls in the Ukraine about 25 years earlier (Tomashple, Warshilovka), and their children grew up as first-generation Americans in a bilingual (Yiddish, English) home. Stan’s experiences with immigrant parents blending into a dominant culture sensitized him to the experiences of members of other immigrant groups, later informing his writing, politics, and teaching.
Stan and Hal graduated from Abraham Lincoln High School in Los Angeles in 1949. The twins were athletes and scholars who also had creative and performing arts talents. They both received academic scholarships to attend the University of Southern California (USC), playing baseball under the guidance and mentorship of legendary coach Rod Dedeaux as a double-play combination, with Stan at second base, and Hal at short-stop. Rod called them both lovingly “Pep,” short for “Pepper,” and also “Tiger,” a moniker he used for all of his players – these nicknames saved him the trouble of needing to know which twin was which!
An All-Pacific Coast first-team selection as both a junior and a senior, Stan served as co-captain along with his brother during their senior year at USC. Letterman Stan continues to rank among USC’s all-time leaders in hitting triples during his career. During an exhibition game in 1951, the USC Trojans played the New York Yankees, and baseball folklore tells that nineteen-year-old Mickey Mantle hit one of the longest home runs ever hit; Stan recalled that the ball went over his head at second base, over the fence, and into the football field in the distance, “probably 500” or even “520 feet.” Stan himself batted .467 in the 1951 College World Series and earned a spot on the All-Decade College World Series team for the 1950s.
In 1953, the twins completed their USC Bachelor of Science degrees in Physical Education. In 1954, Stan married his sweetheart, Norene (Moore), and the two of them traveled around the country for the next few years, due to Stan’s baseball career and stint in the military.
Stan first professional contract was with the New York Yankees, and he played a total of seven seasons of minor league baseball with affiliates of both the Yankees and the Detroit Tigers. Stan and Hal were sent up to the majors for five days, and a classic photo shows manager Casey Stengel scratching his head, standing in puzzlement with the identical Yankee-uniformed Charnofsky twins. With Hal, Stan set an Eastern league double-play record during their “A-Ball” season with the Binghamton Triplets in New York, and newspapers touted the novelty of the “Charnofsky Twins” playing for the “Triplets.”
During Stan’s two years with the Augusta Tigers in the South Atlantic (“Sally”) League, Stan was known for having broken up a no-hitter thrown by famed pitcher Bob Gibson with a single in the sixth inning. Towards the end of his professional baseball career, Stan managed in the minor leagues in 1958 and 1960, respectively, for the Detroit Tigers (Augusta) and the Yankees (St. Petersburg).
While playing professional baseball in the 1950s, Stan also served in the Air Force for nearly two years, and continued his secondary education, finishing his M.S. degree in Physical Education from USC in 1958. Stan and Norene settled in Sepulveda, and Stan taught physical education and became a baseball coach at San Fernando Valley State College (SFVSC), now CSUN. He then earned an M.Ed in Counseling from USC in 1961, and completed his Ed.D. in Counseling Psychology from USC in 1965, with his two daughters, Kim and Dana, being born during that time period. (As part of Stan’s graduate-level training in psychology, he worked as a school psychologist for schools in Saugus and in Lancaster; walking in his footsteps, his daughter Kim has now enjoyed being a school psychologist for nearly 30 years.)
Stan was the Matadors’ baseball head coach from 1962-66 with an overall record of 80-99-8. After building the team for three years, in 1965, Stan’s Matadors posted a 21-17 overall record and an 11-4 mark in conference play to claim the league championship, the first baseball title for the college. That season, four of his players (Bob Christensen, Terry Craven, Paul Edmonson and Tom Cottrell) were drafted in the Major League Baseball First-Year Player Draft. Stan also placed four additional Matadors in MLB during his tenure: Bob Hiegert (1963, Angels), Tom Carver (1963, Yankees), Tony Davila (1964, Angels) and Jack Intlekofer (1966, Angels).
When Stan retired from baseball and moved into becoming a counseling psychology professor in the Educational Psychology Department at CSUN, his players lovingly bronzed his shoes and cap and mounted them on a wooden plaque, which Stan proudly displayed for the rest of his life. The year following his retirement from baseball, Stan’s son Jordan was born.
Stan founded and coordinated the Marriage, Family, and Child Counseling (MFCC – called MFT since 1999) program on campus as its own specialty beginning in 1970. Stan helped select the graduate students for the program each year, and his practicum classes, where he supervised, mentored, engaged, and created collegial relationships with his counseling students individually and as a group, delighted and energized him and were arguably his favorite part of participating professorially in the MFT program.
Stan was the CSUN Educational Opportunities Program (EOP) director during the student protest of November 4th, 1968, during which minority students spontaneously organized an occupation of the administration building so that Acting President Paul Blomgren would hear their grievances. Student goals included increasing minority enrollment and staff, initiating programs that reflected student backgrounds such as Chicano Studies and Black Studies, and conducting a thorough investigation of racism complaints on campus. Stan took on the role of intermediary between the Black Student Union and other factions on campus. As a result, extremist groups in the Valley harassed the family with phone calls for more than a year.
While Stan actively continued his professorial and administrative roles in counseling psychology at CSUN, he also became a licensed psychologist in the State of California in 1970, and entered private practice in 1971, running the Human Growth Center on Kingsbury in Granada Hills where he employed many graduates of the CSUN MFCC/MFT program as therapists. Stan retired from nearly 50 years of private counseling practice when he reached his late 80s.
In 1972, Stan published his first textbook, Educating the Powerless, followed by later publications including When Women Leave Men: How Men Feel, How Men Heal (1992), The Deceived Society (2005), and Therapy with Couples: A Humanistic Approach (2006). Stan authored many articles, more than 30 novels informed by a psychological view of the world, as well as three novellas, two collections of short stories, eleven non-fiction books and texts, two plays, poetry, and numerous songs, many written for his children, nieces and nephews, and grand-children.
In 1979-80, Stan “swapped places” with a professor at David Ben Gurion University of the Negev, in Beersheva, Israel. Stan taught humanistic ideas of counseling and education for a semester (in English), created a number of friendships, and traveled with his daughter, Kim, and son, Jordan, around the country by “sherut” when he was not working on campus.
Stan became active in the Association of Humanistic Psychology (AHP), an organization that emphasizes positive aspects of human nature, potential for personal growth, self-actualization, and looking beyond the medical model of psychology to find new ways of helping people strengthen what’s “right.” The AHP originated in the late 1950s, with notables involved in the early development of the organization including Abraham Maslow, Carl Rogers (one of Stan’s most significant mentors), James Bugental, Clark Moustakas, Rollo May, and Gordon Allport.
A quote attributed to Carl Rogers states, “We have a natural drive toward health; just as a plant, given sunshine, water, and proper care will reach its natural maturity, so will humans reach theirs, absent harsh and punitive treatment.” Stan believed deeply in the notion of having a natural drive toward health, and lived and taught this concept to students, colleagues, and family, to emphasize how the basis of psychological healing can come from within. Stan served as an enthusiastic President of AHP, was a long-standing and devoted Board member for over 20 years, and was a consulting editor of the AHP Perspective newsletter. In addition, Stan helped organize and co-sponsor a number of regional conferences for AHP, including one held on the CSUN campus in Summer 2011, on the theme of “Multiple Perspectives on Partnering.”
In 1983, long before the advent of Facebook, Stan was instrumental in founding the CSUN MFCC/MFT Alumni Network, helping graduates from the program maintain connections with other graduates and encouraging them to provide mutual support during the licensing process and into the development of their professional identities as they entered private practice. A regular newsletter was sent out by snail-mail to help communicate information in the days before computers. Today, a similar group from the CSUN MFT program has a Facebook presence. The Alumni Network was originally a “wing” of Stan’s Center in Educational Psychology’s Workshop Program, also established in 1983, which helped students, educators, pre-licensed professionals, and professionals collect required hours of training.
Stan became an American Fulbright Scholar and lived and taught in Tallinn, Estonia, from September 1998 until February 1999. During his professorship at the Tallinn Pedagogical University, Stan forged new relationships with Estonian friends and students, sharing ideas about humanistic psychology, and even “recruited” an Estonian student for the CSUN MFT program. Over the years, Stan’s outreach led to a number of friends and family members entering the MFT program and transforming themselves into therapists.
Stan was an MFCC Counseling advisor at the “CSUN at Channel Islands” program in 2003. At that time, the campus was transitioning from being “CSUN at Channel Islands” to being CSU Channel Islands and Stan’s expertise was tapped on the possibilities of including an MFT program at the new campus.
In 2006, Stan was honored by being inducted into the Southern California Jewish Sports Hall of Fame (SCJSHF). According to their website, the Hall of Fame, established in 1990, honors Jewish men and women–– athletes, coaches, officials, media, executives, and others––at the professional, collegiate, high school and community levels of sports. The SCJSHF has now honored over 300 Jewish men, women and teams who have played a significant role in shaping the sports history of the Southern California community.
At the age of 85, in 2016, his 55th year of teaching at CSUN, Stan received the CSUN Distinguished Teaching Award for his work in and 50 years of dedication to the Department of Educational Psychology and Counseling.
2016 was a banner year for Stan, as he was also inducted into the Matador Athletics Hall of Fame for his athletics involvement in the 1960s. Nominated by friends and former coaching colleagues Terry Craven and Dick Enberg, Stan was honored for his years of being head coach and building the Matador baseball program. When Stan started at SFVSC, the college was only a few years old, and Stan helped create Matador Diamond, getting a crew to build the original outside fence on the weekends. According to the website for the CSUN Hall of Fame, “The CSUN Hall of Fame recognizes the men, women, and Matador teams that have distinguished themselves in athletics, by sport or by meritorious efforts, as undergraduates or after leaving the university,” and, in 2025, “…will have inducted 130 outstanding members and teams.”
In 2018, Stan was honored at USC with the Jay Jaffe Spirit of Troy Award at the USC Trojan Baseball Alumni Association Awards Banquet for his notable contributions. The Alumni Association annually honors selected alumni for their professional achievements and service to the university and community.
At the age of 88, Stan took faculty “early” retirement in 2019, moving to part-time teaching for a year, and finally retired in 2020. Stan was then awarded the status of Professor Emeritus of Educational Psychology and Counseling. His final retirement came after 59 years of teaching at SFVSC/CSUN, one of the longest teaching tenures ever in the history of the California State University system.
Stan and Norene had three children, Kim, Dana, and Jordan, all of whom are still living. Stan truly loved and cherished being a father to them and sharing stories with and about family. Stan immensely enjoyed being a grandfather to Molly and Jack, the children of Kim and her husband, Robin Sturgeon. Stan’s influence is clearly seen in Molly Bess’s determination, optimism, love of musical theatre and butterflies, and in Jack Stanley’s brown eyes and passion for baseball and music. Stan was always enthusiastic, zestful, and loving in his family and friend relationships. He deeply missed his four predeceased siblings, with whom he had socialized and traveled for more than 70 years. Uncle Stan leaves behind five nephews, three nieces, eight great-nephews, three great-nieces, three great-great nephews, and three great-great nieces.
In his free time, when not teaching, writing, traveling, or hanging out with family and friends, Stan enjoyed playing tennis (into his 80s), playing Scrabble (especially with his twin brother, Hal), regularly attending the theatre and USC Trojan football games, and wearing pins with butterfly likenesses. He was a fan of the miraculous monarch butterfly, told the story of the monarch’s long migrations, and emphasized the importance of saving milkweed habitat, to help the butterflies survive and thrive. Along with sporting his signature white, curly ponytail, Stan was known for wearing a butterfly pin on his shoulder and a kind smile on his face.”
— Kim Charnofsky with kind help from Family Members