At first, choosing to come to Cornell was not an easy decision for Marty Lustig ’63. In high school, he had his heart set on MIT—until the Cornell Club of New Jersey drove him and another student to Ithaca for a campus visit. And what he found wowed him: a beautiful campus with an entire quad devoted to engineering.
When it was time to pick between the two universities, the deciding factor came in the form of a letter announcing a John McMullen Regional Scholarship covering Marty’s full tuition for the five-year length of the electrical engineering program.
Once on campus, Marty threw himself into his coursework. Social life, he said, came later—his junior year, around the time he met his future wife, Dianne Lustig ’66.
“A few of us from electrical engineering were working on lab reports in Mann Library, the Human Ecology library,” Marty said. “I saw Dianne come down out of the stacks and I ran over and offered her a ride home. And I was lucky it was a very cold, wet night, typical Ithaca in the fall, and she accepted the ride.”
Marty and Dianne married the following summer, and the couple moved to Rochester, NY, after graduation and soon got involved with the Cornell Club of Rochester. After participating in a steady stream of alumni events, Marty became chairman of the Alumni Secondary Schools Committee, which later became the Cornell Alumni Admissions Ambassador Network (CAAAN).
When Marty and Dianne moved to Prairie Village, Kansas, a suburb of Kansas City, and found no alumni club, they started one themselves. Together, they formed the Cornell Club of Mid-America (CCMA), running it for most of the 43 years of its existence.
Marty said that the most meaningful part of his volunteer experience has been establishing the Cornell Club of Mid-America Scholarship in 1983. Because both Marty and Dianne received full scholarships to attend Cornell, “I think that very much informed what we did,” Marty said. “It was very important to us that there be a scholarship.”
In 2025, Marty and Dianne were honored by the club renaming the CCMA Scholarship as the “Cornell Club of Mid-America Martin ’63 and Dianne ’66 Lustig Scholarship.”
Marty and Dianne have hosted myriad events to engage alumni and also fundraise for the regional scholarship, which helps support a student’s tuition every year. Two notable guests the Lustigs hosted were Professor Bob Baker and Professor Don Rakow. Professor Baker, the inventor of the chicken nugget and Cornell chicken, once grilled on the Lustigs’ back patio while Marty served as his “lab assistant” fetching ingredients for his famous marinade. And Professor Rakow, the former director of what is now Cornell Botanical Gardens, sent clippings of a hardy ground cover, European Ginger (Asarabacca for the botanists), to Marty and Dianne before his visit. They potted the plants in small clay pots and handed them out to all the event’s attendees.
Marty is also on the Class of 1963 class council and is a Cornell University Council life member. Beyond Cornell, Marty’s spirit of service extends into his community. After retiring from the corporate world, he started a handyman business and fulfilled a childhood dream by earning his license as a master electrician. On a volunteer basis, he does all the electrical work at a local community pool, as well as for clients who are elderly or ill.
Marty encourages fellow Cornellians to get involved by starting small, whether that means joining a local Cornell club or simply showing up to an event. That instinct for making a practical difference, he said, comes naturally to him as a Cornell engineer.
“One always aims for what makes the most sense and what does the most good,” Marty said. “I just found it extremely rewarding when I could help others share in the benefits Cornell has to offer.”
