Author Archives: admin

Final Note Post 3

We owe a different sort of thanks, one more profound, to the students and faculty friends who helped Bob Gaudino through his final years. We hear from a few in the oral history, but there were others, including the chaplain’s son, Alan Eusden, and Williams-in-India’s Parker Croft, who assisted Gaudino with daily life in his […]

Final Note Post 2

While a few interviews were conducted by necessity over the phone, most were done face-to-face as my work on various writing projects took me around the country. I was able to connect with Gaudino’s former protégé Craig Brown in Arizona, with Jake Gaudino at his retirement home in Indio, Calif., outside Palm Springs, and with […]

Final Note Post 1

Thank you for having accepted our invitation to take off your shoes and spend a bit of time with the remarkable Mr. Gaudino. This oral history was initiated in 2002 by the board of the Robert L. Gaudino Memorial Fund at Williams College, which envisioned something far less ambitious—more of an institutional record memorializing the […]

Chapter 8 Part 16 Post 3

Since I am running on I shall tell you of a recent dream I had about Bob. I was visiting him, and was trying to tell him that many, many years later he was lovingly remembered by his students, but he kept walking away from me, and even went into a lake to swim, and […]

Chapter 8 Part 16 Post 2

It is a bit curious that although the death of Bob Gaudino, one of my two or three best friends ever, was a big loss for me, he has, to a surprising extent, not been lost to me…I retain a vivid almost yesterday-like memory of…walking toward his house in his driveway that Thanksgiving day and […]

Chapter 8 Part 16 Post 1

Our Thanksgiving dinner companions fell out of mind until September 1999. Right after my 25th reunion someone mentioned to me there was going to be a convocation and Gaudino was going to be honored and remembered. So I drove back up and after the convocation they had a picnic table and a reception for everyone […]

Chapter 8 Part 15 Post 1

He really changed my life by encouraging me to come down here to Washington and not stay in New York with my mother. I wasn’t really aware until later of what had happened. I just thought this was a good idea to go down here and work on the [1956 Adlai Stevenson] campaign. My father […]

Chapter 8 Part 14 Post 1

It is amazing how some people make such a profound impact upon us. One could argue that they are not accidental, but, if you would permit me to say, an indication of divine grace, or in musical terms, they are grace notes of our collective experiences. Bob Gaudino did not simply engage me in terms […]

Chapter 8 Part 13 Post 9

Gaudino would have been more than a little embarrassed at one level by the Fund and quite tickled in his most private moments by the Fund. He would have chided all of us for wasting our time and effort trying to understand what he was talking about. He never thought it was that clear anyway […]

Chapter 8 Part 13 Post 8

The honor in which his name is held by his students is something that most professors would give a lot for. But they’ve over-institutionalized the Gaudino thing. I don’t think he would’ve been comfortable with that. That wasn’t what he was about. I think he would’ve been probably embarrassed to see the Gaudino seminars, the […]

CHAPTERS

Introduction
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8
Final Note