AC_1965_Web

77 AN T I OC H CO L L E G E C L A S S O F 19 6 5 5 0 t h A N N I V E R S A R Y B O O K A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z J O H N S O N batical in which they can study any subject they choose.I have the happy responsibility of helping them find their way through the groves of ac- ademe.This includes traveling with them for short educational tours— last year to Finland and Russia, this winter to Berlin.The whole experi- ence has been tremendously uplift- ing and invigorating for me. I never thought of myself as a Kremlinologist, but I have been and remain an active Russia-watcher, a critic of both the Russian govern- ment and its U.S. counterparts. I can’t say that I am any more optimistic today about either side than I was in the days of Kissinger and Brezhnev, but I keep trying to add to the pot my own few grains of what I imagine to be wisdom—or at least common sense. Sorry, Horace, that’s the best I can do. Apart from academia, I have in the past decade found great plea- sure in poetry. I had been writing “for the drawer” for a much longer time, but only recently started send- ing my work to journals. I now have a small list of poems in print, and a much larger array of work that has not yet found a publisher. I look for- ward to a busy retirement. Through all these years my soul- mate has been Laura (Climenko) whom I met and married while at Antioch. I will let her describe her own academic experiences, but I must note that she has managed to stay in step or outpace me at every stage. In the eighth month of preg- nancy she passed her Ph.D. exams at Cornell, while I, three months later, barely managed to get through mine. She gamely relocated to Finland (with a one-year-old child) so that I could go to Russia for my research. Having finished and defended her own dissertation, she held my feet to the fire so that I would finish mine. Together we raised two sons and built a new life in Canada. Our collaboration has been intellectual as well as romantic, and includes one book that stayed in print for three decades and another that is currently in progress. Her affection, enthusiasm, curiosity and critical in- telligence have enriched my life and work beyond measure. OUTTAKES A short work of fiction in a literary journal, or a paragraph on linguistics, might (or so it was thought) reveal fundamental changes in leadership and ideology. Some of the methods applied look ludicrous today (one political scientist, for whom I later worked as a research assistant at Cornell) tried to analyze the poli- tics of the Politburo by studying the photos of the Soviet leaders as they reviewed parades atop Lenin’s tomb. But Leo was a rigorous and skeptical observer and a demanding editor.