When Jerry Hickey died in June, a lot of us felt the way author John O’Hara felt in 1937 when he heard that his friend George Gershwin had passed away: “I don’t have to believe it if I don’t want to.”
The former College of Communication professor and Bostonia editor was such an influence on what books we read, what records we listened to, and what jobs we took that we felt wobbly without him. Life had a lost a bit of its verve.
Jerry brought that verve to Bostonia in 1994 after retiring from COM, where he had taught writing and magazine management since 1981. Tall and white-haired, dressed in seersucker or tweed according to the season, Jerry encouraged Bostonia’s writers, as he had encouraged his students, to have faith in their own authorial voices. Most of all, he urged them to read. How could they expect to write, he insisted, if they didn’t read? He managed the staff humanely, edited the content tactfully, and exploited many of the contacts he had made throughout his years at Boston and at BU to attract good writers.
Jerry redirected Bostonia back to its readers, selecting topics and developing stories that were right for BU alumni, and struck a balance between what he felt alumni ought to read and what they wanted to read. Challenge them, but don’t alienate them. In publishing, this is the whole game, and Jerry generally got it just right.
Early Growls
Jerrold Hickey was born in Newton in 1922. In 1941, while studying English and economics at Bowdoin, he purchased a college humor magazine and made himself publisher. The Growler was profitable, but Pearl Harbor and the draft put his college and publishing careers on hold. Still, he told us, the Navy was good for one thing: as - a lieutenant on a wooden submarine chaser in the Pacific, he read a staggering number of books — hundreds of pocket-sized Armed Services Editions of biographies, the classics, and modern works.
Jerry finished his B.A. in 1947 and then earned an M.B.A. from Harvard. He moved in 1949 to New York, where for fifteen years he befriended, worked with, or at least bumped into many of the individuals who made publishing in the 1950s so exciting: Dawn Powell, B. H. Haggin, Robert Giroux, Alexey Brodovitch, T. S. Eliot, Dylan Thomas.
His delicate touch and tendency to downplay his own excellent judgment were surely what made so many literary and artistic figures comfortable with him. As features editor for Harper’s Bazaar, he was sent to supervise a photo shoot by Richard Avedon, who asked Jerry what he thought of a particular setup. “Looks good to me,” Jerry said, knowing when to leave creative people alone. He also knew when not to. Mary McCarthy, going over Jerry’s edits and suggestions to the typescript of one of her books, wrote along the margin, “Fine, seems good to me, much better,” or words to that effect.
In 1964 he returned to Massachusetts to take over Boston magazine, which had been founded as little more than a chamber of commerce handout. He ran a distinguished monthly, with handsome covers, good arts and cultural coverage, and fine political reporting. Jerry’s own articles were witty and with it. Boston caught the mood of “the New Boston,” a dormant city that was starting to wake up to the new realities of urban renewal, tensions in race relations, and the domestic implications of Vietnam.
I met Jerry in 1983 at COM, where he was teaching and I was working as a designer. Jerry was welcoming and interested in what I was doing.
Soon, books and photocopied articles began to appear outside my office door: Cyril Connolly’s The Unquiet Grave, Flannery O’Connor’s Everything That Rises Must Converge, Harry Levin’s Memories of the Moderns. These deposits were the work of Jerry the teacher. I had graduated recently from the College of Arts and Sciences with a degree in French literature and had strong interests in music and the arts. I think Jerry appreciated my interests and sensed my limitations. I knew Malraux and Mahler, but embarrassingly little of Joyce or Jelly Roll. Nor was I familiar with some of the periodicals he had commonly rolled in his pocket and then passed on to me — the Times Literary Supplement, the New Republic, Partisan Review. He wanted the people in his life to know about the things he loved: jazz, canoeing, food, poetry, squash, the Red Sox, travel. He loved to make connections. He’d send a young writer to New York to talk with a colleague from the 1950s. He and his wife, Sue, would host a dinner at home with a visiting music critic and a BU colleague. He’d invite a distinguished poet and an aspiring one to lunch at the Harvard Club. He was as generous as anyone I’ve met.
He was also the funniest man I’ve ever known. Discovering that a student had copied her paper from a piece in the New York Times Magazine, he said, “I don’t know what’s worse: that she cheated or that she thinks I don’t read the Times.” His wordplay was elegant and allusive, and it showed great respect for his listeners and readers. To take a car ride or a walk or even an elevator with him was to be treated to witty observations on the meeting we had left or the day’s news. And while much of his humor, ephemeral as skywriting, was gentle or self-mocking, the darts he winged at frauds and hypocrites — particularly politicians and University administrators — were sharp and accurate.
Jerry had had severe health problems for several years, but pain and fatigue couldn’t stop the humor. A couple of days before he died, his voice parched and faint, he whispered to me over the telephone, “The doctors say I’m in pretty good shape — it’s just pneumonia and a weak heart.”
Michael B. Shavelson (CAS’83, COM’83) is the editor of Columbia magazine. He worked at Bostonia from 1993 until 2004.
Faculty Obituaries
DAVID J. BARABAN, 87, Goldman School of Dental Medicine professor emeritus of prosthodontics, on March 17.
An international lecturer on prosthetic and restorative dental medicine since the 1960s, Baraban called Boston home for most of his life. He briefly left the city to pursue undergraduate studies at the University of Pennsylvania, but returned to complete a doctorate in dental medicine at what was then Harvard Dental School.
From 1963 to 1967, Baraban was chairman of the continuing education department at SDM. During his tenure at BU, Baraban was also an honorary visiting dental surgeon at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston. He was made professor emeritus at SDM in 1988 and was honored by the University for his role in establishing the dental school and for excellence in teaching.
Baraban was a member of a number of dental societies, including the American Dental Association and the American College of Prosthodontics, of which he was a charter fellow. He also remained active in the Harvard School of Dental Medicine alumni community, which gave him a Distinguished Alumnus Award in 1988.
Following his death, the Goldman School of Dental Medicine established the David Baraban Award, which honors an outstanding graduating prosthodontics resident. Baraban’s wife, Marjorie, presented the first award to Jong-Yub Kim in July.
THOMAS E. CULLITON, JR. (DGE’53, SED’55,’58,’61), 75, School of Education professor emeritus of education, on May 30.
After spending nearly fifty years at BU — first as a student, later as a professor, graduate student advisor, and mentor — Culliton was, to many, the embodiment of the School of Education’s commitment to service.
“When asked to serve the University and SED, he never said no,” SED Professor Emeritus Burleigh Shibles (SED’69) said when Culliton retired in 2004.
Indeed, countless students over the years benefited from Culliton’s passion for teaching, his expertise in literacy methods, and his infectious enthusiasm for teaching children to read.
“Tom was an enabler in the very best sense of the word,” says Barbara Finnegan (SED ’65, ’74), Culliton’s former teaching fellow and academic advisee. “His affirmation and encourage-ment were directly responsible for the accomplishment of countless personal and professional goals.”
Culliton’s influence extended to the Boston community as well. As the former director of SED’s Educational Clinic and its Reading and Study Skills Clinic, Culliton oversaw student teachers and personally taught everyone from elementary schoolchildren to high school dropouts.
“His specialty was unlocking the intricacies of reading and then igniting a passion for reading as a lifelong enjoyment,” Finnegan says.
After earning a bachelor’s degree from BU in 1955, Culliton spent four years as a public school teacher in his hometown of Lynn, Massachusetts, while pursuing a master’s degree. He went on to complete a doctorate in elementary education at BU as well, and in 1961 he accepted an associate professorship at the University of Illinois.
Three years later, Culliton returned to his alma mater and remained at BU until his retirement.
While at BU, Culliton served on numerous committees and the SED Alumni Board and was faculty advisor to Pi Lambda Theta, a national teaching honors organization. He was president of both the New England Reading Association and the Greater Boston Council of the International Reading Association. He received the Excellence in Teaching Award from the Boston Higher Education Partnership.
KLASS ERIKS, 84, College and Graduate School of Arts and Sciences professor emeritus of chemistry, on April 17.
Eriks, who was born in the Netherlands, studied inorganic chemistry and X-ray crystallography at the University of Amsterdam. After earning a doctorate in 1952, Eriks came to the United States with his wife, Maartje, for postdoctoral work at the University of Minnesota. He was then offered a faculty position at the BU department of chemistry, where he remained until his retirement in 1992.
Eriks taught both undergraduate and graduate chemistry courses at BU and supervised doctoral candidates. He continued to publish after leaving the University and was active in the scientific community throughout his retirement. The American Chemical Society honored him in 2006 for his fifty years of membership.
MARVIN I. FREEDMAN, 67, College of Arts and Sciences professor of mathematics and former chairman of the department of mathematics and statistics, on April 26.
Freedman completed his undergraduate studies at MIT and received a doctorate in mathematics from Brandeis University. He spent the next several years working as a senior scientist for NASA and as an instructor in the math departments of Brown University and the University of California, Berkeley, before accepting an associate professorship at BU in 1970.
Subsequently, Freedman traveled and published extensively, holding visiting professorships in the Netherlands and Spain and a residency at the Institut de Recherche d’Automatique in Rocquencourt, France. He was made a full professor upon his return to BU in 1977. Freedman chaired the mathematics department from 1991 to 1997.
Freedman was interested in the mathematical and practical problems of economics and finance. In addition to his scholarly work on the pricing and risk analysis of interest rates and currency swaps, he also provided weekly commentary on the economy for several Boston-area radio stations and was a consultant at the United Technology Research Center in Hartford, Connecticut.
Freedman advocated for better and more practical math education for high school students. From 1997 until his death he served on the national advisory board of the Mathematical Methods in High School program, sponsored by the nonprofit Education Development Center in Newton, Massachusetts.
MAC R. MORGAN, 89, College of Fine Arts professor emeritus of music and former chairman of the department of voice, on June 12.
A bass-baritone who performed with orchestras, in recitals, and on radio and television, Morgan taught vocal performance at BU for nearly twenty years while balancing the demands of an international singing career.
“I think he liked the career that he had, which was traveling around, rather than settling in,” says Raffael De Gruttola (CAS’60), Morgan’s longtime friend and the former treasurer of the Boston Opera Group. “His diction was beautiful, and he had beautiful interpretation of songs, but I’m not sure he wanted to be a grand opera singer.”
Instead, Morgan developed a reputation for his concert singing, where he was often backed by major orchestras. He performed under twentieth-century legends, such as Leonard Bernstein, Igor Stravinsky, and Sarah Caldwell, the former director of the BU Opera Workshop.
“As a musician, you get to know everybody in your city,” De Gruttola says. “With Mac, it wasn’t only Boston. People knew him all over the world.”
At the height of his career, Morgan made an impression on American icons as well. Norman Rockwell, a close friend, sketched Morgan when he visited Morgan’s Stockbridge, Massachusetts, home.
Morgan earned a bachelor’s in music from the University of Rochester’s Eastman School of Music. In 1941, he married his accompanist, Helen Neilly, and shortly thereafter was drafted into the Army. While on active duty, Morgan performed extensively throughout Australia. When he returned home, he began singing on NBC Radio’s Highways in Melody and other programs.
Morgan moved his family from Connecticut to Stockbridge in the 1950s, and for a few years he taught at the New England Conservatory between tours. He began teaching in CFA in the early 1960s and was later chairman of the voice department for eleven years. Morgan loved the Berkshires and performed regularly at Tanglewood, in Lenox, Massachusetts.
In 1982, Morgan retired and moved to Atlanta, where he taught part time at Emory University until the early 1990s and continued to provide narration at concerts.
“He was a very affable person,” De Gruttola says. “Everybody who knew Mac liked him.”
CHARLES F. SCHWERIN (SED’54), 86, College of General Studies professor emeritus of humanities, on June 18.
Schwerin, who taught countless BU students from 1950 to 1985, was perhaps best remembered for his love of teaching and his tradition of walking all the way to his Bedford, Massachusetts, home from campus on the last day of classes before Thanksgiving — a journey of about fifteen miles.
Schwerin was raised in Oak Park, Illinois, and attended Oberlin College and Northwestern University. He earned a master’s in English from Syracuse University while teaching at Cazenovia College in New York in the late 1940s.
He and his wife, Margaret, moved to Bedford in 1950, when he joined the faculty at BU.
A lifelong vocalist, Schwerin sang in the Bedford Community Chorus and directed a local quintet called the Shawsheen River Rats. He was a dedicated community activist; he worked with Bedford public schools and libraries and helped develop the Minuteman Bikeway, a trail of American Revolution sites.
