Farewells: Obituary, Helmut Liedloff
This man made the life I live possible. I received his obituary, clipped from the newspaper, in the mail from my mom. It's melancholy, and I've been quietly a bit sad today.
In my junior year of high school, Ila Adhikari asked me if I wanted to carpool to the PSAT. It was only because of her that I TOOK that test, that I knew there were entrance requirements for college.
In my senior year of high school, David Mendriski, my German and Latin teacher, nominated me for the Helmut and Mary Liedloff Scholarship for German. I was awarded a 4-year full-tuition scholarship to SIU-C, where I studied German and English, AND received additional monies from my PSAT scores.
Dr. Liedloff was one of my professors, one of my mentors, and he was my benefactor. His generosity, his textbooks, his teaching, his energy...they all made my achievements in college foundationally possible. I hope he was still able to read the postcard I sent him from Germany last November.
One of my few regrets in my life is that I was unprepared for his class on November 10, 1989, and I skipped class. He suspended the regular plan to talk about the fall of the Berlin Wall, about which I'd not even yet heard. I could have heard his perspective on that event...a division that happened in his living memory, and that none of us expected to come to an end in our lifetimes.
He lived a good, long, full life. I'm honored to have known him, and I'm forever grateful for the education he made financially possible for me, for all I learned from him studying from textbooks he wrote and then teaching from them, and for all he taught me in his classes.
I tell his stories regularly. May he live on through them. Fair skies, sir. This entry was cross-posted at https://amilyn.dreamwidth.org/843661.html.
In my junior year of high school, Ila Adhikari asked me if I wanted to carpool to the PSAT. It was only because of her that I TOOK that test, that I knew there were entrance requirements for college.
In my senior year of high school, David Mendriski, my German and Latin teacher, nominated me for the Helmut and Mary Liedloff Scholarship for German. I was awarded a 4-year full-tuition scholarship to SIU-C, where I studied German and English, AND received additional monies from my PSAT scores.
Dr. Liedloff was one of my professors, one of my mentors, and he was my benefactor. His generosity, his textbooks, his teaching, his energy...they all made my achievements in college foundationally possible. I hope he was still able to read the postcard I sent him from Germany last November.
One of my few regrets in my life is that I was unprepared for his class on November 10, 1989, and I skipped class. He suspended the regular plan to talk about the fall of the Berlin Wall, about which I'd not even yet heard. I could have heard his perspective on that event...a division that happened in his living memory, and that none of us expected to come to an end in our lifetimes.
He lived a good, long, full life. I'm honored to have known him, and I'm forever grateful for the education he made financially possible for me, for all I learned from him studying from textbooks he wrote and then teaching from them, and for all he taught me in his classes.
I tell his stories regularly. May he live on through them. Fair skies, sir. This entry was cross-posted at https://amilyn.dreamwidth.org/843661.html.