Rossi-defined pillars of Western philosophy: Augustine to David Riesman. Chardin. Joseph Campbell. Camus. Fromm. Plato. Joseph Fletcher’s “situation ethics.” Machiavelli. Hobbes. Locke. Rousseau. Koestler. Sartre.

Court Patton

I once had a teacher who was more an unindicted co-conspirator than a hired pedagogue. Most everyone has a favorite teacher, although rarely will such choices be unanimous. But for hundreds of people who were seniors at Crawford High School in the late 1960s, there is only one Favorite, Most Inspiring, Most Affecting, Most... Outrageous. I think of him often, both as the galloping hero I saw then and as the flawed but more interesting person I eventually came to know. I will call him Rossi.

Vic Rossi was bom in the hardscrabble Iron Range of Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, in the town of Iron Mountain. To hear him tell it, Iron Mountain was populated by an legion of Vince Lombardis: hammerheaded folk who believed life was difficult and joyless and the only existential victories to be had were manifest in the absolute destruction of one’s nemeses. This unpromising outlook — life as a blue-collar tundra— appealed to the materialist in him but frustrated the aesthete and intellectual.

He left unchanging Iron Mountain to attend the University of Michigan in the days when that campus was spawning Students for a Democratic Society. He might have been, but wasn’t, one of the authors of SDS’s manifesto of participatory democracy, the “Port Huron Statement.” His unionist spirituality found voice in what was being called the New Left. The hopefulness of that movement, which considered itself heir to American socialism but argued simply that “we want to make love more possible,” offered him, for once, a more sanguine prospect than kissing up to the Man. He stayed on at Michigan to finish a master’s degree and ultimately found work in Canaan, which was how everybody east of the Mississippi regarded California, back then. He would go and teach all nations or, anyway, certain high school students in San Diego. He headed west with his wife Elyse, a beautiful, formidable Swedish-American woman from the Lower Peninsula whom he’d met at Ann Arbor.

My family arrived from New York in the same year as Rossi, and I recall just what kind of one-horse town he rode into in 1962. Electricity had come to San Diego, but not civil rights; freedom of the press was guaranteed, for all the good it did. C. Amholt Smith had recently been named “San Diego’s Man of the Century.” This was not a town that took kindly to shit-disturbers, but that was exactly what it got in the person of Vic Rossi. And so he set up shop in Crawford’s social studies department, where he taught World Affairs, which he turned into a college-level course in the history and nature of everything.

Rossi’s politics and personality would eventually run afoul of the locals, but I never heard a student, parent, or administrator fault him on his teaching ability. (You wouldn’t have heard a student fault him for anything, come to think of it.) For starters, he simply insisted on a level of inquiry transcending anything even his advanced students had previously encountered. He laminated to that a requirement that students aggressively cultivate their vocabularies, with progress to be measured weekly. He took a perverse glee in foisting upon us, for our verbal isometrics. Time magazine — the offspring of megamensch Henry Luce, which still bears Luce’s quirky love of language-for-the-sake-of-knowing-more-words-than-the-other-guy. All these years later, hardly a composition scrolls by on my computer screen that doesn’t use a word Rossi forced me to learn.

Rossi dispensed with the government-issue text for the course and had us trek over to the bookstore at San Diego State for a copy of A History of Western Philosophy by Bertrand Russell, he the noted mathematician, philosopher, pacifist, free-love proponent, and instigator of the Russell Tribunals on American involvement in Vietnam. For us students used to being spoon-fed "Official History,” Rossi’s iconoclasm and sheer erudition were the intellectual equivalent of working without a net. Other teachers might have illuminated, entertained, earned respect, imparted vital learning; Rossi touched young minds as they ached to be touched, as they hoped one last hope they might be touched before they gave up completely and turned to sawdust.

He accomplished this with a combination of stringency and intellectual randiness. On one hand, he expected us to digest Western thought, from the Old Testament to C. Wright Mills, and translate it in sophisticated latter-day terms: “Explain how a Hobbesian analysis of man would appeal to an intelligent, patriotic Vietnamese.” On the other hand, he was a man endowed with Mediterranean good looks, in the prime of his life, living on America’s Gold Coast in a time when the world was hinting it might become both libertine and enlightened — a sort of worker’s paradise and nude beach — and the chance to be smart, good, rascal-righteous, and influential in such a time and place was enough of a turn-on to him that it could only be a turn-on to us as well. Much of his discourse sailed unimpeded over our heads, but it happened that he did produce in us a kind of arousal with his visions of a just and equitable and measurably humane society.

A quick flip through my fading spiral notebook from World Affairs class reveals some 30 Rossi-defined pillars of Western philosophy, from Augustine to David Riesman. Chardin. Joseph Campbell. Camus. Fromm. Plato. Joseph Fletcher’s “situation ethics.” Machiavelli. Hobbes. Locke. Rousseau. Koestler. Sartre. Mills. McLuhan. Malraux. Franz Fanon. His lectures on these and other thinkers lifted us whole out of the Rotarian parameters of our bovine lives and into an arena in which discussion of the nature of humankind and purpose of human society was — Vince Lombardi again — not everything, but the only thing.

By the time I entered his class in the fall of 1967, I was near the end of an epistemological rope. Born, like Rossi, to first-generation Italo-American parents, I knew too well the constraints of Catholic guilt and other-directed piety. Caught as I was between the parochial and the secular, Rossi and his bold demeanor were a tonic.

He taught us to question everything, to scrutinize every assumption of every belief system. Hell, he taught us the simple fact that there were such things as belief systems. But the key to his success with us was not what he told us or exposed us to (even though, for many, his class provided first sightings of countless ideas) but what he elicited from us. For he knew, as few teachers do, that the root of the word “educate” is the Latin educare, “to draw out (of).”

His own belief system centered on pedagogy. (From my spiral notebook: “We must teach the masses that the future lies with them, depends on them” — apparently from Fanon, but surely close to Rossi’s heart.) To create the world anew would require nothing less than a populace armed with intelligence and fired by compassion; in order to get to there, radical unlearning and rethinking were in order. Soon the classroom was hot with shirt-sleeve debates on George Wallace, an exposition of the sexual revolution, an exegesis of Christian doctrine as embodied in Western political structure, an essay on Marx as “the last of the Hebrew prophets.” Much of it didn’t stick (for all I know, some of it might never have been intended to), but just sitting there in the face of the gale was like moving from, well, San Diego to someplace with weather. In any given discussion, it was never too hard to discern Rossi’s own viewpoint, but he was too good at his job merely to indoctrinate. Each day we’d hear him complete an argument about modern morality or neo-Marxism with the careful caveat, “I’m not saying it’s good or bad; I’m just saying it’s so.”

Rossi’s talent as a stand-up comic afforded us the same kind of thrill you get when you discover a hip new comic, only here the show went on five days a week for nine months, and we were the only ones in the world in on the joke. One favorite gambit of his was to create alliterative characters to illustrate his point. Exhibit Number 1: “Louie La Mesa.” Louie was a genuine slope-browed knuckle-dragger with a winter's coat of hair on his arms and a penchant for polyester shorts and over-the-calf socks. Louie was a regularly featured Rossi foil, always available for trotting out when we needed to be reminded of the kind of cannon fodder we could become if we preferred to remain asleep. As the months rolled by, he would improvise other characters — I seem to recall a heartstopping model, Vickie Voluptuous, and Len-nie Lens, an amateur photographer, in a discussion of situation ethics. But Louie was his main man. He was cut off by Louie’s Rambler at intersections, heard Louie yelling at his kid from across the street. (I gather Louie still lives with Vic, too, because when I called Rossi a few weeks ago, he mentioned Louie.)

There was also the seriously hip/tragic aesthetic. If reading Playboy was, at the time, considered cool, French cinema and jazz trios were positively icy. Sure enough, Rossi had us trooping off to the Academy Theater to see Alain Resnais’s La Guerre Est Finie, a pastiche of political correctness and sensuality. The commingling of radlib politics with grainy romance, featuring some genuinely innovative photography and editing, was not lost on us. Somehow “Surfer Girl” would thereafter seem less weighty a work. For my money, Rossi could have spent the rest of the year reading from the phone book, and his class would still have been worth it simply for the introduction to New Wave cinema. There was no faulting Vic Rossi on taste either.

After graduating in 1968, many from Rossi's class went on to UCSD, myself among them. Rossi himself took the opportunity to transfer to Patrick Henry High, which opened the following fall with an instant reputation as an elite school with elite teachers teaching elite kids in a brand-new, elite neighborhood. At Crawford, his politics and personality had already caused him problems with the administration, and this doubtless seemed a chance to head for greener pastures. Apparently, the grass turned brown before long.

When I went to school there, Crawford’s student population was solidly middle to upper-middle class. The school was very academically oriented (also more than twice as big as it is now) and had a slightly more liberal center of gravity than most other schools — or, at least, the students in Rossi's class were more predisposed to a liberal viewpoint than were most others. Not so Patrick Henry. The more conservative parents there didn’t like Rossi’s act for a hot minute. “Marxist thought in a 12th-grade classroom? I don’t think so.” I don’t know the details, but it seems he found himself waging a continual uphill battle on an ever-steeper slope. Rossi lasted a year there before deciding this was not the California he had enlisted in. He made plans to return to Michigan, to his alma mater, for his doctorate.

I began to metamorphose from his student into his friend. I’d tool over to the Rossis’ San Carlos home in my new Toyota, which he saw as the angel of death for the American auto industry and its many good union men. Elyse would join us with soft drinks, and I’d regale them with college-man tales from the other side of the horizon. That year saw the eruption of the great Marcuse controversy, in which the noted UCSD professor was the object of a campaign by local right-wingers to take him off the public payroll, if they couldn’t just drive out to Torrey Pines Mesa and shoot him. Rossi had taken a few extension classes taught by Marcuse and drew great inspiration from him. It’s safe to say that Rossi also saw the still-new UCSD campus as an oasis of highly evolved beings, a place where philosophical intercourse was the raison d’etre. In any case, as Rossi saw it, the people he liked most were all getting to go to such stimulating places, while he had to stay behind and deal with australopithecines. It didn’t take a computer to do the arithmetic. He and Elyse packed up their son Salvatore and Jacques Loussier Trio records and headed back to Ann Arbor.

After getting his Ed.D. from Michigan, he was hired to teach at a large Indiana university that today is known primarily as the alma mater of a famous TV personality. He settled in and found himself, to his horror, surrounded exclusively by Louie La Mesa’s Midwest counterparts. His tenure there took on the trappings of Moses’ exclusion from Canaan.

But Moses was given only a glimpse of the Promised Land; Rossi had lived there, splashed in its waters, tutored its golden youth. Thinking back over our correspondence and phone conversations, I see now what I didn’t then — Rossi’s world was losing its glowing promise and was beginning to offer little more than the pursuit of enemy-squashing, just as his Iron Mountain forebears would have it. His letters gradually took on a bitter tone and lost the inclination to easy laughter. His handwritten letters often came on pages on which he’d previously typed in one comer a juicy quote from an admired author such as Cesar Pavese or this telling tidbit from Ignazio Silone: “There are moments of harmony and plenitude between friends/That cancel out years of hardship and aridity.” Rossi likely thought he had used up his quota of harmony and plenitude and was in for an extended run of hardship and aridity.

In the fall of 1974, after malingering for a couple of years in a job at UCSD, I set off with a friend for a few months of vagabonding in Latin America. Returning home from Peru in late winter, we took the long way home, up the Atlantic seaboard to New York and across the frozen midsection of the U.S. Thumbing 1000 miles through frozen late-February slush was no picnic, and by the time we crossed into Indiana and landed at the Rossis’ home, we were ready for some home cooking and central heating. Thankfully, we got snowed in there and stayed a week. I saw my first cardinal, blazing red against the white background, through the Rossis’ kitchen window. My friend and I accompanied Vic to his class, to the teachers’ lounge. It was all a big goof to us. We were happy in the knowledge we’d soon be leaving and found it hard to take seriously the idea of going to college or being compelled to live in Dullsville. Vic and Elyse welcomed us like long-lost relatives, but I wonder if our visit didn’t upset him in ways that weren’t directly apparent, if we didn’t serve as a reminder of a freer, woollier world from which he felt banished.

Whether that set him on edge or not, one evening during our stay, he showed me something I’d never before seen from him: high-octane irascibility. He had invited over a couple of faculty colleagues and their wives for a casual soiree in our honor. After we’d all gotten comfortable and were sprawled out with wine and munchies and his friends had pretty much finished their biopsies of the two alien creatures, he became entangled in an argument with one of the professors. It turned out he harbored an intense dislike for this person, so what started out as intellectual combat quickly became personal. Rossi wound up tearing into the guy as a devious, backbiting, sniveling, chickenshit game-player and mental midget. The invective so broiled the room that Vic himself became uncomfortable. The party must have broken up after that, although I don’t recall exactly how the bodies were carried out.

A couple of hours later, after the room temperature had come back down, I was solicited by both Vic and Elyse for some soothing counsel. “You have a nasty bent,” Elyse scolded him. “If you can’t have someone on your side, you’ll try to destroy him.” He didn’t argue the point, as I recall, adding only that his victim asked for it. He turned to me for my take on the incident. I was leaning against the kitchen sink, long beard and unkempt curls set off nicely by my tie-dyed thermal undershirt: a visitor from a foreign planet with powers and abilities far beyond those of anybody he knew in town. “Well, Vic,” I offered (or words to this effect), “I don’t know. The guy might be a jerk, but you could have just argued with him. You didn’t have to blast him out of the water.” Whatever I said, and it was probably even more unremarkable than that, it was what Vic needed to hear, for he responded with a kind of benediction: “You know, when you were in my class you were a smart boy. Now you’ve become a wise young man.” I could scarcely have been prouder if I’d gotten A-plusses on every paper I ever wrote for him, but those words have echoed oddly in my mind many times since. One last bit of teacher approval for an eager pupil, perhaps, but also a turning point in my relationship with him — the first moment when I could see in him not Platonic perfection but a guy, with blemishes and intellectual tics and private miseries.

Later that year, he briefly visited California to attend an academic conference and stayed overnight with my girlfriend and me. Our few hours together were light and enthusiastic, with no signs of negativism or volatility. It was no doubt like a weekend pass, ultimately frustrating but to be enjoyed as much as possible.

I didn’t see him again until 1981, when the three of them came west on summer vacation. By then Michelle and I had married and had our first child, and I was eager to share my new familial bliss with them. That spring Vic had written me, “I haven’t been out since 1975; Elyse and Sal haven't been out since the exile began in ’69. I’ll come to a California that I no longer know. Except for a very few persons, the old community I knew is gone. I’ll come as a stranger — but I came in ’62 as a stranger too ... it’s a good part of the earth/sea.”

They came to our small flat, where Michelle made some pasta with pesto sauce, and I uncorked some fine Barbera I was then favoring. We stuffed ourselves and, for a while, felt like a coterie (a Rossi word, if ever there was one) that transcended time and space. After dinner we moved to the cramped living room. The conversation started out gently enough. After a while, though, I found myself engaged in a Dostoyevskian dialogue with my former mentor. The original point of the argument has long since been lost. I do remember that the dialogue quickly devolved into simply opposing attitudes — he essentially arguing a cynical viewpoint and I a sunnier one. In retrospect, the argument seemed to have been a debate over our respective answers to the question: Is it smart to be happy?

The conversation went in circles for at least an hour, Vic and I dominating it to the point of excluding our wives. As we argued, I began to realize that he had aged more than the six years it had been since our last face-to-face encounter. Since his arrival, he complained repeatedly of a painful back. His demeanor was more severe than I was comfortable with, as though he’d stopped enjoying this weekend pass long before it expired. After a few dozen laps around each other, we finally ran out of gas. “Well, you can’t live without some kind of hope,’’ Elyse finally said, and I was more than willing to let it go at that. It had gotten late. We walked them to their car, and after hugs all around, they took off. I haven’t seen him since.

In the wake of their visit, I felt unsettled whenever Vic came to mind. He now seemed terminally embittered, completely different from the potent, laughing man I had known. It was difficult to match the memory of the vital firebrand, undaunted by the Louie La Mesas, with the too-quickly aging, fatalistic, somewhat irrelevant Marxist prof who’d come to dinner.

A few days later I sent them a card in which I wrote:

• I just wanted to keep the fire burning between us.
• And I want to say that even tho we discovered again a fundamental difference in our outlooks, what I'm left with is keen affection and a strong sense of much in common. I wish we could walk among redwoods and throw stones into the Pacific. I wish we both spoke Italian more fluently. I wish the fulfillment I may have garnered so far were more infectious. I wish the perhaps inflated sense of the possible I get from running in “New Age" circles didn't seem so foolhardy to those who aren't necessarily so imbued — after all, it works for me. (I wish more people found out that pain is more avoidable than they think.) I wish what I'm saying didn't sound so platitudinous. I wish we could watch each other's children grow. I wish for a thousand more evenings just like the one we had ...
• I want to reach across the Great Divide to give back some of that intensity of vision that so inspired us back in '67- '68. I don’t know if I succeeded or if my words fit or feel good or make sense. Let the dialogue continue....

Later that year he wrote back:

• Thank you for the stream of words and letters. I don't write to apologize, nor to explain. The simple truth is that my life is subject to many brute and brutal pressures ... none of which can be avoided ... nor will they go away soon. I am having a terrible time trying to stand up to them. ..
• I hope that I can survive this difficult period of my life. I value your friendship, and if we were in the same city I would see you when I could. Your life is happy now. and (hat s good. You have a good family....
• One never knows w hat life has in store for any of us. Perhaps there will be a time, and a place, in the future when we can be the kind of comrades, e amici. that you seem to want.
• Best auguri a tua famiglia. I'll write when I can.

I was nonplussed — the kind of comrades that I want? Hey, Vic, I was try’na be your friend — but also relieved, in a way, to have a direct statement of how he saw his life. Smoking ruins came to mind. We continued to correspond irregularly and speak by phone once every year or so.

By the summer of 1983, Michelle and I were expecting our second child, and our first-born was progressing toward elementary school. One night we were discussing the state of modem education. I took the position that we were proof one could survive the public school system reasonably well. Michelle remarked that all through school, she never felt appreciated for who she was, never felt a teacher cared about her, never felt stimulated to learn. I replied that education is properly a process of discovery, one that depends on a curious self — a curiosity that must be cultivated, in the home and the classroom. I agreed that, far from being cultivated, my curiosity had been stifled, with one exception. I had to write to Vic to tell him about this conversation.

• The only teacher I could recall who instigated my self-educating amblings was. and is, you. No wish to deliver a panegyric here. Just want to tip my hat. .. Everything you tell me of late is spoken in the voice of a frustrated, pained — not to say broken — man.
• I want you to know that I know you've breathed fire, and I still bear the burns.

About a month later I got a letter from Elyse. “I forwarded your letter to Vic,” she began. “He is on sabbatical and living with his girlfriend in Milwaukee. He decided this past year that he didn’t want the responsibility of a family, dog, and house and divorced me this summer.” My jaw landed sharply in my lap. Elyse went on to note bitterly that Vic’s girlfriend had been his high school sweetheart and that when his wife and son “weren’t good enough as an adoring audience anymore,” he opted out. Their 25 years together were over.

Catholic roots are not easily severed, and at first I had a knee-jerk reaction to their divorce. And since I didn't hear from Vic for some time, my inclination was to take Elyse’s “side.” She and I would stay in touch, actually become friends directly instead of by proxy. Eventually I found a less judgmental position for myself. It helped that I did hear from Vic later that fall.

“You said that I sounded frustrated, pained and ‘broken,’ ” he wrote. “You were near correct.” He told of an emotional torment that, he said, had been killing him. As he wrote, he was days away from remarrying. His part-Italian fiancee and he “loved each other in high school 1954-56 and have lived in pain for over a quarter century..,. Being away from her these past years has caused terrible suffering for me — and for her — and now the historical wrong has been righted.... I ain’t never been broken but the pain was almost too much.” It was vintage Rossi, seeing the emotional turns of his own life on the stage of world history. It was also earnest and strikingly hopeful like nothing he had written me in over ten years.

Six more years have gone by. Sal is grown and on his own; Elyse has since remarried and moved to the Indiana city where her husband practices medicine. They visited us three years ago, on their honeymoon. They are very happy. So are Vic and his wife. He still teaches at the university. When we spoke recently, he said he’s hoping to get a contract with a European publisher which (if I have this right) issues books of neo-Marxist critical theory. “If I’m lucky, a thousand people will read it,” he said with a bit of sadness, but nevertheless, it’s the work he wants to do, the work he’s best at, and it beats going toe-to-toe with Louie La Mesa. His Christmas-card messages and occasional notes contain the words of a man who, without becoming complacent, has made a kind of peace with the hand he’s drawn. I think maybe he and I can be the kind of amici we seem to want.