A Life Renewed, 1983-1998 continues the personal story begun in Roderick Stackelberg's earlier autobiographical volumes, Out of Hitler's Shadow and Memory and History. The basic themes stressed in the prefaces to the first two volumes of his autobiography-the desire to honestly share his experiences in an aesthetically pleasing and enjoyable way retain their relevance for this later volume as well. This third volume covers his happiest and most generative years, including his new marriage to Sally Winkle and his work as a professor of history at Gonzaga University. His richly illustrated personal and professional stories are interspersed with a running commentary on the extraordinary political changes in the closing years of the twentieth century. The title of this volume, A Life Renewed, 1983-1998, refers to both his new marriage to Sally and to the birth of their son, Emmet, in 1991. The fifteen years covered in this volume are infused with the joys of a happy marriage, a gifted late-born off spring, and some limited but satisfying professional success. He also chronicles the successes of his older children as they pursue college and careers. Stackelberg considers this period to be the "high noon" of his life, before the onset of old age and ill health at the turn of the century.

A Life Renewed 1983–1998

By Roderick Stackelberg

iUniverse, Inc.

Copyright © 2012 Roderick Stackelberg
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-4759-3037-5

Contents

Preface.............................................................viiIntroduction........................................................ix1 A New Beginning with Sally, 1983–1985.......................12 A Productive Period of Scholarship, 1986-1988.....................253 Making It, 1988-1990..............................................494 Years of Momentous Change, 1990-1991..............................685 The New Arrival, 1991-1992........................................876 Another Year, 1993-1994...........................................1027 Endings and Beginnings, 1994-1995.................................1188 Early Deaths, but Life Goes On, 1996-1997.........................1289 The End of an Era, 1998...........................................148Epilogue............................................................163

Chapter One

A New Beginning with Sally, 1983–1985

In late October, 1983, I first met Sally Winkle at the home of Olivia Caulliez, still married to my former Gonzaga colleague John Shideler at the time. Sally had just begun teaching German language and literature at Eastern Washington University. We had both attended the annual German Studies Association conference held that year at the University of Wisconsin in Madison, where Sally was completing her PhD in German language and literature. We had not met at the conference, but it gave us plenty to talk about. My visit to Madison had indeed been a memorable occasion for me, my only visit to one of the major sites of the student rebellion and anti-war movement of the 1960s, with which I sympathized so greatly. The balmy weather drew hundreds of students into the streets to enjoy the "Indian summer." The student union, the Rathskeller, still served beer at the time, and the atmosphere of the city and especially the campus struck me as marvelously liberal and inviting. For Sally, who had already lived in Madison for six years, the weekend was probably nothing special, but we found in our conversation at Olivia's that we were on the same wavelength in our political views and intellectual interests—so much so that for all practical purposes we were "computer-matched." Sally had been an active member of the graduate teaching assistants' union at the University of Wisconsin and had participated in a strike for higher wages and better working conditions a year or two before. Within a week we became an inseparable couple. Our sixteen-year age difference was no problem, at least not at the time. "It turns me on," Sally told me, "that you think I am young." And I was turned on by her slim figure and excellent mind.

I had been searching for a mate for more than a year, ever since my final separation from Steffi at the end of 1982. I was particularly attracted to two of my young female colleagues at Gonzaga, but they were each other's best friends, and in my clumsy efforts at courtship I only managed to antagonize both of them! When one of them threw a tenure party for the other one in April 1983 and I was one of the few faculty members who were not invited, I knew I had ruined whatever chances I might have had with either of them. In my journal I recorded my reaction to this rebuff:

The war between the sexes: the effort to grow beyond the natural attraction to the opposite sex. Hence one competes for the superior psychological vantage point that confers autonomy. Make the other side want you more than you want them.—Insight derived from not being invited to [the] tenure party. Nice to have the insight, but wouldn't it have been more fun to have been invited?

I took a mordant view of my motives:

Irony: in students as potential lovers I look for the parent-less, because they are more likely to defy convention (Kaye!). In older women as potential mates I look for those with close ties to their parents because they are more likely to have internalized the conventional goals of marriage and children (besides carrying the genes of longevity). They are less likely to give in to Lesbian temptations.

Obviously, my own inhibitions played a part in my problematic post-divorce relations with women:

It is easy to say, why not call her; the worst that can happen is that she'll say no. For one thing, it isn't the worst. She may say yes and not mean it. But what is even worse is that she says yes and you do not mean it. You mean it only if she reacts in a certain way. One inhibition, then, is fear of becoming a fraud, of being revealed as a fraud, because your phone call may promise something you can't deliver.

Another inhibiting factor was the note of desperation that I seemed to convey. Martha Chrisman, an attractive young pianist in the music department who in June, 1986, moved to a higher position at Purdue University, gave me some good advice: "You go too fast. You seem desperate. It takes all the romance out of it. A romance needs a little mystery, a little teasing." Martha told her mother that I seemed very lonely. I asked her what her mother's response had been. "She said she thought you'd better get your act together before you go out." But Martha and I were too different ever to have made a harmonious and integrated couple. She was a bit of a born-again Christian who dragged me to Sunday services at a number of churches.

At the Plymouth Congregational Church with Martha. The minister with the ingratiating gestures and self-admiring public speaking style of Bob Carriker. Martha applying the lessons of the sermon to her problems with Fr. Leedale [chair of the music department], who gave her a bad evaluation after a sneak visit to her class: "I'll get him through love," and "I'm going to think of my problems as challenges from now on." About the minister: "He doesn't play it safe like other ministers. He disturbs people. He has the courage to speak of faith and love instead of how to save the world."

Martha was quite aware of our basic incompatibility. Of a romantic rival, a young executive at a local credit union with whom she was going out, she said: "I don't want him, but I want to want him; I want you, but I don't want to want you." To my plaint that she got sexually aroused with me but then transferred it to him, she responded, "Maybe it's the other way round."

When I met Sally, my son Nick was quite relieved. He had become quite worried that if my relationship with Martha developed any further, he would have to go to church every Sunday!

Twelve-year-old Nick was a bit wary of Sally, too, at first, for fear that our relationship was getting too close, as Sally frequently came over for supper. "When I see three pork chops on the counter," he admonished me, "I get really mad." "I should sue you for waste of gas," he said at another time. "Have you and Sally ever thought about how much gas you are wasting when she comes over here?" But when Sally finally moved in with us two years later in September 1985, they got along very well.

Sally was very much affected by the second wave of the feminist movement, sometimes referred to as the Women's Liberation Movement, reaching its crest in those years. I sympathized with the movement as well for its emphasis on equality, even if it seemed to make courtship more complicated than it had been when I grew up in the 1950s (not that the more rigid gender roles of an earlier era made it any easier for me). Several months before, on May 6, 1983, I had written in my journal:

Feminism only...