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Three weeks ago, during a time when white Christian nationalism seems to smite America in ways unrecognizably Christian, I did something that may strike progressive friends as daft. I joined a new church.

More precisely, I changed my church congregational membership to Holy Cross Lutheran, in Wheat Ridge, Colorado, part of the ELCA, for those who know their Lutherans. I’ve been an ELCA member 45 years: First Lutheran (Findlay, OH); Zion (Iowa City); St. John’s (Bloomington, IL); St. Paul’s (Denver); and now Holy Cross. Before then, I was baptized and raised in the Lutheran Church, Missouri Synod, which is a whole different ballgame: Grace (DeWitt, IA) and St. Paul’s (Iowa City). Monica was baptized in Grace, Andrew in St. Paul’s.

Enough autobiography. Why a church now?

It’s a fair question when the popular image of American Christianity is an exclusionary, judgmental, censoring, hell-consigning, Trumpastic/Hegsethian, gospel-of-wealth-driven, selectively Bible-thumping (heavy on the Old Testament) terrain, populated with people who look like me. Folks in that image are eager to seize the news, certainly. The Pew Research Center’s monumental Religious Landscape Study tells a more complex story, something we know from those images of pastors and priests getting peppered and tear-gassed at protests against ICE. Pew shows that 23% of Americans are “Evangelical Protestant” and 11% are “Mainline Protestant” (that’s me; clearly I’m not on the winning team). 19% are Catholic, and remaining Christians are strewn among other traditions. Of course, 38% of Americans aren’t Christian at all, and supporting Jews, Muslims, atheists and agonistic was something the nation’s Founders thought essential in adopting the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment.

At Holy Cross last week, Pastor Libbie Reinking, a vibrant and theologically-astute woman a few years younger than me, led an opening prayer that included our confession:

“We remember that you sent Jesus to Earth not only to be with refugees, but as a refugee himself. You made yourself known in human form as a migrant, born to a poor young woman who was forced to flee all that was familiar and dear. Remind us, oh Lord, that as we welcome refugees and immigrants, we welcome you. Forgive us for all the ways we have individually and collectively fallen short to do this holy work of welcome.”

Not exactly the creed of White Christian Nationalism, right?

Part of the church’s attraction, I’ll confess, is less theological than aesthetic. I like singing hymns, and I like the patterns of the liturgy. Last week, the closing hymn was “Jesus Still Lead On” or, as I know it best, “Jesus, Lead Thou On” or as I sang it as a solo many times at Grace Lutheran, for an annual German service, “Jesu geh voran auf der Lebensbahn.” My interests in hymns and liturgy seem quaint, even off-putting to many people, I’m sure. I’ll even admit impatience with newer hymns written for unison, with repetitive texts. I try to do better.

But the heart of the church experience is the weekly gospel and its explication in a sermon. (I’m an English professor, so I’m probably more invested than most in passages and their interpretation.) The assigned gospels have been challenging this fall, and I’ve appreciated Pastor Libbie wrestling with them thoughtfully, not trying to glaze them over. Last week’s, Luke 18:1-8, was a little more straightforward and timely. It’s the parable of a widow seeking justice from an “unjust judge,” as Luke puts it. Inevitably as I sat in the pew that morning and every Sunday, I thought hard about the historical moment when the gospels were written and their resonance with the present.

I’m happy to gather with other people willing to ponder such things, grappling with ancient gospels and aspiring to enact a Christian vision greatly at odds with what’s being touted by contemporary Pharisees who aspire to dominate America’s temple.

I’ll reflect more later on mainstream church traditions–and yes, yes I know how the Lutheran church in Germany was too often complicit with Nazism, even as pastors like Martin Niemoller weren’t. But let me end this with a statement from Holy Cross as a Reconciling in Christ church. If you’re in Denver and want to learn more, just contact me:

“Holy Cross Lutheran Church welcomes all who are seeking God’s grace and love in an open and affirming congregation. We welcome people of all sexual orientations, gender identities, and gender expressions; of every race, ethnicity, and culture; and of every socio-economic situation. We are committed to racial equity and our doors are open to all regardless of religious background, age, abilities, or life experiences. We affirm the sacredness of all those who have experienced exclusion, whether by family, church, or society. We are a Reconciling in Christ Community. You are most welcome here.”

I was born eleven years after World War II, when America thought it had defeated fascism, and the world thought it had so exposed the horror of genocide that we’d never let it happen again. And yet I’ve lived long enough to see America build concentration camps, to see the world’s children starving (or bombed or shot) according to government actions and designs. 

I was born 91 years after the Civil War, when there were still people alive who had lived in slavery. It would be another nine years before landmark voting and civil rights legislation would legally enshrine the proposition that all men are created equal. (Women? Another matter.) And while few people were deluded that mere law would end racism, the law at least declared our national aspiration for all citizens . And yet I’ve lived long enough for certain Americans to denigrate that city on a hill into a dark fetid gulch, cheering a racist leader whose sense of history extends only to what he could exploit yesterday.

I was born when American cities, Los Angeles to Denver to Cleveland were gray-hazed with particulates and smog, banked on brown rivers so toxic they could strip paint or catch fire. Americans realized that protecting the environment through clean air, water, and energy actually protected people—including grandchildren and unborn generations. And yet I’ve lived long enough to watch emboldened oligarchs and opportunists care about neither. Worst, they’ve had the power, economic and propagandistic, to sell the world’s future for a buck today, never minding science or the interests and wishes of the people.

I was born during the presidency of Republican Dwight Eisenhower, who, whatever his shortcomings, served faithfully and expertly in World War II, who oversaw a blazing economy driven by a 90% top tax bracket, and who warned of the dangers of a military-industrial complex he saw antithetical to the nation’s best future. And yet I’ve lived long enough to see a Republican draft dodger, a 34-time felon, who measures public service only in personal hatred and endless grifting, abetted by stupid, evil, or cowardly (you choose) Republican representatives declining to question anything about him. 

There are days I think I’ve lived long enough. 

But then there are days like this morning, when I hear from dozens of friends and family around the country who share my bewildered outrage. They are people with a sense of history and the sense of a future born not of greed or vindictive hatred, in which my gain comes only at your loss or oppression. They embrace a future born of understanding that they are neither the first nor the last nor the best nor the only people to live, in America or in the world. They are people for whom “liberty and justice for all,” both present and future, remain our best aspirations.

As I sit on my porch, this 69^th birthday, I think of those countless friends. I think of my Mom and Dad, of birthday cake in a small town Iowa park, the world—my world—still full of possibility, naïve but in the very best way.

I’ve written a note below the images, but here’s a link to the 1989 WPA Summer Conference Program. Doug

Today (July 10, 2025) I’m taking part in the CWPA summer conference program, which is happening virtually, in a robust Zoom platform that allows lots of interesting interactions. It made me recall the very first WPA conference (in the days before the organization acronym acquired a C) that I attended, in sweltering late July, in Oxford, Ohio. It was more convenient just to walk down to my basement this morning for the first session. But 36 years ago, we all got on a riverboat in Cincinnati for dinner and dancing (with Susan Jarratt, Mary Ann Cain, George Kalamaras, Lynn Bloom, Bud Weiser, Susan Miller, David Bartholomae, and so many others) on a Friday night, and I do miss those days.

Here’s a link to the full 1989 WPA Conference program.

On a flight last week, I struck up a conversation with a woman and her husband sitting next to me. They were retired physicians, she a pediatrician at the university and he the chief of radiology at a big Denver hospital. We were both returning from visiting kids and grandkids. She asked how I liked retirement, and I said I enjoyed having time to write a book, but mostly I was just happy to be able to pull weeds out of flowers each morning without worrying about the clock.

She was bemused, even aghast.  They’d moved into a big downtown high rise condo precisely so they didn’t have to worry about a yard, especially since they were spending retirement traveling. In fact, they’d just be in Denver for a couple days before taking off for a ten day bicycling tour in Austria, the third such European cycling tour they’d done. She recounted their other travels, though I lost track somewhere between Thailand and the Galapagos.

For hardly the first or fifth time, I felt like I was failing retirement. My one-year anniversary was July 1, and I have no big journeys to recount, no significant accomplishments, no next calling, no momentous volunteering. At times I feel a little ashamed. It seems that some many retired friends—not to mention retired strangers—are doing Meaningful Things, while I’m puttering around writing letters, reading books, and pulling dandelions. There’s the nagging feeling I’m derelict.

I’m warned, “One day you’ll be too old and sick, and then you’ll regret wasting your early retirement.” Maybe. And maybe there’s something wrong with me, some lack of imagination or late life ambition. I certainly had plenty of the latter until the day I retired, always in pursuit of something, often professional leadership roles, so it’s been wonderful not worrying about writing reports, balancing budgets, or worrying about struggling colleagues. Maybe I’ve become Odysseus among the Lotus Eaters.

I think of my father’s retirement. He stepped off the garbage truck where he’d worked 25 years, the last of his many jobs and small businesses. His knees and hips were shot, and he was relieved not to have to worry about paying fuel bills, working through the flu or snow drifts, or losing a contract. No one ever asked Dad what meaningful things he planned to do next. His trips consisted mostly of putting his flatbottom boat into the Wapsi or Cedar Rivers to go catfishing with Ray Cole or John Camp. Big journeys were visiting kids and grandkids in Georgia and Texas, seeing school events in Iowa and Illinois. 

I regret never asking Mom and Dad if they were satisfied in retirement. I’d like to have asked if wish they done things differently. I know what they’d have told me. I don’t know if that would have been accurate.

It’s perhaps an occupational hazard of a certain professional class—including professors, whom I know best—to have goals in retirement. Mind you, I have the goal of making closer friends, which turns out to be pretty challenging, despite best intentions. The friends I’ve made over the years have all moved away at various points—or I left them—and starting over, virtually, at age 68 takes more wherewithal and less introversion than I can easily muster. I spend embarrassing amounts of time screwing up the courage to make a phone call or a plan.

I thought the independence of retirement would feel different, but I find a new dependence on satisfying expectations, anticipation future regrets that, in fact, may never come, all the while figuring that others are doing things better and doing things the way I should. Meanwhile, I buy postage stamps and pull hoses and sift archives. 

The American Bicentennial  happened the summer I turned 20. That July 4^th I ran a 10K race in Clinton, Iowa. Riverboat Days. I was in good shape, but I hadn’t planned well, especially for a hot morning. I’d gone by myself. Fortunately, Dr. Ash was running the race, and some of his family saw me after and shared cold drinks. That afternoon, Hazel Tech took me to a nursing home in Davenport, where she played piano and I sang a few patriotic songs. Mrs. Tech, my best friend Vance’s mom, was the church choir director at Grace Lutheran DeWitt, and she was the first person to encourage me to sing.

On the Fourth of July, 2025, the American President announced he’ll celebrate the nation’s 250^th birthday next year by holding a UFC Fight on the grounds of the White House. Maybe this will be in conjunction with the reality TV show he’s mused about, the one where longtime residents with jobs and kids and hardworking dreams are made to compete with each other to avoid deportation through Alligator Auschwitz. For our entertainment.

I don’t remember, but I highly doubt my heart’s desire July 4, 1976, was to sing “America the Beautiful” for incontinent geriatrics on a hot afternoon. I did partly because, as someone who grew up as a “good boy,” something I repeatedly heard my whole life, I figured it was a good thing to do. But I’m sure I did so partly because I hadn’t planned ahead, didn’t have a more desirable option, having simply wandered into the holiday as I’ve wandered into retirement. 

Clearly America has wandered profound since that day. I’ve been joining protests and writing to politicians, but without method—and certainly without effect, as yesterday’s vote for stupid cruelty revealed. My single consolation is that a clear majority of Americans—whether by polling or by representation—don’t want this. That’s small solace when North Dakota has the same number of United States of America Senators as does California. But I have to believe that most Americans, however gerrymandered into idiocy, have a stronger, historical vision on our democracy than the selfish despots some have elected. Probably the most meaningful “project” for retirement will be to figure how best to spend waning energies and talents to counteract the greedy decline that Republicans under Dear Leader have charted. 

Saturday afternoon I was walking back from our small neighborhood grocery store, where the annual customer appreciation event included free hot dogs and one dollar beers (from the in-store bar) when I passed a Little Free Library down the block. Our neighborhood has a dozen of them, and I’m well-acquainted with their owners’ reading tastes. (I can’t imagine any pedestrian saying, “Hey, I want that 1986 accounting textbook or C+ manual,” but that’s just me.)

This particular library is reliably high quality, and two books immediately caught my attention. One was a hardcover first edition of Tom Wolfe’s The New Journalism, a 1973 book whose 50-page introduction is a landmark statement of what came to be known as creative nonfiction, or a substantial corner of it. I’ve cited and taught the piece many times, from photocopies and a pdf I acquired years ago. But, heck, even in retirement, I thought it would be nice to have a copy of the thing itself.

The second book was Emily Watson’s 2023 translation of The Iliad. It was a pristine copy that had unceremoniously been discarded from the Denver Public Library. I hope and figure that the Library kept another copy or two around, that they’d just bought a bunch of them, expecting a run on Homer, and were now just paring down after the reading frenzy. It’s not that they’re lacking shelf space. My local branch, the Woodbury Library, on Federal, has about 40% of its shelves occupied. I get that folks are reading (or listening) digitally these days, but I’m thinking it wouldn’t be terrible to keep stocked at 75% or so, for the decor even if not for reading.

Anyway, I’d never read The Iliad. It seemed like something I ought to have done, and dotage wasn’t too late to check it off. I’d read The Odyssey as a sophomore in college, in a marvelous course called Biblical and Classical Literature, in which we read everything from Job to Sophocles. Liked it. Of course, I knew all about The Iliad (I thought) from pop culture references, way down to Brad Pitt’s Achilles sprinting down the beach, gold hair flying, in the movie Troy. It was time to pay dues and make good, so last night I spent three hours starting the book.

It’s good, and the translation is spectacular, happily readable. But a few things struck me. Foremost is the petty vanity of so many characters, who are motivated, yes, by a sense of duty and pride in nation but equally or more by ego and entitlement. Am I sitting the place I deserve at the banquet table? Am I getting a good cut and portion of meat? Do people respect me sufficiently? I mean, am I doing the proper thing to get recognized and honored?

So much of what’s going on is brand management.

Even when characters are doing the right thing, their reasons are misguided and conflicted. Hector comes from afar to defend Troy because he knows Greek invaders are bad for local lands. At a crucial point, he knows he should lend his considerable skills to the city battlements, staying inside where he really can do most good. But where’s the glory in that? Where, further, do people expect him to be? What will they think if he’s not out there leading charges? What will he think of himself? So he goes out, kills Patroclus, pisses off Achilles, and ultimately gets his carcass drug behind a chariot for a few days.

I can’t help but think of Iliadic behavior these days in so many Republican leaders for whom Trump is their Zeus, entertaining himself at the expense of humanity. Some of those leaders even understand that the bill, while big, is really bad, but they have reputations (for hatred? for meanness? for fascist nationalism?) to uphold. They want to sit at the right hand of Trump and eat the tenderloin. They have no greater motivating principle than keeping stature before a group of petty electors, though they may conjure some pretext of past greatness they fancy themselves restoring. Meanwhile, on the plains before Troy and in the city itself, tens of thousands die needlessly because Paris and Menelaus think with their crotches and egos, and convince enough of their bros that fame and glory are there for taking. In the end, Troy burns and arrows hit heels. I hope the latter, at least.

And to think I just started the afternoon wanting a free hot dog.

I’ve had occasion this week to think back 22 years, to Urbana, Illinois, where I’d organized Stage 2 Reviewers to help put together the Conference on College Composition and Communication Program for March 2004 in San Antonio. Prior to our gathering, dozens of reviewers had rated hundreds of proposals, and we had the results in thick folders of printouts, one proposal per page. I divided the group into small teams and assigned each some clusters to review. Their task: decide what to put in the program. This included combining similar-enough papers into groups of three and conjuring a title for the result. These were days of sifting piles of paper at tables, in energetic conversation.

That was the technical process. What stays with me, however, was the camaraderie. We met occasionally as a whole group to discuss our work, but most of the time was in small rooms scattered around the NCTE headquarters at 1111 W. Kenyon Road. We’d share funny paper titles or read aloud striking lines, but the side conversations were vital: stories of our teaching and families and projects and summer plans.

At noon we’d walk across the street to the Urbana Garden Family Restaurant, a familiar midwestern code for a place with a menu a mile long, from salads to burgers to plates. At night, we’d go to one of several excellent restaurants in Champaign/Urbana and have a couple bottles of wine. One evening, Peter Mortensen had us all over to his house, a sprawling place on a tree-arched street. I recall he and his wife serving an amazing Stilton cheese, so good that a couple of us went the next day to the small cheese shop to buy some for ourselves.

About a month after the Stage 2 meeting, I got a big package of note cards. Each contained a session for the program. Lori Ostergaard, then my program assistant and now editor of College English, and I arranged a room of tables in Stevenson Hall at ISU, right across from the English Office. We spread meeting times for the 4-day program, then deployed sessions across them, looking for balance, avoiding conflicts, sifting and resifting until we got things as good as they’d be. We joked about who’d be upset with us for sticking them at 8 am on Friday or late morning on Saturday, but someone had to be there.

In the fall, Lori and I traveled to San Antonio to preview the convention site. We got a sense of all the rooms, their shapes and sizes, information that was useful when we got back to Normal and I had to place sessions in rooms. Who would be the big draws? I had, after all, Sandra Cisneros, Gunther Kress, Bob Scholes, Deborah Brandt, Wayne Booth, Claudio Sanchez, and dozens of other luminaries. While we were on that trip, I took the photographs that would be used in the program, the subject of an earlier blog post.

I contrast that experience, born in a different era, with how things are done now. It’s deemed too costly and–this saddens me–too inconvenient to travel to gather in person. Of course, at a high level I get it. But it was special to spend a few days physically with people you didn’t know very well, people from different sorts of schools and with different scholarly interests. There was time to learn about backgrounds and families as well as classrooms and projects. Now we Zoom, and it’s almost entirely business, finishing tasks with minimal interactions and certainly no shared Stilton on a midwestern summer porch beneath oaks and maples. Sure Zoom is more efficient and likely more inclusive of people for whom travel is hard, but it comes at cost of in-person interactions that foster trust and occasionally friendships. Having recently Zoomed a couple of days for an organization, I can say there will be no tales remembered 22 years from now. I took a desultory screen capture at one point. Less than a quarter of us looked at the camera and each other.

I recently found a forgotten recording from 20 years ago that includes me singing a solo. I was nervous about listening to it. I have a certain sense of how I used to sound–and of how I sound now. Maybe I’d learn my memory was flawed. Vanity. Maybe my memory is accurate, and I’d be depressed at my current ability. Reality.

Cantus Novus was a small amateur chamber chorus of 24 or in Bloomington, Illinois. We were competent, with some flashes of artistry, but we sang challenging music and had a great time doing it. That concert had six songs by Aaron Copeland, and my turn comes on “The Boatmen’s Dance. In addition to some good fiddling, the recording features a song suite, “South Dakota Shadows,” which I remembered as a really pretty piece. Not only had I forgotten the recording, I’d forgotten that my son Andrew, and his then-girlfriend (now wife) Molly played in a string quartet.

Here’s a link to our recording of “The Boatmen’s Dance”

I took all of the photographs, except for a couple, that were used in designing the 2004 Program for the Conference on College Composition and Communication in San Antonio, for which I was program chair. I’d taken my camera on 2003 trip to San Antonio to scout the convention site, then sent several images to NCTE. Some were printed in the pages of the program. However, a few of them were selected for the cover by an outstanding artist at NCTE, who then used some brilliant design skills to create a spectacular cover image.

For example, he took my photograph looking out a window from a small museum, onto a courtyard, as the basic frame.

In that basic image, he replaced the central opening courtyard view with my photo of a stunning mural I found on a walk, children (mostly) in white standing in a cornfield, their arms upraised to an angelic figure, doves between them.

Then, brilliantly, he put other images into the side panes of the window. I’ve pasted one of my originals below, so you can see how he transformed those photos. I hadn’t taken a picture of The Alamo, but the designer figured it should be represented, so he used a stock photo. I wasn’t thrilled, but I thought maybe the Cesar Chavez image would counter-balance a bit. I can’t imagine the number of hours he took getting all the angles to work, with all the precise cropping. Then there was that final excellent decision to use a filter on the whole image.

Afterwards, I asked him to send me the massive file with the finished cover. I had two prints made and framed, one for me and one for Lori Ostergaard, who’d served as my program assistant (and who since has gone on to edit College English.) For years, my offices have included a little display: the poster, plus a handful of the contributory images.

The pages of the program itself had interspersed a number of my pictures, rendered in black and white, to serve as decorative filler. Below is an example, though it’s a somewhat cringeworthy one, in terms of design. Following a memorial session for Marilyn Sternglass is a picture advertising the “world’s largest collection of horns and antlers.” Not a very fitting juxtaposition of serious and silly.

If you’re curious, you can see the entire 2004 CCCC program, with my interspersed photographs. (It’s a medium sized PDF, so it may take a while to load.)

Work Worth Doing, Done Better with Friends

St. James Ballroom, MLA New Orleans
January 10, 2025 

Doug Hesse

This is a deeply moving honor. I thank Margeret Koehler, the ADE executive committee, and Janine Utell. I thank Paul Krebs and MLA. I thank Anne Gere, Kathi Yancey, and Rosemary Feal. I thank my wife and kids, for so much time elsewhere.

Tonight takes me back to a spring afternoon forty years past, to PhD days in Iowa City. Richard Lloyd-Jones, better known as Jix, asked me to join him and John Gerber for lunch in the Union cafeteria overlooking the river. I was excited to meet Gerber, who in 1949, was the first chair of CCCC, the key organization in writing studies 

What I didn’t know then was that Gerber had just won the very first Francis Andrew March award. Jix would win the second in 1987, and I’m truly humbled to look through the list of winners since that time. Recipients with personal connections—people brilliant, generous, and kind—include Jacquie Royster, David Bartholomae, Phyllis Franklin, David Laurence, Stacey Donohue, and half a dozen more.

I’ll mention two lessons learned from such exemplars. First was a capacious vision of English studies. Gerber was a Mark Twain scholar and Jix a Victorianist, but they also championed rhetoric, composition, and creative writing. They invited students and colleagues to view all terrain in this complex ecology as worthily fertile.  For example, my doctoral adviser, Susan Lohafer, was an Americanist who taught in Iowa’s creative nonfiction MFA.

My first tenure line job was in a department at Illinois State that fully embraced English Studies. The chair was Charlie Harris, who won the 1997 March award. With colleagues like Janice Neuleib, Bill Woodson. and Ron Fortune, they’d made a doctoral program whose students all took advanced seminars in literature, rhet/comp, linguistics, and pedagogy. I got to co-teach writing with my friend David Foster Wallace, 19th century nonfiction with an old-fashioned Thomas Carlyle specialist, and narrative theory with a Marxist fiction writer. We proudly advanced teacher preparation and learned from our public-school colleagues.

I’ve since watched the field dance with English studies, often in efforts safely federated into tracks, even for undergrads. I do sympathize how forces now thwart fuller integration. After all, I came to college in 1974 straight from a summer of working the back of my Dad’s trash truck. I started as a chemistry major but switched to English when I learned such a preposterous thing was allowed and, actually, unfoolish. Still, I’d like to think that even in 2025, we can make English plausible to first-generation working-class kids, including boys. Doing so requires our best rhetoric to make our passions truly account for their interests and needs.

The second lesson was to become a steward of disciplinary lands that we each merely tend for a time. Like many, I’ve tried to support people, practices, policies, and programs. I’ve tried to understand what predecessors have achieved, however imperfectly, and to see what might be moved a step ahead. Doing so has meant everything from picking up donuts for morning meetings to chairing national committees, from teaching classes when colleagues get sick to meeting with Betsy DeVoss’s staff during the first Trump administration, from leading a university gen ed revision to organizing student writing competitions whose winners met Mohammed Ali. I was always honored to be asked. I said yes as much as I could, though no doubt I was strategically stupid. Still, teaching and learning conditions need care. Someone needs to set the chairs and take the minutes, review proposals and write reports, answer phone calls from provosts, reporters, parents, and politicians.

That said, my career happened in conditions seemingly more conducive to stewardship than those of the current professional landscape, one scoured by climate change, cleft by cliffs. Precarity now seduces us to personal brands.  Memberships dwindle. Reviewers disappear. The mode is no. Professional life threatens becoming a version of gaming Canvas or Blackboard sites. 

I understand. Yet I humbly encourage stewardship beyond self-promotion. There’s work worth doing, done better with friends.

One morning twenty years ago, at an ADE meeting in Monterey, I came early to breakfast. Sitting alone was Bob Scholes, and he gestured to join him. I said as a sophomore I’d read The Elements of Writing, co-authored with Carl Klaus, another mentor. Scholes was gracious and recalled when he was hired by Iowa in the sixties, John Gerber was chair. Scholes, of course, won the March award in 2000. Nearly a quarter century ago, beside that California beach, its bright sky unfouled by Palisades fires, the sea of faith had no melancholy, long, withdrawing roar. There was only generous company and the wild privilege of doing something that mattered. That same kind of company is present in this room tonight, beside America’s mightiest river.

I sincerely appreciate this award and the occasion to remember so many people who have done so much for me and for our profession. 

I heard from one of my sisters that John Camp passed away last week, at the fine age of 91. He was my father’s last fishing partner, and his obituary includes a sentence about their pursuit of catfish on the Wapsipinnicon River over the years. (I’ve pasted the obituary at the end.)

Dad had three great fishing partners in that part of his life when I was aware of such things, generally his mid 30s until his own death at age 91 in 2021. The first was my uncle Gabby Fletcher, a partnership I well remember. Gabby had Mondays off from being produce manager at Barnes grocery store in DeWitt, and Dad arranged his own work (first delivering fuel oil, then co-owning and driving a trash truck) to match. Dad had a large flat bottom boat that could navigate shallow water, good for getting over sandbars, and they’d launch before dawn and fish until they caught their limits (in those days, 16 fish per person), which might take until late morning or, horrors, early afternoon, by which time the Cubs game (then always in the day, first pitch 1:10 pm) would be on Gabby’s transistor radio.

When Gabby suddenly died around 1990, Dad started fishing with Ray Cole, a little older than him. I remembered Ray as the operator of a Shell gas station in town. He was characteristically buck toothed with a big sense of humor and a big heart. His wife, Helen, happily cooked fish and hosted late afternoon drinks at their house after Dad retired. Dad was a fan of Black Velvet whiskey and Seven Up, never more than one, but that one was plenty stiff. After Ray passed, if you were visiting my parents and Dad offered you “a mixed drink,” that’s what you were getting. On the night before his funeral, all of my siblings gathered a last time at the old house on 6th Avenue. Dick and Nancy Capper brought over a bunch of fried chicken, and we sat on the patio, with the last bottle of Black Velvet from the house.

John Camp was later and last. He was one of “the Charlotte relatives,” mysterious folks we saw only at reunions whose connection to you, at least when you were a kid, was always mysterious. Occasionally, Christmas parties would happen at the Lutheran Church in Charlotte (note to outsiders: it’s char LOTTE, not like the North Carolina city), occasionally at my Aunt Gail’s small cafe there. John’s mother, my Aunt Erana, was my Grandma Krukow’s sister, and when I read the obituary, all these names reappear through the haze of history: Paul, Nan, Noel, Gail, and Fawn, those last two still living and but three of their generation. I saw them at my Aunt Diane’s funeral in May.

Dad had three friends that spanned sixty years of his life, men with whom he spent at least one day a week and, later in life, many.

I’m struck that I have not had such friends, at least not in the fashion of Dad’s weekly/daily interactions. I’ve been friends with several men over the years: Dennis, Kaj, Ron, Kim, and Dan. The closest I’ve had to Dad’s fishing calendar was playing racquetball at 6:30 am every Friday with Dan and my still great friends Susan and Laurence, then having breakfast. But that was now 20 years ago, and I’ve made myself no rituals to match those days.

One reason I retired was to challenge myself to elevate friendships a deeper part of my life, with men like Richard, Bob, Tom, with women like Wendy, Susan, Barb, Jennifer, and others. A consequence of having put a lot of energy into national disciplinary efforts over the past 40 years is that I have lots of professional friends, whom I also have come to value on personal levels, people like Erika, Anne, Kathi, and so many more. I treasure them. But we’re not going fishing each Monday on the Wapsi or drinking Black Velvet at 5:00 pm. Instead, we cross paths now and then, Brigadoon fashion, at professional meetings. Now that I’m retired, those meetings fade perhaps permanently into the moorish mists.

I wonder. Is the way we live now amenable to having deep ongoing friendships, anchored in quotidian routines and interactions? Sure, even though transitory lifestyles make some challenges–especially for someone like me, who’s been so beguiled by career connections as to compartmentalize my local world. The question isn’t whether the world fosters such friendships but, rather, whether a deep introvert, albeit one who seems to have faked out the world, can muster them in his last third.

Such are Monday morning thoughts on learning that Dad’s last fishing partner has died.

Obituary for John W. Camp

John Walter Camp, born May 5, 1933, the second twin of Walter Camp and Erana Hoffman Camp. John was baptized into the family of Christ on June 4th 1933. He was confirmed at Immanuel Lutheran Church in Charlotte. IA on March 30th 1947. He graduated from Charlotte High School. John served in the United States Army from 1952 to 1954. Much of that time, he was stationed in Germany. He married Carole Hackett on June 17, 1956 at Chancey Lutheran Church in Clinton, Iowa. John drove truck several years for C&S Trucking in Charlotte. In 1961, John and Carole moved to the family farm at Riggs Station. 

Throughout the years, he continued to drive truck and farm. John was an avid hunter and trapper, earning him the nickname “Skinner.” Among all his hobbies, one of his favorite pastimes was fishing, especially fishing for catfish on the Wapsi River with Don Hesse. He enjoyed gardening, often taking much of his produce to the farmers market with his wife Carole. 

He is survived by his wife of 68 years, Carole. His children Cindy Diedrich (Dan) of Charlotte, Lee Camp (Sue, now passed) of Clinton, Jay Camp (Tina) of Charlotte, and Heather (Brian) Stoecker of Charlotte. John is also survived by eight grandchildren, and six great-grandchildren. Sisters Gail Adrian and Fawn Heil. 

John passed away, Thursday, September 12, 2024. He is proceeded in death by his parents, his twin brother Paul, and sisters Nan Robins and Noel Hertensen and daughter in law Sue Camp. 

Visitation will be Thursday, September 19, 2024 at the Immanuel Lutheran Church – Charlotte. Funeral Services will be 10:00am on Friday at the church. Burial will be in the Rossiter Cemetery with military honors being conducted by the Clinton AMVETS. Serving as pallbearers will be Kevin Horan, Gary Steen, Don Luskey and grandsons Jordan Camp, Cody Diedrich, Tevin Stoecker; Honorary pallbearers will be Gary and Jeanee Horan. The Snell-Zornig Funeral Homes – Clinton is in charge of arrangements.