In Memoriam

On February 2, Louise Schwingel delivered a moving tribute to Larry Friedman:

 

When Larry Friedman died on January 19, our profession lost a dedicated and devoted master. A member of our faculty from 1979 until 1995, Larry had a passionate commitment to his students and to his subject, English, most particularly Irish literature and film.

 

Having edited scholarly publication on Ulysses, he could name all of the foods that Leopold Bloom ate, a measure of his quirky mind and memory. His interests ranged from Yeats and music to the holocaust, from racing Chuck Hamilton to finish the Times crossword to making a study of bathroom graffiti.    

 

Larry possessed an enormous baritone sax which he played enthusiastically in several jazz groups on campus. He also shared his love of jazz as one of the earliest D Js on WNMH.

 

He will be remembered  for his curious intellect, for his laugh, a high pitched giggle that shook his entire body, and for  his irreverent humor. As the Director of the Work Program, on Northfield Clean Up Day, he drove a P & P truck around campus picking up dorm trash, the sleeves of his T shirt rolled up onto his thin shoulders, an unlit cigar jammed between his teeth,  his ordinarily elegant speech roughened abrasively to suit the role, as he called it, of The Big Bad Mother Trucker. 

 

As a colleague, he grabbed passing fellow English teachers and dragged them into his class for corroboration or illustration. Dennis Kennedy fondly recalls being summoned to Larry’s class on the day that Ray Bolger died to commemorate his most famous role by singing “If I Only Had a Brain."

 

Larry  engaged our best thinking on NMH life by establishing The Committee on Redundancy Committee and by instituting faculty Bingo.

 

Those of us who taught with Larry in Stone Hall, remember his asking us to contribute to the blackboard’s listing of new course proposals…such as “Food In Literature” the  texts for which might include  Huckeberry Jam, Of Mousse and Men, and A Farewell to Almonds…you can add to the list, as Larry would want you to do.

 

Larry was also a serious scholar, a demanding teacher, a loyal friend, a thoughtful gentlemen who commited himself to our work together and who cared deeply for this place and its people, for his current and former students both here and at Eaglebrook where he taught until his illness forced him out of the classroom, almost two years ago.

 

Dennis remembers reading  one of Larry’s favorite poems by William Butler Yeats with him during a recent visit. That poem, The Moods provides a fitting remembrance:

 

For Larry Friedman: 

 

The Moods

William Butler Yeats

 

TIME drops in decay,

Like a candle burnt out,

And the mountains and woods

Have their day, have their day;

What one in the rout

Of the fire-born moods     

Has fallen away?                                                                      

 

Let us not let Larry fall away; Let us pause and remember and honor him in our hearts.