JFound: Bill Weisgerber (MC1971 RIP); Tom Gray (MC1970) quoted
http://www.thejournalnews.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20070529/COLUMNIST05/705290349/1019/NEWS03
http://tinyurl.com/29zfpt
Readers get their say on teacher, Indian Point
(Original publication: May 29, 2007)
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Two recent columns – one about the seemingly never-ending problems at Indian Point and the other about the life and death of Rockland Community College adjunct faculty member Bill Weisgerber – brought, respectively, a wave of criticism and an outpouring of memories.
After writing about Weisgerber – someone I knew in college who in recent years became my neighbor in Suffern – I heard from a number of people whose lives he had touched.
Nick LaBruna of Suffern, whose full-time job was teaching math at Nanuet Middle and High schools, taught with Weisgerber on the RCC adjunct staff. “We shared many moments before and after our classes commiserating about our students, how the college could be better run and, most importantly, college basketball! I listened to all his Manhattan Jasper stories and he listened to all my Villanova Wildcat ups and downs,” LaBruna wrote.
“As you noted,” he continued, “Bill was a very warm person who retorted with insight and humor.”
Later on, LaBruna wrote, he cultivated a friendship with Weisgerber, who moved to Suffern and became a member of the Sacred Heart Parish.
“I think he really loved Suffern as I frequently saw him walking the streets of the village with such a look of contentment on his face,” LaBruna wrote.
Another village resident was touched when Weisgerber thanked her for a simple sign of friendship.
“I first met Bill at the Suffern Library, where I work, and he was also a member of Sacred Heart Parish,” Joanne Mattern wrote. “One day I saw him at Sacred Heart and waved to him. I thought nothing of it, since I knew him casually from the library. The next time I saw him, he made a point of thanking me for my kindness and told me he had just moved to Suffern and felt lonely,” she wrote.
“Bill’s gratitude,” she went on, “made me realize how much a simple act of kindness can affect someone.”
She said she and Bill chatted often after that, and she found him a “very sweet man who I will always remember.”
Tom Gray, a 1970 classmate of Weisgerber’s at Manhattan College, picked up on my mention of Weisgerber’s somewhat quirky personality. “Some of that was Bill, but most of it was the result of an accident he had as a little boy. He had been struck by a car. He lost no intellectual skills,” Gray wrote, “but some motor skills gave way. I think this caused Bill to have a tough time as a teenager and young adult.”
Weisgerber, said Gray – who lives in Irvington with his wife and two children and works at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Institute – overcame all that. “Bill would persevere, and your article illustrates just how he did succeed and succeed so brilliantly. He was such a good person, and am glad others, so many others, came to learn that, and now even more thanks to you.”
One of Weisgerber’s students, Lauren Abbondanza of Garnerville, said she was especially saddened because she had no idea he had been ill.
She described Weisgerber as a “kind, gentle soul, always going out of his way to help his students, me being one of them.”
She took both microeconomics and macroeconomics with Weisgerber. Once she was unable to attend a final exam for personal reasons, “but he made sure I was able to take it,” she wrote.
“Mr. Weisgerber was an incredible teacher and has left a lasting impression on so many hearts,” she concluded.
Keith Walters, another RCC faculty member, shared similar feelings and wondered why Weisgerber’s status never changed over more than 20 years of teaching at the college.
It was notable, he wrote, “that for all he offered RCC and his students, the college never thought him worthy of being hired full time. He never had employee health insurance. He never had a paid vacation. He never received compensation when a class he had prepared for months was taken from him. He was never paid for office hours. The college never gave him the honor of being a professor.”
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Bill Weisgerber (1971 RIP)
Tom Gray (1970)
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