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By now you've all heard the news. Or if you haven't, it's one of those articles you skim and pass on by. The story of the bus crash involving students from the small Mennonite College of Bluffton University. For me, it would have passed as a footnote as well, except for one thing.
See, in 1992, in my first halfhearted attempt at completing college, I attended a small but prohibitively expensive school in my hometown. I was 22, a few years out of high school, and I really didn't want a degree, but I was trying to get my head back on straight before finally realizing the futility of it all and I went back to school in the misguided notion that that would somehow help. Part of my problem was that I had no desire for a degree, part of it was an innate need to belong that kept me using free time I didn't have between work and school to go out with friends and participate in campus life. The end result is that I didn't have ample time to devote to my studies. But I digress...
The highlight of that brief year of academia was a young History professor by the name of Perry Bush. Dr. Bush was one of those professors who would make you think, who would challenge everything you thought you knew, and encourage you to challenge everything he presented. He introduced me to much of the labor history of the United States, knowledge that would serve me well when I walked through Pullman, Illinois, Haymarket Square, a lumber camp in the northwoods of Wisconsin, and in the depths of a mine in Death Valley. It was in his class that I first heard the full story of the Kent State Massacre, an event that happened exactly three days before I entered this world not terribly far from that tragic event.
And it was Dr. Bush's pen that delivered one of the most scathing critiques I had ever received, a criticism that led me to correct the very problem he presented, and, unbelievably, to find the very truth behind his words. On a paper detailing the attidudes of war reflected in popular music from 1946-1993, I casually (and wrongly, as it turned out) dismissed the '50s as "a waste of time" using the later words of Joe Walsh as my justification (thanks a LOT, Joe...I'll stick to listening to you for MUSIC, not history from here on out, k?). Dr. Bush penned in red ink that is still indelibly etched in my memory to this day that "your knowledge of the '50's is appalling". Well, since that time, and since interviews with 1992 Socialist Party USA Presidential candidate J. Quinn Brisben (for whom my eldest son is named), the late Harvey Matusow (prosecution witness for Roy Cohn in the McCarthy hearings, one of the first to recant, and, in an extremely ironic twist of fate, for two years my stepdad), and my current role as a board member with the Woody Guthrie Folk Music Center in Pampa, Texas, I have found that he was definitely and most decidedly right, and that his summary was, if anything, an understatement. Those words drove me to learning and looking for source material, to becoming a researcher instead of just a reader, and towards taking a genuinely analytical approach to history, politics and all other areas of intellect. Those words should be framed and hung on my wall for all the good they have done me throughout my life.
Dr. Bush believed in me and in my potential, something that has for much of my life gone greatly unrealized. Dr. Bush was one of the first that truly expressed that kind of faith in me and who I am. The last time I saw Dr. Bush was at the funeral of my brother, later in the summer after that academic year, after I had moved on up to Chicago. That a professor cared enough to come out in such a moment of tragedy added additional impact.
Dr. Perry Bush is currently a professor of History and the History and Religion Department chair at Bluffton. Guiding more students and hopefully impacting them every bit as much as he did me. Bluffton University is a small university, and I have little doubt that Dr. Bush has crossed paths with some of the students and/or their close friends; perhaps even had them in his classes.
My prayers are with Dr. Bush and with the faculty, staff, and students of Bluffton U. And I stand amazed, and just a little bit frightened, at what a small world it actually is.