Macaela J. Bennett | Collegian
His margin notes are indecipherable, but his voice is clear.
Three years after former Hillsdale College Professor of English John Reist passed away, alumni reclaim pieces of him through his book collection, which contain his scrawling, exclamation points, and sloppy underlining.
Reist walked around Hillsdale’s campus for almost 30 years whistling and greeting everyone with a “quack” and a peace sign. Not everyone liked his “off-the-wall” teaching style or raunchy jokes, but he would say, “That’s the point.”
“I have met so many people through being a journalist, and you realize certain people stand out as true originals and wish the whole world could have met this person,” Tony Gonzalez ’08 said. “That is Reist.”
Mariel Stauff ’05 began working part time in Mossey Library since her husband joined the art faculty this fall. While sorting through Reist’s more than 5,000 recently-donated books, she emailed a few of his former students, asking if they wanted her to reserve a few for them. Within days, alumni had forwarded it several times, and she now has about 20 book requests to fill.
“I already had a book of his I forgot to return, so I thought, ‘Why not add to the collection?’” Nathan Loizeaux ’04 said, who requested any book Reist owned on church history. He added that the books will serve as a tangible reminder to “finish some of those thought processes” Reist began with him.
“I feel like I may let him down if I don’t,” Loizeaux said.
Bethany Slater ‘03 said she feels a similar duty to pursuing the truths Reist revealed to her — primarily discovered during a book club her senior year on Graham Greene, of whose books she requested from Reist’s library.
“Books are an outward expression of the inner life of the mind of a particular scholar,” she said. “Books they own represent their formation as a thinker and human being. It feels very personal to have something of Dr. Reist’s that represents the humanity that he brought to his scholarship and represents a lot of the mind he introduced me to.”
Reist’s daughter, Jennifer Azar, affirmed Slater’s sentiment that her father’s library reflects his
character and values.
“He thought literature was the secret to uncovering the meaning of life — that the more you read, the more you understand about the world. He loved the idea of a liberal education where you were always learning and not being unidimensional,” Azar said.
While the first thing many mention about Reist is his provocative humor, he attracted a diverse following of students — both devoutly religious and “more rambunctious,” according to Gonzalez. He seemed to use his humor to disarm students so they could better learn the lessons he shared.
“You look at his quotes and think he is a light-hearted guy, but he was the most serious guy I’ve ever met,” Loizeaux said. “He just had a different way of handling it. I think it was that combination that kept bringing people back to him.”
Reist’s antics inspired Gonzalez and a group of friends to name both their off-campus house and a blog recording Reist’s entertaining moments after his phrase “Sad Bear,” which Reist inserted into stories to denote unfortunate events.
“He had these zippy, confrontational sayings but deliver lessons about things like marriage,” Gonzalez said, whose wife interjected that many of Reist’s phrases still “pop up in our daily lives.”
Gonzalez said he and his friends found that Reist’s method taught them meaningful lessons, despite how random it could appear during class.
“I got a kick out of him while I was there, but it turns out a lot of things he espoused really did stick with me,” Gonzalez said. “He would jump around, sing little ditties or whistle a tune, and then jump back into literature. A lot of us figured out that it really did all go together — it was like the liberal arts blending together all these things.”
Slater described Reist’s teaching style as a “gadfly approach,” but it took a while to appreciate his method.
“As a freshman, I found him frustrating because I didn’t get what game he was playing,” she said.
Gonzalez explained every lecture was like a Reist performance, during which he would “literally interrupt himself with the sound effect of a bomb coming.”
“I get the sense he was a living version of an old-time radio show with one man and a microphone and a bunch of sound effects — that’s how he rambled around,” he said.
Like many, Slater said she appreciated Reist’s approach more as she matured and discovered that his humor was a mechanism to analyze and communicate deeper lessons.
“He wanted to cultivate true piety and not something that just looked appropriate and respectable on the outside,” Slater said. “His jokes were there to destabilize what he saw as potentially us clinging to outward forms of performance.”
His style was abnormal, but alumni agree his message is unforgettable.
“It’s like holding onto a little piece of him through his library,” Gonzalez said. “I wonder if we should resurrect the Sad Bear blog for one more time.”
