Lessons for a Lifetime

He stood behind the lectern on one leg, resting the other, knee crooked, on his desk. I'm still not sure how he achieved this position without falling over, but somehow he did. His sleeves were rolled up, and his voice was husky. 

Toiling in the vineyards of academia can be a lot of work. But Dr. James Ferguson did that work, and because he did, legions of Hanover College students fell in love with The Magic Mountain and The Brothers Karamazov, with Faulkner and Bellow and Eliot. 

Dr. Ferguson, who died May 12, was the kind of teacher you get once in a lifetime — if you're lucky. Though I studied with professors who published more, whose names were more recognized in literary circles, Dr. Ferguson was the real thing: a man who loved the great books and thrived on helping others love them, too. 

The details of his life that I learned from his obituary — that he came from a family of Dust Bowl migrants who moved from Missouri to California and slept for a while in their car, that he served in Korea and got his Ph.D.  with the help of the GI Bill, that he took care of his wife, who had a chronic illness, and his mother, who lived to 102 — tell me that his didn't just teach the great books, he lived the great life. 

But these facts don't surprise me.  His respect for the written word seemed to flow from his whole being. What I took from him was to love literature not for where it could take me but for what I took from it—  lessons for a lifetime. 

("The Point" at Hanover College, where Dr. Ferguson taught from 1963 to 1992.)