Eulogy for Richard Reed

by Patrick Ward
Delivered 5/13/00
Centre United Methodist Church
Malden, MA 5:00 PM

Good afternoon. I was a student of Richard's at Stoneham High School from 1979 until I graduated in 1982. I'd like to take a few minutes this afternoon to share with you some experiences from those years.

I've had many teachers since Richard, but none have quite had his gift to, in a phrase from Yeats, "engross the present, and dominate memory."

I remember quite clearly, as I'm sure most of you do, my first meeting with Richard. He was taking attendance in creative writing class on a humid September afternoon, calling each student's name in his resonant voice and peering over the top edge of his reading glasses to look into each face as the student mumbled "here" or "present."

To me he looked as authoritative as a judge behind a bench, as imposing as a biblical prophet. "Ward. Patrick Ward." He leaned forward and locked his eyes on me. "Could you by any chance be related to John Ward?"

When I said yes, Richard took several minutes to explain to the class what an astoundingly insightful student of literature my recently graduated older brother had been, how witty, and how sensitive to human nature and to complex patterns of imagery in the required reading.

"Do you, Patrick, hope even to approach your brother's level of accomplishment?"

Well, he certainly had my attention...and that's the first hurdle any effective teacher must get over. I can't remember my exact response, or if I was even able to muster one. But I do remember vividly the next three years, Richard's humor, guidance and insight. I am still living in the world his teaching opened up to me, and I'm sure hundreds of other students, not here today, are living in that world too.

Richard's teaching style was at once adversarial and generous. He had no tolerance for oversimplifications, sentimentality or pretense. His critiques could approach public humiliation. What drew us to him, though, aside from his sharp humor and his energy at the front of the classroom, were his passion and enthusiasm for the literature, and the amount of time and attention he would concentrate on any student who was curious or willing to learn more.

Richard's life, to a fifteen-year-old raised in a bedroom suburb of Boston, seemed infinitely interesting and rich. His travels, his love for music, for the poetry of Yeats, for colonial architecture, for landscaping, for cinema. He had so many passions, and could toss out staggering opinions on so many subjects. Things were either wonderful or dreadful. Examples of wonderful: the cuisine at Le Bocage, a restaurant he had once visited, the city of Dublin, Mahler Symphonies, Fassbinder movies, and so many of the warm, accomplished and vaguely idiosyncratic people who flocked to sing in his choirs. Examples of dreadful: the large-handled plastic combs that many high school girls in those years carried, protruding, in the rear pocket of their jeans, the Moral Majority, Sony Walkman Headphones, dangling modifiers, and the beverages, dispensed from a machine in the cafeteria, known as "juice drinks."

Many of the adults I had encountered until that point never seemed to be very passionate about anything. Richard was one of the very first adults I met who made me want to be an adult myself, whose relation to the world around showed me that adult life, if lived with receptivity and curiosity, could be a continuous reward. That's why his classes were always interesting. One memory of Richard seems particularly indelible to me right now: the obvious relish he took in providing spontaneous piano accompaniment to the silent films of D.W. Griffith and Sergei Eisenstein, both of which he screened in a senior elective on film appreciation. I remember the intensity of his movement from the waist up as he sat on a piano bench, his eyes darting between the keyboard and the screen. His pleasure was part of the show. At the time I didn't understand quite what he saw in footage of a massacre on the Odessa steps. But I knew as I watched him that he was on to something that gave him great force and energy and passion, and that made me want to be on to something too.

When I remember the texts Richard assigned us as sixteen and seventeen year-olds, I'm astounded by the complexity of some of them. 1919 by William Butler Yeats. JB by Archibald Macleish, As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner. Enigmatic and elusive short fiction by Kafka, Eudora Welty and Flannery O'Connor. One of his essay assignments asked us to compare and contrast Albert Schweitzer with Mr. Kurtz, the central character in Conrad's Heart of Darkness.

It seems to me now that Richard's aim was to train us in the skill of tolerating, of being able to hold in mind, mystery and contradiction.

Huck Finn is a liar, but we love him.

Hester Prynne is an adulteress and an outcast, but she is also the moral center of gravity in Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter.

Schweitzer's reverence for life co-existed with racist beliefs and a prickly temperament.

All of those proper and fastidious church ladies in the fiction of Flannery O'Connor meet violent ends, which seem inexplicably, and strangely, justified.

In a recent issue of Harper's Magazine the novelist Francine Prose offers a critical assessment of the current state of English teaching in American High Schools. I'd like to leave you with an excerpt from that article, because she managed to capture something essential to Richard's teaching:

"Teaching students to value literary masterpieces is our best hope of awakening them to the infinite capacities and complexities of human experience, of helping them acknowledge and accept complexity and ambiguity, and of making them love and respect the language that allows us to smuggle out, and send one another, our urgent, eloquent dispatches from the prison of the self."

I suppose it's not too much to conclude that Richard helped me to break out of a kind of prison when I was fifteen. Although there's never much to be gained by wondering how one's life might have been different had one not taken a specific trip, encountered a certain person, or picked up a particular book, my own life would be poorer and thinner in so many ways had I not met Richard. For that reason, I can't stop thanking him.

Thank you.