I lost a great friend this week named George Juergens. A
retired professor emeritus of history at Indiana University, George was
introduced to me years ago by my writing mentor, Bob Hammel. We had regular
lunches for years, first in my days at the newspaper in Bloomington, later
while I was doing detective work, and then on and along, and now they’ve come
to an end, and I’m going to miss George terribly. I’ve met just a few people whom
I consider truly brilliant – not just smart, but thinking at a level that
separates them from even the brightest of us – and George was one of them. As
an academic, his specialty was the press and the president, but the man had no
focal concentration. He wanted to know about everything, and he seemed to.
Ours were wide-ranging and rambling lunches and I’m trying
now to recall a topic on which George didn’t have an educated opinion, and
coming up empty. He deserves to have those words emphasized, too: educated, opinion.
He believed in learning, in the constant absorbing of
knowledge that shaped those opinions, and he also understood that his beliefs
were his own, and that having them did not make them infallible. The ultimate
devil’s advocate, George quietly and kindly altered my own thinking over the
years with one signature phrase, usually offered with downcast eyes and an
extra-gentle voice, designed to remove any level of confrontation and tunnel
down to the reasoning beneath your opinion without hitting the defensive,
emotional shell that surrounded it. “Mind you,” he would say, and then he’d
offer some bit of evidence contrary to the point you’d just made. I loved it.
He had no interest in tying you in intellectual knots, though he could have
with nearly everyone he met, and he surely could have with me, but he liked to
argue – no, debate is the better term, for he was a gentleman and a thinker, he
liked to debate – not for the sake of intellectual battle, but for the sake of
deeper consideration and reasoning. He’d do it with himself more often than
not, offering his point on anything from politics to sports to local road
construction, then follow it with, “Now, mind you,…” and offer the
counter-argument. The idea, never expressed directly but always clear, was that
he wasn’t satisfied to hear – or say – a mere this is what I think. He needed to dig deeper, to know why you
thought it, or why he thought it, and why it might be flawed, and if so, was it
flawed enough so as to require change?
Lord, what a beautiful idea that is. What a truly beautiful
approach to thinking, and living. And how often it is lacking. I think
especially of politics here, where we are bombarded at all times with opinions
that are offered up as intellectual Alamos: “In this place I will remain until
my death.”
George Juergens was always taking in more, thinking more,
and considering the counter-arguments. By nature of sharing lunch conversations
with him, you couldn’t help but sharpen your own mind. He was also a true
friend and advocate and supporter of my work, which meant the world to me, and
I was always struck by his fascination with my business, his constant
questioning: how many drafts, how much control over the story did I feel during
each draft, what was the editorial process, how was cover art determined, what
were e-books doing to the landscape, what was the emotional price of changing
publishers, what was….and on and on. Because that was George, always thirsting
for a better understanding, more knowledge, more education upon which to form
an opinion. His own education is impressive on the Curriculum Vitae side alone
– bachelor’s degrees earned at Columbia and Oxford, also a master’s degree at
Oxford, then a doctorate at Columbia – but it was a never-ending education, and
as his health deteriorated he found he had trouble staying focused long enough
to read books, a true blow to a man who so dearly loved books, but when they eluded his concentration he promptly detoured toward an even more intense
devouring of newspapers and magazines. The quest to know more, to learn more,
never ended. I remember listening with great interest as he lamented the
increased salaries of professors, and his reasoning behind it: a true scholar
should be in academia for the scholarship, the desire to learn more and share
more, and if it became a profession tainted by money, the purity of that
intellectual pursuit would be damaged, and that was dangerous for the students.
Followed by: “Now, mind you, perhaps if there had been more money in the
profession when I started, I would feel differently.” Always, always, the consideration
of the counter-argument.
A final anecdote, the most vivid: I dedicated my first book
to our mutual friend Bob Hammel, who guided me through so much ugly writing,
and still does his best to keep the ugliest out of my drafts now. The phone
rang at my desk at the newspaper one day, and it was George. He wanted to tell
me how much it meant to Bob, that dedication, and how proud Bob was that the
book had broken through and found a publisher, and that while Bob might not
tell me himself, he counted the dedication as one of the truly special things
in his life. Perhaps George was putting it on a little strong, there, but it
was an incredibly sweet and generous call, and contained a classic George line,
witty and honest and thought-provoking, when he said, “There can be a tendency
with older men, and younger men, and men in between, to struggle to adequately
tell another man how much they mean to us, and so we need other men to do that
for us.” It made me laugh then, and does now, and of course it is true.
I wish I’d had someone make that same call to George.
Now, mind, you…I hope that I didn’t need to, and hope that
he knew all that remains unsaid between us.
