Bill was niftar this past shabbes. When a friend of mine came to prospie at the UofC he met Bill in the kitchen. Bill warned Adam with complete seriousness, "You might not want to come here, there are a lot of really weird people."
Bill was unique in a community noted for uniqueness. He tenured seventeen years over twenty-three and left a mark on all who knew him. He played twenty year chess games, he read thousands of books, he knew tens of thousands of baseball statistics. All effortlessly. He was, takka fucking nuts in all the right ways. In many ways he represented all the best that Hyde Park and the UofC offers. He was abrasive, but gentle, harsh but engaging. He would never let a fellow interlocutor off easy. I remember one
shalush shudes when he turned a particular grad student into a gelatinous puddle for questioning the fossil records ability to verify evolution. Bill gave him at least two chances to back down. Then he let him have it. Bill would even correct personal stories I would tell; he knew that much.
He was almost mythical. You can tell people of this Bill who works at the Co-op and repairs bikes, but could school a good number of the faculty with one intellectual arm behind his back. No one would believe you. Who would believe a man who read ten thousand books before he was forty? Bill just wasn't like others. He was singular.
I don't know why Bill deigned to talk to me or even, dare I say, befriend me. I never really knew why I merited his company. I just realized one day that his, "Do you know what you are talking about?!" was not hostile, but the rhetoric of engagement. When I was applying to grad school this fall, he had more recommendations of faculty to work with than most professors in the field I had met with. One summer I got to sit in on a Shmuli-Bill three hour long conversation about the '04 Illinois Senate race, baseball and Iowa federal politics in the 20's. When I was foolish enough to ask how they knew all this trivia, they looked at me with stupefaction. "I don't know, we just read." I admired his intellect, I admired his commitment to his family and I admired his strength of character.
As I remarked this morning to Larry, they don't make 'em like they used to. Larry replied, "I don't think they ever made them like that."
Our deepest sorrow extends to Jen and Shaya. The family will be sitting shiva in Eugene, OR.
