On Wednesday, February 2, 1994, a bitterly cold day in the middle of the coldest winter in over a decade, Jim Berlin came home early from his office and cooked dinner so that his older son, Dan, could eat before playing basketball that night in one of the last games of his senior year at West Lafayette High. Jim then went out for his daily run of five miles, an exercise regime he had followed for twenty-five years. He didn’t finish his usual run that day. He had been battling the flu and turned back early. He walked into his house, told his wife Sandy that he was still under the weather, went upstairs to take a shower, and dropped dead of a heart attack.

He was the last person in the world I expected to die suddenly. He not only appeared to be in excellent physical condition but he also had seemingly limitless energy. And he was just fifty-two years old. My immediate response was the same as that of his other friends: we couldn’t believe it had happened. It was some kind of bad rumor that had been too quickly circulated. Jim’s death became real to me only when I called Sandy Berlin. She said she couldn’t believe it either. But she had been there. She told me how she and Dan had unsuccessfully tried to revive him while their younger son Christopher phoned 911. Jim never regained consciousness.

On the morning after his death, my graduate course was scheduled to meet, a course in which Jim’s work is very prominent. I really didn’t want to talk to anyone, but I realized that I had to go to class and try to tell the students why so much of what we now value in the field of rhetoric and composition would not have happened without Jim. Jim was not the first nor the only influential scholar in the history of writing instruction, but he made the field alive and important in ways no one else had before. He convinced students and colleagues to turn their energies to writing histories of the field. He laid the groundwork in his articles, chapters, and two monographs for others to build on. He explained why the writing of history is not mere recitation of facts but controls how we understand the present.

Just as important, he was the catalyst for politicizing the discipline. Again there were others who helped to raise the political awareness of the profession, but Jim was the one in the front, where he became the primary target for those inside and outside the discipline who are invested in the status quo. I don’t think Jim’s skin was any thicker than the rest of ours. He didn’t enjoy being attacked. But he realized certain things needed to be said, he said them, and when people sometimes got angry at him, he responded with humor rather than anger. A few years ago at the New Hampshire Conference, Jim was in the audience when a prominent member of our profession gave a fiery speech denouncing him as one of the three Great Satans of the profession. When I heard that I too was named as one of the Satans, I immediately called Jim to find out what had happened. He said, “Lester, you wouldn’t have believed it. At the end of her talk all of the audience stood up and clapped like seals, except for me and the people sitting beside me, and the reason they didn’t get up and clap too was because I was holding them down.” And then he burst into a Berlin laugh.

Teaching and scholarship were never just ideas to Jim. He was the foremost rhetorician of his time in his ability to engage people in rhetoric. We in English departments tend to be bookish. Although Jim was extremely well read, he was never bookish. I used to wonder why Jim went to so many conferences and gave so many visiting lectures. It took me a long time to realize that he traveled a lot because he liked to talk to people. He wanted to find out what they were doing and he wanted to exchange ideas with them. He was in every sense a people’s scholar.

But telling my students about Jim’s scholarship didn’t convey my sense of who he was. There was so much more to him than what he wrote: his generous spirit, his unfailing humor, his genuine humility, his complete unpretentiousness, his innate sense of justice and moral responsibility, his faith in people, and his love for those around him are what I will remember most about him. Jim was a restless spirit early in his career, and his last years at Purdue were his happiest years. He was proud to teach at a land grant university. He believed in education for democracy. It was not a naive belief but one that recognized that the possibilities for democracy are always contested. At Purdue he found students and colleagues who supported him and who stimulated him to develop his ideas. When he made the decision to go to Purdue in spring 1987, he wrote that what impressed him most was that the department genuinely cared about its students. When students came to his office, he listened to them carefully. He served as a mentor not only for his own students but also for those at other universities. Indeed, many of us were his students, because we always knew that Jim would read and respond to what we wrote. I don’t know how he did it, but he always found time for everyone. When you talked with Jim or when you wrote to him, you had his full attention.

If you knew him, you knew his family. Even if you’d never met his wife and sons, you knew them because Jim talked about them all the time and wrote about them in his letters. I was fortunate to get to know Sandy, Dan, and Chris well during the year they spent in Texas in 1985-86. The boys learned to play soccer in Texas, Sandy made pots, and Jim ran around Town Lake every day. I helped Jim build enough temporary furniture to get through the year, and our families had Thanksgiving dinner together. He finished Rhetoric and Reality during that year, and he influenced a generation of graduate students at Texas to write dissertations on the history of writing instruction.

Jim was the oldest of seven children. His mother, all three brothers, and one of his three sisters drove through one of the worst snowstorms of the winter to attend the memorial service for Jim held at Purdue on February 26. Janice Lauer, John Trimbur, Victor Vitanza and I were fortunate to be able to spend an evening with them, and we listened to stories about their big brother Jimmy. Jim grew up in Hamtramck, which remains a predominantly Polish city within the city of Detroit. His mother still lives in the same house where Jim and his brothers and sisters were raised. His father was a policeman who later went to work for Ford Motor Company, where Jim’s grandfather had worked as a foundry foreman. I knew that Jim had played sports in high school and had a brief college football career at Central Michigan. His oldest brother, Ray, who had worked as a union organizer told me that Jim had been a star in both football and basketball at St. Florian High. Ray showed me a picture of Jim beside a pool in 1959, when he was seventeen years old. Jim had an extra forty pounds of muscle on his shoulders and legs. After knowing him for many years as a thin jogger, it was amazing to see him as a huge boy at seventeen—around 220-225 pounds, the size of a college athlete, a big load for a high school player to defend.

I was curious enough to ask Wayne Butler, who teaches at the University of Michigan, if he could find anything in old newspapers about Jim’s high school athletic career. Wayne went to the Hamtramck Public Library and dug through issues of the weekly Hamtramck Citizen from the late 1950s. Wayne found that St. Florian had five excellent athletes—Syl Jankowski, Bob Subach, Jerry Kubiak, Tom Mieszczak, and Jim Berlin—who were the core of the football and basketball teams. Their numbers were too few to make a good football team, but in basketball they dominated, winning the division championship during Jim’s sophomore and junior years. Under coach Art Macoszczyk, St. Florian won twenty-five straight regular season games before the unbeaten streak was broken during Jim’s senior year.

Even more remarkable, though, was that Dan and Chris never knew that their dad was a star athlete. Chris said at the funeral that he couldn’t believe that Jim had never told them, but then he realized that his dad didn’t want to put any pressure on them to excel in athletics. At the same time, his brothers and sisters had no idea of his scholarly prominence. They just thought he had a secure job as a professor. They were as surprised to find out that Jim was a famous scholar as his sons were to learn that he was a superior athlete. Jim was so understated that even his immediate family didn’t know the extent of his accomplishments.

Jim usually signed his letters to me with some play on “Yours for the revolution.” I will end with his last written words to me: “Yours for the revolution (probably Pepsi, but never mind).” Jim, I wish you didn’t have to go so soon.

University of Texas

Austin, Texas