The Teacher Becomes the Student
A lot of people who retire to the Williamsburg area cite the Osher Lifelong Learning Institute at the College of William and Mary as one of the attractions that made them choose to move here. In Osher courses, it’s not unusual for me to run into other W&M alumni, some of whom I actually knew when I was in college. It’s also common to meet people who have retired from academic careers at other universities; some of them teach classes in the program, but more of them just take classes and enjoy themselves.
One of the most interesting interactions I had through the Osher program was becoming reacquainted with a William and Mary English professor, Dr. Robert Maccubbin. Mr. Maccubbin (students at W&M didn’t call their professors “Doctor” when I attended there, even when they held the Ph.D. degree) taught at William & Mary for 41 years; Tim and I were in his Freshman English Class in 1965-66, Mr. Maccubbin’s second year at the college. I’m not going to talk about that class, except to say that in later years Mr. Maccubbin said that he was pretty sure that the relationship between Tim and me was the most positive thing that came out of that class.
We ran into him a few times over the years, both before we moved back to Williamsburg and after we retired here in 1998. Over time, we gradually became a little more comfortable in calling him “Bob,” although that was never easy. Bob retired from William and Mary in 2006.
Bob taught an Osher class on Robert Louis Stevenson in 2017 or so, I think it was, and I enrolled in it. The class ran for six sessions, and we read several of Stevenson’s works and watched a few movie versions of them. The class met in the basement of the Campus Center on the Old Campus, and it provided a great nostalgic experience. It was fun to reconnect with Bob and meet his wife, Martha.
Imagine my surprise when, a year or so later, I spotted Bob sitting among the students in a class I was teaching about the causes of the American Civil War. This was a big classroom – there were 130 seats, and the room was full. When I saw Bob there, I couldn’t believe it. When he responded to my wave with a brief wave of his own, we both broke into big smiles.
Bob was interested in genealogy, and I got together with him once or twice to work on his family tree. I gave him copies of a couple of family history books I had written. He and Martha invited us to their Christmas Open House in 2018. We were not close friends, but he provided a meaningful link to the college memories that Tim and I share. I continued to run into him in Osher classes, but it soon became clear to me that he was not in good health. The last time I saw him – in the class on The Great American Songbook, which I wrote about recently – he told me that he was no longer driving, and that he hated the fact that Martha had to drive him around.
Bob died in hospice care in a local nursing home in November of 2020. He was 81.