Deceased October 27, 2019
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In Memory
When I was 4 years old, my father came into my room with a record of the sound of whales. We listened to their soulful bellows. He taught me that nature is wondrous and immense.
When I was 16, my father planned a camping trip for the two of us, a welcome respite for an adolescent girl trying to fit in and be cool. We canoed the White River in Vermont and climbed Mount Washington in New Hampshire. While canoeing, my father vividly recounted stories: the Odyssey, Macbeth, the Iliad. I became a classics major at Amherst.
I’m lucky to have spent a lot of time with my dad during his final year. On one of our walks, he told me how difficult it had been to watch his own father die. I could tell he had felt disconnected during his father’s passing, as he described how isolated and transformed his formerly strong, accomplished father seemed. I think this internal crisis was one reason why my father forged a new path for himself during his final year. He connected with friends, welcomed visitors and let others know what he was going through with pancreatic cancer. He was open, present.
It must be hard to be manly and dying at the same time. My dad was having hallucinations and delusions during his final days—something to do with his liver, my sister, Naomi, who is a doctor, said. On our final visit, my children hugged and said goodbye to their grandfather. His response was, “Don’t worry, kids! Santa Claus is heading to the Northern Mountains!” He remained the adventure-seeking and nature-loving patriarch while he consoled my children, who could not help but giggle. I could not have asked for a better farewell, but I miss my father terribly.
Nora Sullivan ’96
I was browsing in the Jeff bookstore freshman year when this big stranger wrapped me in a bear hug from behind and demanded, “You’re coming out for wrestling, aren’t you.” He waited to let go until I gave him an affirmative response. Our rough and playful friendship has been lifelong.
Rich was the most beautiful wrestler I ever saw. Explosive, powerful, graceful. He was New England champion, could have been national champion had he gone to Oklahoma or Penn State, but an Amherst education was his priority.
After a Ph.D. in English at Rutgers, Sully taught and coached at Friends Academy on Long Island, N.Y., for his entire career. He was proud of what Amherst taught him, and he passed it on. A video his students sent him after he was diagnosed with cancer confirmed how much they loved Dr. Sullivan. He will live inside generations of men and women.
Sully had a sharp mind, a playful dry wit and a rebellious intellect that would take an opposing view, especially when it was not popular. In retirement, he kept active hiking and participating in reading groups. He loved to research and present his findings. Always a teacher.
What I remember most fondly is the way he spoke about his children. He clearly loved them, saw who they were and admired each of them for the unique way they moved in the world. Betsy and Rich built a great family.
During his illness, Rich had the courage to reach out to friends. On our last conversation, he did not say goodbye. The big bear that wrapped his arms around me 55 years ago said the three words I had never heard him say before.
I love you, too, Rich. I hope we will have one more afternoon in the Amherst wrestling room.
Larry Lincoln ’68
Once Sullivan’s Last Word
Rich Sullivan told me his story of the New England Intercollegiate Wrestling championship in our senior year at Amherst. For retelling his story, let me invent a name for his opponent in the match and call him “Alex Pope.” In psyching up for the championship match, Rich may have dismissed the name of his actual opponent from his mind. Rich was putting off his intended English honors thesis on Alexander Pope until the wrestling season would be over. Let’s say “Pope” was Rich’s anxiety, opposite him in the ring.
Sullivan and Pope danced and clawed their ways to the New England finals. In 1967, Rich had come in fourth in the 177 pound class. Alex Pope had won, confident and muscular in both body and mind. In 1968, Rich had a self-assurance of his own because in the regular season he had already beaten Pope. They approached each other at the center of the mat. As Rich told it, miming the roles as if he were a voice actor, the announcer proclaims, “For the 1968 New England Intercollegiate Wrestling Association championship at 177 pounds, Richard Sullivan of Amherst College. Season’s record, 8 wins and no losses.” Rich and Pope make mean squinty eyes at each other yet try to look cool, be cool. Then the announcer says, “His opponent, the defending champion, Alex Pope of Coast Guard Academy. Regular season’s record, 7 wins and 1 loss.”
Rich straightens up, relaxed, and speaks quietly to Pope: “Who’d you lose to?” Rich asks.
Pope lost the match right then and there. He lost his cool. He charged into the physical match in anger. Pope might never realize it his whole life long, but he lost when Rich asked him one simple question, Rich’s last word at the tournament.
Okay. That story Rich told made a huge impression on me in a friendship where we were unconcerned about impressing anyone, least of all each other. When I went to Doshisha University to teach in the fall of that 1968, I was not just encouraged but was expected to take up some martial art because a couple of my predecessors had done karate. I knew I would choose Aikido. I joined the Doshisha Aikido Club, who (not always me!) practiced six days a week in a small temple and on a winter day would go down in their thin, worn outfits to practice barefoot on the snowy banks of the Kamo River. (That’s when I was in Southeast Asia, fortunately!) Aikido especially emphasizes harmony of mind and body. In terms of this art, for me Rich’s experience and story were full of zen.
In 1970, I visited Rich and met Betsy in New Brunswick, N.J., while they were in English grad school. Rich rushed me from behind and took me down onto the sofa, teasing me for not sensing him behind me and missing my one chance to throw him with Aikido. I brag to say that I continued after being introduced to Aikido in Japan to practice thereafter, and I reached the rank of sandan, third-degree black belt, still impressed by Rich’s story of his championship and still readying myself—empty of mind, that is—for Rich or someone to jump me from behind again.
As for Rich, in his last year he told me how he was inspired to include a Japanese literary classic and film in a literature class he taught at Friends Academy on Long Island and even had the chance to see a kabuki performance of that story in Lincoln Center along with his students. He said he was inspired by seeing an Akira Kurosawa samurai film, Yojimbo, when we went together to Professor Ray Moore’s Japanese film festival at Amherst our senior year. Back then Richard saw the film as a proponent of “existentialism,” he’d say.
In January of this year of 2019, he and Betsy came to stay with Gail and me overnight. We played a mini-festival of Kurosawa films—Sanjuro, Yojimbo and Hidden Fortress, reputably George Lucas’s model for plot and character in Star Wars. In his hands he weighed and held up to the light three swords I handed to him. In that visit too we watched daily highlights of the current sumo tournament on NHK World Japanese TV. Rich watched intently and analyzed the most barely perceptible and precise of moves and vectors of attack and defense of three, four hundred pound wrestlers in collision and saw similarities and differences among sumo and the American sports he played and coached.
On Oct. 16, 2019, Rich and Betsy were to have stayed with us again, this time to see a chanted performance of the story of Benkei and Yoshitsune at the guarded mountain pass, the story that Rich taught about at Friends. But on Oct. 2 at 6:30 a.m. in Japan, I got a call from him, at 2:30 p.m. the previous day in Bellingham. He called to cancel our date for the Benkei show. He called to say he was moved from a hospital to home hospice care. We ended the call unable to speak. Recalling all this, for a few minutes today I imagined how next time, knowing what I know 55 years later, I’d begin a wrestling match in our freshman year. As if! Yeah!
Steve Sumida ’68