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| Bob Isaacs circa 1975. Photo courtesy of the Housatonic Community College Archives. Used with permission. |
The following article is a posthumous tribute to
Robert M. Isaacs that I wrote for Horizons at the behest of the current editor-in-chief.
Isaacs was the first faculty adviser for Housatonic Community College’s
student-run newspaper. He also founded and developed the journalism program in
which I studied and which I am now helping to teach. I personally feel a deep
indebtedness for his contributions to college. The full memorial appears in the
April issue of Horizons.
When the first issue of HCC’s
student-run newspaper came out on Oct. 11, 1967, a noteworthy name appeared at
the bottom of the paper’s staff list: “Robert M. Isaacs, Faculty Advisor.”
It was the beginning of an
influential 44-year career at the college that ended only a few months before
Bob, as his friends called him, died Feb. 21 at the age of 84.
Over the course of that
career, Bob created Housatonic’s journalism program, helped launch the creative
writing magazine, taught numerous courses on literature and writing, and
inspired hundreds of students. He was an inveterate booster of the budding
college and a vociferous defender of students’ rights.
Born Jan. 15, 1929 in the
Bronx, Bob was passionate about reading and writing from early on.
“When I was a little kid –
second or third grade – I remember writing lurid stories to amuse my friends,”
told the Bridgeport Post in a 1997
article about his efforts to revive HCC’s lapsed creative writing course.
Bob’s wife, Karen, says that
after high school he had his first foray into journalism working for the
International News Service and the Daily
Mirror in New York.
Bob left the news industry to
earn a bachelor’s in English from the City College of New York and a master’s
in American Literature from New York University. He was drafted in the Korean
War, where he specialized in military intelligence while stationed in
Frankfurt, Germany.
When Bob returned to the
states, he attended Loyola University in Chicago. There, says Karen, he worked
with a professor who was enamored with James Joyce. Bob adopted developed a
love of Irish literature, earning his doctorate in the subject.
“Bob thought of Joyce and
Yeats as the greatest writers of the modern age,” says Karen. “Joyce fascinated
him. The work was a puzzle, intellectual, referential and full of
alliterations.”
By 1964, Bob had moved to
Stratford, where he owned the now-defunct Stratford
News. The Stratford Board of Education was considering starting a community
college. His paper championed the cause.
A few years later, he was
teaching journalism at the new college while running his newspaper.
Teaching proved to be just as
much of a passion for Bob. It was a chance for him to share his adoration of
writing with others.
And share he did, sometimes
with more people than intended.
“Bob was loud, in a good
way,” says English Professor Emeritus Glenn Kindilien, who began teaching at
HCC in 1971 and came to consider Bob as family. “We used to joke that our
students should get double credit for his class as well as ours.”
Bob’s own students also
noticed how excited he would get in the course of teaching.
“He would be sitting there
reading to us, and he would get so excited. He’d be laughing hysterically,”
says Director of Student Activities Linda Bayusik, who took classes with Bob in
the 1990’s.
Indeed, drawing students into
his world was one his aims. In a 1985 profile by the Bridgeport Post, he described his approach to teaching poetry as
“like throwing a barrel of cold water on them (students)….Eventually, I have to
say: ‘You ought to know I probably think this is the most important thing in
the world.’”
From the start, Bob also
sought to give his students a leg up. In 1968, he hired two of his journalism
students, Lois Cronin and Dale Friedman, to work for him at the Stratford News. Cronin became Society
Editor.
He continued throughout his
tenure to help young journalists find employment. Bayusik says he recommended
her for a job at the Connecticut Post,
which she held for three years. She had been an editor for Horizons under him, where she learned such skills as editing,
interviewing, layout structures – and how to use a computer.
Those skills still influence
Bayusik’s writing today. She says people have commented that her emails are
“quick and to the point.”
“I learned that doing
journalism with Bob,” she explains.
One of the ways he
effectively prepared students for the real world was by being a stern
taskmaster.
Former Horizons Editor-in-Chief Joseph Weathered says Bob reminded him of
a gruff, stern coach running a boot camp.
“You would write a lead, and
he would say, ‘No, not good enough,’” Weathered recalls.
The ones who stuck it out,
though, would reap the rewards. “A lot of the students who came out of his
class could write a fantastic news article,” he says.
He also developed close
relationships with those who did the work. Both Bayusik and Weathered described
him as a close adviser and friend.
“He was the guy to give you
the right advice,” says Weathered.
The lynchpin of Bob’s
teaching philosophy was that students needed to be independent citizens capable
of contributing their own ideas to society without being stifled. He was hard
on students, in part, because he believed in their abilities.
It was this philosophy that
drove him to design the journalism courses as hands-on workshops. Steve Mark,
who Bob groomed to take over as adviser to the program in 2000, says he got a
sense during that training of how committed Bob was “to the idea that the
student-run paper was in the hands of the students.”
Mark says that aside from
updates to reflect technological changes, the program’s basic structure remains
the same today as it was when Bob created it.
Bob had personal experience
with being the lone dissenting voice. Karen says he was unabashedly liberal,
even at times radical.
Indeed, the two first met in
1968 at a private home while planning support activities for the anti-Vietnam
War Democratic presidential candidate Sen. Eugene McCarthy.
After McCarthy lost his
party’s nomination at the Democratic National Convention, Bob could not support
the remaining contenders.
“The Stratford News was the only newspaper in Connecticut that year to
urge its readers to write in a candidate for president,” Karen says.
Mark agrees that Bob could be
headstrong. “He would fight to the end of the Earth for whatever the issue,” he
says.
Often the issue for Bob was
students’ rights. At a 1998 forum on student press issues at Bunnell High
School in Stratford, the Bridgeport Post
reported he shouted out to the room full of student journalists:
“The decision for what goes
in (the paper) should be left to those who (write) it. Must we learn at 18
years old that those sons of bitches want to crush the spirit out of us? You
cannot surrender your right of freedom of expression.”
Bob also believed
wholeheartedly in the community college vision of serving everyone equally.
When Connecticut’s legislature in 1977 fell short in its funding for the
schools, he wrote a scathing opinion article for the Milford Citizen in which he chastised lawmakers for selling
students short.
“If we fail to keep the door
fully open,” he wrote, “we will be doing a great injustice not only to those
persons who will be deprived of their fair share of our nation’s fullness but
also to the city of Milford, the State of Connecticut and ultimately to the
United States of America which will be deprived of more complete and
contributing members of society.”
Bob “retired” in 2000, partly
because of his growing frustration with the college’s administration at the
time, says Karen. That year, he spoke at graduation.
“He talked about how much he
had learned from the students,” she says, “and how much he admired them.”
Bob continued to teach at
Housatonic part-time for the next 12 years. Quinnipiac University student and
HCC graduate Victor Rios took a course in British Literature with him in
2009.
Though Bob was much older,
Rios remembers him being full of life and full of jokes. It was clear, he says,
that Bob wanted them to enjoy literature as much as he did.
“He used to tell us this
story,” says Rios. “Life is like a banquet hall. You’re in there eating and
having a good time, when this little bird pops in through one window and goes
out through another. You don’t know where it came from or where it’s going.
That’s life.”
Rios later credited Bob when
he recounted the story in one of his college papers. “I made him a part of my
own work,” he says. “So there’s definitely a little bit of him lodged in me.”
In late 2012, Bob had a fall
at HCC. His health declined quickly after that, says Karen. By Christmas, the family
knew things weren’t going to end well.
Finally, Bob died peacefully
at Connecticut Hospice in Branford. Karen praised the staff at the hospice for
the way they handled his last hours.
“They knew he was dying, but
they still treated him well, and were concerned about his comfort,” she
remembers.
Friends and former students
all expressed sorrow over his passing.
“Bob was very animated, very
alive,” says Kindilien. “He enjoyed what he was doing – so much so that if one
were to go where he’s been, there’s a void there now.”
Karen says the family will
set up “something in Bob’s name” through the Housatonic Community College
Foundation to benefit students.
That way, the profound
influence Bob Isaacs had on HCC will live on for years to come.
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