My lifelong friend, Dr.James Kluger, professor of American History died yesterday at 5:40 pm of kidney failure.
This is not an obituary, I will surrender that task to those who charge $5 a line. Jim, with his seering, H.L. Menken style of humor and brick in your lap common sense, would not have approved of the collection of a fee for a eulogy. He would, of course, enjoyed a free blog and a short little story about a friend. That would be the way of a historian.
I can hear Jim now declaring that the the beginning of the death of the daily newspaper was coincident to the election to charge for Obit’s. In doing so we began to segregate ourselves from the commoners in the community and our sense of place.
Jim Kluger never lost his sense of place, both in the stream of American history and in his beloved Tucson community.
With a singular elan, Jim knew, down to the calcium in his bones, that he was born to be a teacher–to which thousands of his students in American History would testify.
I am but one of those students, as was my son Ryan. To know and absorb the teachings of an American historian like Jim Kluger, is to be an American without pretense and platitudes.
Jim once told me, “it isn’t what you teach, it is what you get them to say.” It is the things that Jim got me to say that forged our relationship in 1971 when I was a numbed out young Marine freshly ejected onto the American scene from the jungles of Vietnam. I was mute and lost on the campus of the U of A as a pilgrim to polite society. There were no transition programs for veterans. There were no welcome home greetings, and for many of us there were no social outlets for our war experiences. In some respects we were all mute strangers in a strange land.
Jim felt that psychic pain that permeated my entire being from dawn to dusk, with sleepless nights. The violation of a moral code learned in my Catholic upbringing,as was Jim’s, and a personal sense of shame I felt from some particular war experiences could not be rationalized in the tavern conversations.
Jim was my first post-war mentor, confidante and confessor,(he would chuckle at the last one). But without his intervention and the guidance of the Newman Center on campus I would likely not be here today.
“To the good man to die is to gain” St. Ambrose. Jim’s alma mater was Saint Ambrose in Davenport.
So many, many of us have gained by Jim’s wit and sardonic wisdom. I was a lucky man in the summer of 1972 when Jim and I traveled across America to our respective hometowns, his Davenport Iowa, mine, Dixon, Illinios. It was on the Interstates of the heartland that Jim Kluger placed the soul back in the hollow heart of a young warrior.
Hope brings reality into focus. Did Jim know that by parading all of America—a people of hope, in front of me that he would restore my own hope? I think so.
Did Jim know that by having me read Dostoevsky that I would identify with suffering and thereby release the radioactivity of my own? I think so.
Did he know when we sat on the steps of the College Library in Tyler, Texas and he declared that, “by the time you are 30 you will not feel so stupid and will have a fund of knowledge and literacy of suffering that will benefit many of your brothers in arms,” that he was a prophet? I think so.
Did he know that by assigning me to read T.S Elliot that he would deliver me to that plane? I think so.
“How much reality can humankind handle” T.S Elliot.
Accurate for war eh? When you place a man of letters and humanities next to a Psychiatrist and the topic of existential pain and suffering is the offering, the chances are good that the professor of history will provide the framework for grasping and coming to terms with the exigencies and travails of war. Jim did, and I am a better man, husband and father as a result of a blessed association with a teacher par excellance.
Should all have such a superior system navigator as Jim Kluger, American history may not be so strewn with such tragic decisions.
New learning is always an affront to our inherent narcissism. Jim knew how to crack the crusty shell of self and ego to teach something valuable to the village. Teachers like Jim go straight to heaven in the carpool lane. And Jim….,? Sister Francesca of the Sisters of Mercy does in fact know what you did for eternal salvation…. you performed acts of mercy for the Vietnam Veteran.
“There are two laws discreet–not reconciled
Law for Man and law for Thing
The last builds town and fleet
But it runs wild
And doth the man unking”
Ralph Waldo Emerson
As I built my career in real estate, that stanza always reminded me of Jim.
“Let man serve law for Man
Live for friendship, live for Love
For Truth and Harmony’s behoof
The State may follow how it can.
As Olympus follows Jove.
“The sense of the world is short
long and various the report
To love and be beloved
Men and gods have not outlearned it,
And how oft’ so’er they’ve turned it
Not to be improved.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Though my sins be scarlet I am cleansed and healed by friendship of the sorts of Jim Kluger, my pal. See you on the other side Jim. Mike Brewer/ Student
Jim Kluger’s Celebration of Life will be at the St. Thomas More Newman Center of the U of A campus on Saturday, January 16th at 11am.
