Remembering Bob Spearman

I was honored to be asked to speak at Bob Spearman's Memorial Service on April 29, 2018.  Here's the text of my remarks, to which I adhered pretty closely except for adding a story about how Bob and I each won a bottle of wine on a long-ago flight to San Francisco by being the first to answer questions in a trivia contest put on by the flight attendants.  Bob was the first passenger to identify the four states whose capital cities begin with the same first letter as the state, and I was the first to come up with the names of the seven dwarfs.

Separately I have posted Bob's obituary.

          I met Bob Spearman in the fall of 1961, on the first day of freshman orientation at Carolina.  We were introduced by Pete Wales, Bob’s Groton classmate and fellow Morehead Scholar, who was in my orientation group.  Both became my lifelong friends and now, sadly and unexpectedly, I have outlived them both.  I guess Billy Joel got it right: only the good die young, or at least before their time.

          Over the course of 57 years Bob and I took classes together, worked together and played together.  As undergraduates at Chapel Hill we also plotted and schemed together in an effort to defeat or repeal North Carolina’s infamous “speaker ban” law, an affront to free speech that was as noxious, notorious and unwise then as HB2 was recently.  Happily, our co-conspirators included then Governor Terry Sanford, UNC President Bill Friday, prominent UNC alumni, and other leaders of the state and university.  Confronting that serious and challenging First Amendment challenge not only helped cement my friendship with Bob; it also was an important impetus, together with the Alamance County draft board, in my decision to go to law school and to become a First Amendment lawyer. 

          Early on I realized two things about Bob: that he was incredibly smart, but he never tried to impress you with how smart he was.  To the contrary, he was one of the least pretentious people I have ever known.  We often talk about people as being comfortable in their own skin, but I don’t think that really applied to Bob because the stuff inside his skin included a spine made up of damaged and deteriorating vertebrae that made him very uncomfortable for much of his life.  Instead, I prefer to think of him as a person who, unlike most of us, was always comfortable in his own mind.

            Bob loved good food and good wine, but he was not a gourmet; he was a gourmand.  (Given the sophistication of this crowd, I’m sure I need not explain the difference.)  He would eat pretty much anything that was put in front of him — and often something that was put in front of the person seated next to him.   The one exception was Brussels sprouts, which he loathed.  When I asked him why, he said it was because at both Groton and Oxford they were always served the same way: cold and gray.  Collards, he believed, were an infinitely preferable green vegetable.

          Bob liked to read about eating almost as much as he liked to eat.  One of his favorite authors was Calvin Trillin, the New Yorker writer whose first book was entitled “Alice, Let’s Eat.”  Bob shared with Trillin the view that the best way to show proper appreciation to one’s dinner party hosts was graciously to accept their offer of a third helping.  Another favorite was R. W. “Johnny” Apple, a New York Times reporter famous for his ability to knock out a riveting front page lede under the pressure of a deadline, and for the staggering size of his expense account statements.  Bob gave me books by Calvin Trillin (including the aptly titled “Third Helpings”) and sent me clippings of Johnny Apple stories.  I can still remember his delight over the September 29, 2003 issue of The New Yorker, which contained an article about Johnny Apple that not only ran to almost 10,000 words and was written by Calvin Trillin.  Bob sent me a copy of the article, which he devoured as enthusiastically as if it were a bowl of crawfish étouffée.

          Given the gusto with which Bob ate, it’s startling that he never acquired a physique like Johnny Apple’s, who was known around the Times both for his profundity and his rotundity.   To the contrary, Bob never seemed to gain any weight.  In his 50s and 60s he could still fit into clothes he had had as a college sophomore; in fact, he sometimes wore clothes he had owned as a college sophomore.

          There are many other things about Bob that I could talk about this afternoon, such as the astonishing breadth and depth of his knowledge; his love of both books and birds; the full-throated enthusiasm with which he watched Tar Heel basketball games on television; his mechanical ineptitude, which left him completely flummoxed when he was confronted by any tool more complicated than a wheelbarrow; or how he would go into an almost impenetrable zone of concentration and focus when he was preparing for a court hearing.  Instead, if you will forgive me for injecting a note of sadness into what is, after all, an occasion for joyous remembrances, I’d like to talk for a few moments about Bob at the end of his life.

          I didn’t see Bob’s steady decline into dementia coming; indeed, in retrospect I see that I didn’t even recognize it after it had begun.  Looking back, I see that if I had been more perceptive I would have realized that something was up when Bob abruptly retired from the practice of law that he loved so much; or when after he and Pat moved to Chapel Hill he didn’t do what so many retirees here do, which is to fill their schedules with the endless array of lectures, seminars, concerts, outings and spectator sports offered up by this great university.   Only when his dementia began to manifest itself in episodes of aphasia and forgetfulness did I come to realize that a more understanding friend would have said long before, “Bob, are you okay?  Is there something I can do for you?”

          Unfortunately, I didn’t ask.  For one thing, Bob’s and my relationship, like those of many men who are friends and colleagues, didn’t extend to asking each other such personal questions.  For another, I always thought of Bob as so self-sufficient and so much in control that it was impossible to think of him as needing help.

          Nearer the end of his life, when he lived first in a group home at the Governor’s Club and then in a memory care facility, I visited with him.  I would show up at the group home with barbecue sandwiches or a bag of BLTs from Merritt’s Store and a cold beer or two, and we would sit on the deck and watch the birds in the adjacent trees and I would read bird poems to him.  Later I got some great advice from my son George who, as an Episcopal priest, has many occasions to visit with folks suffering from memory loss.  He told me that often one of the last faculties that such patients lose is their ability to recall and enjoy music, which certainly was true for Bob.  Even when he could no longer speak or feed himself, he reacted visibly and happily when I cranked up my iPod and my portable speaker and played beach music and 1960s rock and roll hits from the Chi Psi juke box.  The Big Bopper’s “Chantilly Lace” was a particular favorite.

          So, I leave you with some unsolicited but heartfelt advice:  if you have a friend or family member whose mind is failing, don’t fall back on the excuse that “I just want to remember them the way they were.”  Suck it up.  Pay them a visit.  Talk to them, even when you have no idea whether they are taking in anything you are saying.  Sing to them or play music for them.  It will be hard, and you almost surely will leave with tears in your eyes.  But one of the last of the many things I learned from Bob is that it also will be therapeutic for the person you visit — and for you.