Woodworking: Local professor’s influence has long life

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Longtime UW-River Falls English prof Bob Beck is gone, but not forgotten.

Whenever his old friends gather together, they talk of Bob’s unforgettable skills, his wit, his amazing ability to recite reams of poetry from memory.

They talk of his incomparable skills as a cook, as a baker and as a host at his and his late wife Susan’s home on Glover Road.

They talk about how he and his cousin climbed Mount Kilimanjaro and his rather eccentric manner of dress. (Years ago, Bob had driven the poet W. D. Snodgrass to a poetry reading at Eau Claire State, where they confused Bob and Snodgrass because Snodgrass, the poet, was so well dressed — and Bob wasn’t.

Bob has been gone for several years now, but his stories won’t soon be forgotten.

One day he showed me a snapshot taken on the farm in Nebraska, where he grew up. It was just a picture of a work horse and a little boy.

On the back, Bob’s mother had written an explanation: “Tom and one of our nephews.”

“In Nebraska,” Bob explained, “we remember what’s important, like the names of our workhorses, but not our nephews.”

Enter David Carr, the New York Times media critic who was making big news with his stunning autobiography “The Night of the Gun,” in which he wrote about his drug addiction and miraculous recovery.

I knew Carr slightly because he had once written a story about me when he was editor of The Twin Cities Reader, Minneapolis’s premiere alternative news weekly.

So when his book crossed my desk, I jumped in.

Imagine my surprise when I discovered that Carr had been a student at UW-RF back in the ’60s. He told about dropping out and visiting his favorite English prof before returning to Minneapolis.

He mentioned no names, but described the portly prof as having a tobacco stained beard, who told Carr that he was bright, but a “know nothing, read nothing,” then gave him a list of 100 books to read.

I shared the passage with two of Bob’s colleagues, Rick MacNamara and Charles Lonie.

“Tobacco stained beard, list of 100 books. That has GOT to be Bob Beck,” they chorused.

Cut to last month. MacNamara phoned me and said, “Google ‘David Carr’ and the Washington Post for yesterday.”

Of course, I don’t know how to Google, but Beautiful Wife pitched in and came up with a printout of a feature about David Carr in the Style Section of the Washington Post, which has been running a series about unconventional educations enjoyed by celebrities like Quincy Jones, actress Clare Danes, movie director Oliver Stone, and now David Carr.

Here’s an excerpt:

Carr: “…I went to the University of Wisconsin-River Falls….Eventually, I decided I couldn’t stay at River Falls. What hemmed me in wasn’t the school itself but the small town….”

Reporter: “Then what happened?”

Carr: “Robert Beck. I had an English teacher there. I don’t know where he came from. He was dead by the time I was doing my book. I had always been quite taken by him. He had a way of speaking that I admired….Anyway, when I was leaving he said, ‘You are a really bright young man but you haven’t read anything. You don’t know anything.’ And he gave me a list of 100 works of mostly contemporary fiction, and over the course of the next four or five years [during his drug rehabilitation] I’d say. I knocked out the list….I was reading Kurt Vonnegut, Joseph Heller, John Cheever. It didn’t really feel like homework. My sort of college reading career had been sitting in a bean bag chair smoking pot and reading ‘Lord of the Rings.’ [But Beck’s list changed that] so my head over time filled with words and I think that’s part of the reason I am a writer.”

Good story, eh Bob?

Dave would like to hear from you. Phone him at 426-9554.

Tags: dave wood, opinion, columns, books, travel