My first meeting with Bruni Ridgway would have been back in the early '60s when I was a classmate with one of her sons in preschool, but I admit that as a kid, with kid concerns, I did not commit that to memory. More memorable was the time during the first month of classes my freshman year, when she bustled up to me at coffee hour in Thomas. I was in her Archy 101a class, and the way I handled the stress of the transition to college was by needing much more sleep than usual. It was my introduction to what a forthright and direct person she was, because she bustled up to me to say, right there, in front of Athena, the doughnuts, and everyone, “I was distressed because you were sleeping in my class, but then I talked to Miss McPherson and she said you do it in her class too! It is not just me!” Anyone who has ever experienced her in class will know that it would only be a desperately tired person who could manage the feat of sleeping in Bruni’s class.
She understands in her bones that great teachers are great dramatists, and fascinating dramatic figures. Quietly or forcefully, according to their character, they bring their subject alive. First would come the click! click! click! of her small dog Charles’ nails and her own heels, with the familiar clacking sound of her worry beads being pushed along to absorb her restless energy, and then she would launch into the day’s show, always sharing her delight and wonder, and sometimes acting things out. When I think of the Apoxyomenos, it is never the Vatican or any of the other copies that come to mind, it’s Bruni demonstrating the position and the three-dimensional twist that heralds the changes that Hellenistic Sculpture brought.
In time I graduated, and Bryn Mawr having been where my grandparents met, my father and aunt’s childhood home, my earliest remembered childhood home, my first choice of college which suited me right down to the ground, and the place I met and married my husband, it was too painful a parting to consider going back for my reunion that first time. My Archy profs and Miss Lang came to my wedding in the Cloisters the day after we both graduated, many of them eager to chat with my grandparents, their former colleagues. We made our 10th reunion, with my 5-year-old daughter and 1-year-old son in tow. It was one of the delights of that event when Bruni took one look at my daughter, before even catching sight of me, and cried out “I know whose daughter this is!” My daughter learned to expect the moment of conversation with Bruni at reunions, and her cheerful extroversion made even my quiet and retiring daughter quite a fan.
Bruni made it to the University of Michigan for an A.I.A. lecture. As part of entertaining us, they arranged for her to see a University of Michigan football game with the chairman of the Classics Department and two grad students, and I got one of those slots. The seats were great, right on the 50-yard line, although the game was a snoozer, against a team that set a record that day for the most consecutive Big Ten losses. Bruni was having all her usual enthusiasm and delight in the pageant, when the two of us grad students disgraced ourselves. During halftime the announcer intoned that the halftime show was dedicated to a longtime University of Michigan Marching Band leader who had been forced to retire when (stentoriously) “the worst thing that could possibly befall a band leader befell him ...” [meaningful pause] “deafness!” Marianne’s mind had supplied “his lips fell off?” I thought “he lost his arms?” and we both came down with unsuitable and unseemly giggles. The head of the Classics Department was a lovely man who had apparently had his sense of humor removed at birth and was indignant. Bruni was amused.
When Bruni came to Hanover, N.H., to give a symposium at the Hood Museum there in connection with the publication of Goddess and Polis, The Panathenaic Festival in Athens, I went, and invited her to dinner at my house, a 45-minute drive away. She came, and the high points of the evening for her were clearly seeing how the next generation was coming along, and meeting our big slobbery Newfoundland dog. The slobber did not matter. It was a dog! The highlight for me was a discussion on the way home in the car. I had left the University of Michigan three credits and one M.A. thesis short of my M.A. and a big part of the parting was politics. We were settled in rural Vermont. That part of my life was over, but I could still feel the pull of scholarship, and the symposium had woken the sleeping ember. “But are you happy doing what you do?” asked Bruni. When I thought it over and said yes, she said, “Good. Then I am happy.” I had the outside input I needed to realize that by choosing the path I had, the one that was right for me, I was not deliberately choosing to become M. Carey Thomas’ failure that only wed. I was using the choice that feminism fights so hard for, for people regardless of gender to follow their own best path.
Bruni, mine is only one life of many that you have touched and changed through the years. Others, like Joan Bretton Connelly, M.A. '79, Ph.D. '84, have gone on to become scholars of note, but I know from personal experience that you have sent out ripples in this world that you will never know, and that Cammie, now 34, will carry the memory of you with fondness into the future, and since I chose my grandparents on all sides carefully, that is likely to be well into her own 90s!
Brunilde Ridgway, Rhys Carpenter Professor Emeritus of Classical and Near Eastern Archaeology, is celebrating her 90th birthday. In honor of this milestone, her former students, colleagues, and friends have been invited to share memories of their beloved mentor, teacher, and friend. View the list of messages.