“Of course, there’s another question: Has our confrontation with him changed us? When you encounter someone who listens like no one you’ve ever met—totally, without remainder–that may well have a lasting impact on even the most self-centered student. And it’s not just listening. It’s hearing—and hearing not merely the literal words, but the worldview coming your way. So a story:

In the late ‘80s I was going around the country to see how Indian reservations were being transformed, for better or worse, by the casinos then just popping up. One stop was in Mohawk territory, at the New York-Canadian border, following a shootout between opponents and supporters of the gambling halls. Well, many of the principals had the careers for which Mohawks are legendary. They were iron workers, men able to walk along the beams atop the most intimidating skyscrapers. So I asked these guys which buildings they’d worked on, figuring they’d proudly rattle off names of some landmark towers. But they just shrugged. They couldn’t name one. “Oh, I did six months in Cleveland,” they’d say, or “I spent most of a year in Chicago.” So I kept pushing. Might they have helped build the Sears Tower? Again shrugs. It took several such failed attempts for me to get it, to finally hear. I was projecting my chattering-class view of work—that we are what we do, that whole over-identification. To these guys, a job was a job, X-months of paychecks plus OT, then home. Now maybe I would have figured out that clash of worldviews in the normal development of my professional skills. But given the way those encounters simultaneously taught me something fundamental about those iron workers, and about me, it was hard not to think: This is a classic Gaudino moment.

–Paul Lieberman '71, writes and works on films from New York after a quarter-century as an editor and reporter for the Los Angeles Times, and was asked by the Robert L. Gaudino Memorial Fund to compile this oral history. In the process, he produced the documentary “Mr. Gaudino.”