My crush on Don

Don is one of the first people I remember meeting at graduate school, at an evening mixer for incoming students in the grand, formal Rackham building. He, Ian McNeely and I somehow found each other as historians in a nervous crowd of students from many departments. I was immediately drawn to them both, but especially Don – I wanted a piece of that! He was charismatic and handsome as hell.

I’d come to graduate school through a slightly unconventional path and was worried that I’d be hanging out with a bunch of over-privileged preppies at Michigan, and I would feel weird and out of place. Don quickly illustrated that wouldn’t be the case; plus, there would be opportunities to flirt with fascinating people like Don. I remember thinking later that night, “I think I’m really going to like it here!”

I never got a piece of Don. Instead, Ian and I ended up happily coupled through my graduate school years, but I was fortunate to know Don as a friend. He teased me about things like coming from a family of communists and dating a preppy. We commiserated about misspent youths. He helped me with a project I did for a video production class by talking on camera about his definition of God – I’ll see if I can find that somewhere.

Ian and I visited Don and Carolyn in Paris while they were all doing their research (I was along as an Americanist tourist). I remember Carolyn explaining how to eat stale baguettes for breakfast and Don explaining how Parisians dug up the street’s cobblestones to use during riots.

I’m so sorry and sad that he’s gone.

-- Mary Margaret Wheeler-Weber