Melvin Charles Shefftz

Melvin Charles Shefftz, 82, Binghamton, NY

As a professional historian, Professor Shefftz chose some memorable dates: born on what eventually became known as Tax Day, April 15, of the year the stock market would later crash in 1929, and died after a short hospitalization on Bastille Day, July 14, of 2011, at age 82. He was born in Chelsea, Mass., to immigrant parents from Eastern Europe. His mother, Jean Shapiro, escaped from the Ukraine during the Russian Civil War, walking for months with her mother and three brothers to Poland, gleaning vegetables from picked-over fields, and sleeping in barns. His father, Simon Shefftz (Szaje Szewc), left Poland at the beckoning of an uncle who had earlier sold a family cow only to abscond with the proceeds to buy a boat ticket to America. He attended Boston Latin School and then earned his AB (magna cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa), AM, and PhD degrees in history from Harvard University, an exemplar of American upward mobility, coming from a man whose grandmother was illiterate and whose mother - while an avid reader - had only a single year of formal education. While at Harvard, he met his wife Claire -- to whom he would be married for almost 48 years -- who had recently completed her graduate degree there. (A son would later add a fifth Harvard degree to the family collection.) He taught at Northeastern University, Syracuse University, and the University of Michigan before accepting an appointment at the then Harpur College, which would become SUNY-Binghamton and Binghamton University, eventually retiring after four-and-a-half decades of teaching several generations of students. His original fields of specialization had been the British Labour [sic] Party and European socialist movements, but he was always a generalist at heart. Over the years, he loved teaching courses on the two World Wars, historiography, history through the novel, and the Vietnam War. The latter course arose from one of his many political causes, as he sought to bring young American men and women home from the pointless slaughter in Vietnam, first chairing the local Presidential campaign for Eugene McCarthy in 1968 and then volunteering for Democratic Presidential Nominee George McGovern in 1972. He was later involved in the efforts to curtail the equally pointless nuclear arms race between our nation and the then Soviet Union. He also wrote letters to the editor and engaged in other activities to affirm the State of Israel's right to live peacefully within secure borders. He grew up as a child afflicted by asthma, whose primitive treatment in the 1930s consisted largely of indoor confinement, as he longed to join the joyous cries of the neighborhood children in the snow during New England winters. But he grew up to become an avid skier (and tennis player), and continued skiing until just shy of his 75th birthday, when the lack of knee cartilage and the worsening of his myasthenia gravis finally snapped his streak of nearly half a century of consecutive ski seasons. He took great joy and pride in teaching his two sons how to ski, the younger of whom was named for many years to the New York State junior race team, and the older of whom was an NCAA race coach for many years. Whenever and wherever they now go on their backcountry skiing and ski mountaineering trips, they carry their memories and lessons from their father. He is survived by his wife Claire; sister, Barbara of Marblehead, Mass.; sons and daughters-in-law, Jonathan and Andrea, of Amherst, Mass., Benjamin and Amy of La Honda, Cal. and darling granddaughter, Micayla. He greatly enjoyed his ten visits with his granddaughter Micayla over the last year-and-a-half (and looked forward to the same with his California grandson-to-be). And Micayla in turn seemed to enjoy all her history lessons from Grandpa, most recently -- the week before his death -- on the 1895 Venezuela border dispute (even though he could not remember the exact spelling of the Schomburgk line). We should all have such mental faculties at age 82, or at any age for that matter. Funeral services will be held 11:00am, Friday, July 15, 2011 at Temple Israel, 4737 Deerfield Place, Vestal with Rabbi Shalom Kantor officiating. Interment will follow services in Temple Israel Riverside Cemetery, Conklin. Donations in his memory may be made to Temple Israel, Binghamton Jewish Community Center, Jewish Federation of Greater Binghamton, and Lourdes Hospital Foundation in-patient hospice. To forward condolences please visit www.demunnfh.com. Arrangements for the family are directed by the DeMunn Funeral Home.