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Memories of Gary Nash over Five Decades
Ronald Mellor
University of California, Los Angeles
| IT IS AS A LONGTIME CLIENT, softball teammate, colleague, traveling companion, and friend that I write to honor Gary Nash. I have known him in varied guises in five different decades (as they say in the major leagues), and on five continents, with Africa coming in 2009. And I confess that I owe him big time in many ways. His generosity and conviviality, his intelligence and scholarly productivity, his political and social engagement, his fiercely competitive determination have been models of what an academic and a friend should be. |
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Yet my connections with Gary may be a bit different from others in this volume. Firstly, I am rather unimpressed by his field of United States history—having last studied it at Regis High School in 1956. (One of Gary's pithy epigrams is that the problem with high school history in the old days was that it was only taught by the coaches.) In those days, it seemed to be a bunch of old white guys who struggled for power, passed laws, or fought wars. So I migrated to Roman history, where old white guys struggled for power, passed laws, or fought wars—but they did it over a millennium rather than over a few paltry centuries. The Romans also had gladiators and orgies, while the Americans had Puritans, Quakers, and earnest suffragettes in bonnets. I understand that American history is more interesting (and fifty years longer) than it was in 1956, and that Gary Nash had a great deal to do with the changes, but, even now that I am an old white guy, I am not up to learning new tricks. |
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So I prefer to avoid Professor Nash and briefly explore Dean Nash, Admiral Nash, Commissar Nash (in the view of Lynne Cheney), Explorer Nash, Athlete Nash, Rancher Nash, and Party Animal Nash. Of course, the best history has a bit of mythmaking—one of the few things the Reverend Weems and Cleopatra have in common—so that not every reminiscence recorded here deserves to be enshrined in the Nash entry in Wikipedia, but most will pass the smell test of probability. And, as the Romans' Italian descendents say, "se è non vero, è ben trovato"—if it isn't true, at least it's well invented! |
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My first encounter with Dean Nash was around 1963 in Princeton, New Jersey. As an impoverished graduate student, I was desperately seeking a loan to study for my exams in Classics and avoid wasting the summer watching Mets games with my father in a Brooklyn bar. I humbly approached the Graduate Dean's office—reported to be the source of unimagined largess—and encountered Assistant Dean Gary Nash. This august personage gave me a loan of $500 in federal funds—all the more wonderful since I was later forgiven 10% for each year of teaching. So it was as a patron—a good Roman word (patronus) for the guy who takes care of you like Don Corleone—that I first encountered Gary. But I soon discovered he was only a part-time Dean, having returned from the Navy to pursue a graduate degree while working to support a young family. So we crossed bats on the softball diamond at the Graduate College. Money and sports—what a beautiful way for a friendship to begin. |
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More than a decade later, when I stopped being a Classicist and came as a Roman historian to UCLA, Gary renewed that friendship with his typical generosity as though no time had passed. He and Cindy made Anne and me welcome at Alcima Avenue on dozens of occasions—from dance parties and dinners, to "mystery" games, to a series of wonderful birthday parties. Of course, they understood that we saw his house filled with overnight visitors, family, and friends who he would take in for months (or years) at a time, and we locals felt sad that we had to leave the party and go home. So they began to take the parties on the road: Kauai and Tahiti, China and Australia, Turkey and Ranchero Nash-Shelton in Springville, California. And, needless to say, it is on the road that we really learn about our friends. |
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Gary has tried to work on my athletic skills, but he truly regards them as beneath his radar. On occasion, in a desperate situation when no one else is there, he might condescend to play tennis or golf with me, but it is clearly a sacrifice. (It is rumored that Cindy was required to pass a decathlon test before the wedding.) Even when I did not do too badly on the tennis court, my form was pronounced ugly. (As a Brooklynite growing up not far from Al Davis, I thought "Win, Baby" trumped form. Not that I ever won.) It was at a gorgeous golf club on Kauai overlooking the Pacific, with the greens' fee reduced from $160 to $25 due to a recent hurricane having frightened the Japanese tourists away, that Gary took me out to my first round of 18-hole golf. (When I told him I could putt as I had been playing miniature golf for forty years, I believe his nose wrinkled.) I found it great fun, except when the ball went into the lake, the sand, the ocean, the hedges, or the trees. (The rest of our group and children had much more fun crashing the very snazzy club-hotel and sneaking past the security guards. I think Gary wished he had stayed with them.) I know Gary won the UCLA Distinguished Teaching Award and his patience with graduate students is legendary, but I got a hint of his true feelings about teaching me golf when one birthday, he and Cyd gave me six golf lessons at Rancho Park. |
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Of course, my golf-playing was an absolute triumph compared to my horseback riding at Ranchero Nash-Shelton. Cindy and Gary have a veritable stable of what seem to me to be enormous beasts. There were horses in Brooklyn when I was growing up—I remember the delivery men had horses during World War II—but getting up on one of them was for cowboys and Indians. Though I am 1/32 Mohawk, I am convinced my ancestors avoided horses; they preferred to be riveters on New York skyscrapers. I did ride an automated horse in the penny arcade in Coney Island in my youth, but a moving horse is different. For some reason, Gary thinks it unseemly that I prefer to get on a horse from a picket fence and bring the beast back to the fence to get off. I know we are in California, but it seems that Gary's vaunted multicultural tolerance breaks down when it comes to urban cowboys. When we went to western China, I tried to show Gary my skill in riding a Bactrian camel—the two humps make it a much more sensible animal to hang onto than a mere horse. And the camel only takes a leisurely stroll. |
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There is no question that we all get on better together in non-competitive activities, like hiking, snorkeling, sailing, swimming, eating, and drinking—though they can all be competitive as well. The combination of sailing and drinking—a familiar grouping for men of the sea through the ages—allows us a glimpse into Admiral Nash's heroic exploits with the U.S. Navy. After he completed NROTC at Princeton, the embryonic commander was assigned to the Sixth Fleet in the Mediterranean. Of course, most of his activities remain highly classified and it is only in moments of considerable... relaxation... that details emerge. We learned when we were in Istanbul in 2007 that Nash's ship patrolled the Bosporus and carefully noted Russian ships making their way to the Mediterranean. In addition to that vital national security mission, Nash had serious humanitarian duties. When his underlings became embroiled in altercations in the brothels of the seductive Orient, it was Commander Nash and his intrepid Shore Patrol who heroically brought them back alive to the ship or bailed them out. Of course, in every distinguished military career, there are small reversals. While sailing from Heron Island to Wilson Island on the Great Barrier Reef in 1990, Captain Nash revealed a small blot on his distinguished service. He is still concerned that Department of the Navy might one day bill him for the $65,000 anchor that was dropped into Glasgow harbor on his watch a half-century ago. With compound interest, that might be enough to pay for another aircraft carrier. |
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But most are more familiar with the incendiary activities of Commissar Nash, after he was empowered by NEH Chair Lynne Cheney to develop the National Standards. It was, of course, a phenomenal success, though there are always a few disgruntled dissenters. I was Chair of the UCLA History department during that period, and there were some colorful, if agitated, letters from alumni. At one point, I was visited by a delegation of four senior administrators from Fudan University in Shanghai. When they asked about the National Standards, I provided them with excerpts and told them that we had been "censured" by a 99–1 vote of the United States Senate a few weeks before. (I believe the dissenting vote preferred to draw and quarter Commissar Nash.) Our Chinese guests did not at all seem to see the humor in the situation; I presume they take their politicians more seriously than we do. |
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Gary Nash has been my friend, colleague, teammate, coach, traveling companion, and drinking buddy for the past 45 years, but he has not yet converted me to United States history. But my mind is still open. In the decades to come, I look forward to becoming excited about Millard Fillmore—formerly the worst U.S. President—and being able to remain on a horse. And if Gary does not teach me to stay on, I trust he will help me to stand back up and give me a beer to soothe the pain. |
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