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Fred Bornhauser Obituary
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Memories and Condolences
for Fred Bornhauser
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6 Entries
Bill Barber
January 24, 2024
Fred was my first year English professor at UVa in 1963. I majored in English as a result of his class.
Jill Kinkade
October 15, 2023
I had Fred Bornhauser as a professor at Hunter College. We studied Faulkner. He was amazing. Today, I am an instructor of English, and I use a lot of the things he taught me. He was wonderful, and I wish I could talk with him today.
John Hayman
August 26, 2007
I met Fred at Cornell University. This was in September 1957, and I was about to start graduate study, having just arrived in North America after graduating from Oxford. Fred had also been at Oxford, as a Rhodes Scholar, and he had reluctantly concluded that he needed a Ph.D to continue in university teaching. Perhaps Fred's fond memory of Oxford was the initial link between us, despite a difference in age of ten years. Without a hint of being patronising, Fred gave me my first lessons in driving, provided a few hints about cooking, quietly suggested that Furtwangler's Beethoven was at least as impressive as Klemperer's, and almost got me to enjoy lieder. Over the years I have found myself repeating Fred's sometimes questionable assertions:e.g. "A log cabin cannot be described as dilapidated." (Why? Because the word "lapis" means "stone.")He must have been a marvelously quirky teacher. Despite long intervals of silence, I have always thought of Fred as a friend for life.
Gary Tunnicliffe
August 16, 2007
Fred was a gentleman in the truest sense - a distinguished, engaging, and gracious man of great intellect, perspective, and humor. As a neighbor of his in our building, I was always delighted to bump into him and have the opportunity to hear a story, share a laugh, or discuss the relative merits of a film or play. I wish I'd spent more time with him over the years we knew one another. While deeply saddened by his passing, I also feel richer for having known this fine man.
Wendy Ely
August 14, 2007
I was 11 when I met Fred as a friend of my mother. They were English graduate students at Cornell. I knew him as a poet. For example, when my parakeet died, I flushed the corpse down the toilet. Fred's poem began, "So Budgie is dead, alas, His soul now piping down the valleys wild..." I had a narcissus which I placed on the sill of our rather grim basement apartment. It died, too. He wrote "On a dead narcissus, standing dark against the night..." This was a real poem, unlike, so Budgie is dead, alas. He must have liked the line because when he heard on a car radio that Boris Pasternak had died, he began, "So Pasternak is dead, alas..." He had a great sense of humor and was always fun to be around. I remember all this and more, though it's been close to half a century since I last saw Fred.
thomas bornhauser
August 9, 2007
Fred Bornhauser was the first Rhodes scholar to come out of the University of Louisville...he was a wonderful teacher....and a kind man
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