Lucky Lecteur

From L to R : A Reedie, Jill Barta, Janet Barta, Jerry Barta (1988) When I arrived at Reed in the fall of 1984, I fully expected to meet professors who would challenge me to grow academically and philosophically – an expectation that certainly came true. But I never dreamed that when I graduated four years later, the professor I would feel most grateful for, the one to whom I would feel most indebted, would be the director of P. E., Jerry Barta.     It certainly was not Jerry’s way with a referee’s whistle that endeared him to me. Nor, I must confess, did he win my everlasting gratitude with all those “stories” he regaled everyone with. What really stood out, and what I will forever remember when I think of Jerry, was his remarkable combination of exemplary tact and unstinting generosity. Long before I took up residence in the Bartas’ spare bedroom for my final year at Reed, Jerry had taken me out to more meals than I could keep track of, not only picking up the check every si...

Professor Larry Ross, Ph. D. Like most students in this department over the last three decades, I had heard about Professor Ross long before I actually met him. Among graduate students especially, the sour grapevine is a popular means for obtaining unofficial advice on courses to take and professors to fear.  In Professor Ross's case, the stories tended to be, to be frank, more than a little ominous -- horrified tales of intimidating, sometimes even insulting, classroom practices, of ponderous reading lists and outrageous work expectations, and of draconian, even demeaning, grading standards.  Supposedly, more than one of his graduate students had been returned papers with melodramatically scarlet 'F's' at the bottom, while others had suffered the ignominy of being stuck with final grades in the 'C' range. And these were not things that had happened just in the dark ages of the department, back before men had walked on the moon and the ceaseless labor of untangl...

      Thank you, Aunt Nora Lee . Thank you for making your home at the crown of Oak Hill a weekend sanctuary for me throughout college. For starting my addiction to red licorice by providing enormous vats of Red Vines to plow through during the long nervous stretches of Broncos games. For burgers and ice cream picked up at the Hasty Freez drive-through as we drove back through Albany from church in Harrisburg. For always finding a bit more wall space to memorialize our parents and grandparents and aunts and uncles and cousins, making every visit to your home a loving lesson in family history. For omelets with three, or four, or sometimes even five eggs (if you lost count), filled with cheese and diced lunch meat, covered in chives you’d just chopped up, all of it cooked to golden brown perfection, breakfasts so delicious that my best friend cleaned his plate and said, “Wow, that was great – and I don’t even like eggs.” For preparing corn on the cob for my freshman roommat...

    I don’t remember the first time I met Aunt Mary Ellen, the older of Dad ’s two younger sisters. (I also had an Aunt Mary Ellen on my mom’s side of the family, out in Oregon.) As I understand it, our family moved back to Ohio, my dad’s home state, around 1970, when I was about three-and-a-half or four years old. Somewhere, there’s a picture of me around that age in a cowboy hat trying to hold up Grandpa’s shotgun in the kitchen of the old house at 4485 Maple St. where Aunt Mary Ellen lived her entire life, so that’s probably the first time I met her and Uncle Dallas, her smiling, friendly husband from West Virginia. In my memories of their home (which were bolstered by the six weeks we too lived there in the summer of 1978), Aunt Mary Ellen and Uncle Dallas and their daughters, Marie and Rebecca, were fixtures along with Grandpa and Grandma, the cuckoo clock and piano in the living room, the enormous (especially to a child’s eyes) round wooden table in the dining room, and ...

A tribute to Uncle Bob First, I’d like to thank Joy – whom I met for the first, blessed time just last night – and all of you present here today for lending me your pulpit to say a few things about Robert Dale Walter – my Uncle Bob. My dad, Alfred Paul Walter , was Uncle Bob’s older brother by a year, and the closeness in their age was always matched by the loving closeness of their relationship. My dad married an Oregon country girl, Dorothy Turcott, whom he had met in the early 1960s in Stanberry, at Midwest Bible College, and I understand that Uncle Bob, after he left the army in the mid-60s, moved to Oregon in large part to be near his beloved older brother.  Uncle Bob soon married an Oregon girl himself and settled in the Albany area while Dad, a Church of God minister, moved to and through pastorates in several different states. But when we moved back to Oregon in 1972, the first people who came to visit us at the Portland parsonage were Uncle Bob and Aunt Sharon. That w...

Bronco Brothers (1991)   Some favorite memories of my dad: Tossing the football to me in the backyard of our house in Northglenn, Colorado and telling me, after every overthrown pass that sailed into the neighbors' yard, that if I could touch it, I should catch it.  Sleepwalking downstairs to my basement room at 5:15 in the morning to wake me up for 8th grade basketball practice.  In the pulpit at the Portland church, praying that the Lord would bless our hearts, but slipping on the last word and instead pleading with God to bless our flatulence (to use one of his favorite euphemisms). Flirting with my mom at the dinner table.  In the driveway of our Owosso, Michigan home in the dead cold of January, trying to get the rusted-out station wagon to start, lifting the hood with his bare, aching hands because he hadn't wanted to spend the money on a pair of gloves for himself.  Handing his wallet with a grin to one of the campers at Camp Corbett a...

  To listen to a recording of this tribute, please press the arrow button on the left. Brian Walter · Willie August Hoffmann (1931 - 2020) Well, what are you doin’, kid? For the last several decades, that was how Willie August Hoffmann, my dear Uncle Willie, would greet me, always putting a little extra emphasis on that last word, “kid.” It was a routine that I would always look forward to renewing when I called from St. Louis to catch up with him and dear Aunt Nora Lee . Uncle Willie and I had developed our joking conversation rituals way back in the 1980s when I was a student at Reed College in Portland and my weekend ritual was to high-tail it down to the Hoffmann home on Oak Hill Road to bask in Uncle Willie’s and Aunt Nora Lee’s improbably generous hospitality. If you’ve spent much time around Willie and Nora Lee Hoffmann, then you know they are creatures of well-honed routines, and being called “kid” was a small price to pay for the privilege of becoming part of those rout...