My dear friend and colleague, J.D. Stahl
J.D. joined our faculty some thirty years ago as the department’s first specialist in Children’s Literature. At the time, we offered only one course in the field, a survey designed to acquaint future teachers with texts they might one day assign to public school children. Other students sometimes took the course, which had a consistently healthy enrollment and—not incidentally—a reputation as an easy “A.” Like students nationwide who enrolled in “kiddie lit” courses in the eighties, Virginia Tech students absorbed attitudes of condescension and dismissiveness about the subject matter itself before they ever opened a book.
J.D. built his reputation as an exceptional teacher at a point when these attitudes were most entrenched. Each time he greeted a new group of students, he had to create and embody the kind of disciplinary authority most of us take for granted as part of our professorial aura. And over the years of his distinguished career, he played an important role in changing the way children’s literature is perceived and studied in the academy. A distinguished scholar in the field and former president of the International Children’s Literature Association, he co-edited the Oxford anthology now used in college classrooms world-wide. He is, of course, also the author of Mark Twain: Culture and Gender: Envisioning America through Europe (1994), praised by critics both for its own acumen and for its “perfect mastery of the mass of scholarly research on the subject.”
Anyone who has ever prepared an award dossier for J.D. knows that references to “the man himself” echo like a refrain through his teaching files: “his unfailing kindness,” “his quiet, modest manner and warm smile,” “his pedagogy of kind regard for the intellectual work of all students.” One student, now a distinguished literary scholar herself wrote to me on hearing of J.D.’s Wine Award nomination: “I have learned that kindness and a gentle spirit don’t always find themselves comfortably housed inside a wicked smart brain. J.D. proves the exception.”
On these qualities of mind and heart, J.D. built long-term mentoring relationships with students he fondly regarded as his “dear pupils.” Working outside the classroom, in many cases for twenty years or more, he shepherded students through international conferences, helped them to connect with other scholars in the field, and mentored their work to publication through multiple drafts. His students have gone on to compose theses, memoirs, children’s books, and multi-media publications. Special editions of scholarly journals and award-winning books of literary criticism have emerged from projects begun in his classes.
A man of global sophistication and multi-disciplinary expertise, J.D. related to friends and colleagues along a broad spectrum of shared interests. His colleagues here and at Hollins know him through the still-thriving faculty study group he launched in the 1980s, in the process transforming a Children’s Literature faculty of one into a burgeoning community of scholar/teachers. They recall his important role as a founding faculty member of the Hollins summer M.A. program in Children’s Literature. Others remember his curriculum-development work, his association with the Cranwell Center, the film series he launched before Netflix brought independent and international films to our mailboxes, his contributions to the program at the Center for European Studies and Architecture in Riva, his pioneering uses of technology.
No man ever desired children and a loving family more than J.D., and in recent years, as his health has kept him more and more at home, most of my contacts with him have been through Sarah, Daniel, and Hans, whose faces kept his own illuminated brightly from within, even in the most challenging of circumstances. When I visited this past Sunday, he warmly welcomed me to stay and chat. He was gracious, hospitable, funny, fully engaged. We talked about Saarbrücken, Germany, where J.D. had grown up and where I had just delivered a paper, and he beamed as Daniel showed me the latest in a series of inventive projectiles on which Hans had exercised his already considerable engineering skills—the “spud-gun,” a four-foot wonder made of PVC pipe and capable of propelling a medium-sized baking potato the length of a rugby field. It was a good visit.
The photos here were J.D.’s gift to me a month ago—and now my gift to you. Hearing we were about to travel to his hometown, he created a little Powerpoint for me, complete with a history of Saarbrücken and a gallery of its chief sites. My favorite images are the two of J.D. himself as a young teenager—one at his thirteenth birthday party, one with a group of friends tossing stones into the river Saar. Of his first home in Germany he wrote in a subsequent email:
Our apartment was to the right as you face the building. Just for reference, that’s where I first heard the Beatles singing “I Want to Hold Your Hand” and the Rolling Stones’ “I Can’t Get No Satisfaction” (a line which I got many requests to translate at school!).
Later, when the family moved:
The meeting rooms for my parents’ mission congregation were downstairs; we lived on the second floor. My room was on the far right as you face the building. I built and repaired many a radio in my room there and read voraciously (after my homework was done, of course).
In the images of J.D. as a boy, he looks like the perfect cross between Hans and Daniel, and it somehow gives me pleasure now to think of him in that second-floor bedroom, lost in the mysteries of mechanism and reading as if for life itself.
“After my homework was done, of course.”
by Nancy Metz