Two weeks into the new year, my friend Victor hanged himself. He was a complex man, haunted and conflicted. He had a keen mind and a highly developed sense of the absurd. He was a lifelong populist, and his red-clay Georgia accent waxed whenever he encountered intellectual ee-leet-ism, which he despised, and his style of guerrilla scholarship and debate punctured conceit and brought consternation and delight (and energy) to many e-lists and to Kutztown University, where he was an assistant professor. He became interested in the 1910 Mexican revolution as a student at Armstrong State College and made his way to North Carolina State University, where he got his M. A. under Bill Beezley, and then to the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill for his Ph.D. under Gil Joseph and Joseph Tulchin. While completing his dissertation, “The Genesis of the Revolution in the Tamaulipas Sierra: Campesinos and Shopkeepers in the Carrera Torres Uprising, 1906-1913,” he taught government and economics at the Marine Military Academy in Harlingen, Texas, and U.S. history at Texas Southmost College in Brownsville, which allowed him to pursue his research in Tamaulipas. His interest later turned to border studies, and he was a passionate supporter of the Zapatista movement.
When Victor became a Catholic, I asked why—I had always believed him an atheist. Because, he said, he needed to understand the culture of the Mexican people to write Mexican history. But more, it seems to me, its doctrine of good works suited his populist activism. He volunteered Sundays to the Reading Soup Kitchen and mobilized Richmond Township neighbors to save farmland from a proposed motor speedway. As assistant director of the Pennsylvania German Cultural Heritage Center at Kutztown, he became involved in wetlands preservation. He used his professional skills in his community to research and coauthor a history of his church, St. Mary’s Catholic Parish. But above all, Victor was a charismatic and respected teacher who believed in the human and intellectual potential of all his students, and he opened their hearts and eyes as well as their minds. It is fitting, then, that the Kutztown University Foundation has created a scholarship in Victor’s name for poor, disadvantaged, and Latino students. Donations may be sent to the Victor Story Scholarship Fund or to Catholic Relief Services in care of its Chiapas Fund. I cannot think of Victor without Paul Simon’s “An American Tune” running through my head:
Victor would say I am a bourgeois sentimentalist. Tough.
