Deceased October 22, 2014
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In Memory
This is a late tribute to one of the most subtly remarkable people I knew at Amherst. On the basis of taking introductory German with him and performing together in a student musical at Smith, my sense of Ron Rubin was that he went through Amherst doing little to attract attention. In German class, he seemed like an average student, which he wasn’t at all; he graduated Phi Beta Kappa and wrote a Ph.D. thesis on Locke. Onstage, he was sparklingly funny, but this was far away from the buzz at Kirby Theater. When we drove to Northampton and back for rehearsals, he was excellent company, conspicuously not serious about much of anything but certainly witty.
Ron died on Oct. 22, 2014, in Claremont, Calif., after a long battle with cancer. The tributes that poured in show how Ron inspired a large, warm and wonderful assortment of family, students, martial artists and scholars through a career as professor of history of ideas at Pitzer College and an extracurricular career with his wife, Susan Perry, as aikido practitioners and editors/publishers of the magazine Aikido Today.
One of those tributes, from his high school classmate Roger Lewin, sums up Ron’s persona and his original intellect splendidly: “Ron had a gift for mock pomposity that was hilarious and put pomp in its proper place. He was fascinated with logic and the structure of argument. He had a beautiful, deep, resonant voice and a slight detachment from whatever he was saying that conveyed that he was paying critical attention to himself while he argued with someone else. Philosophy and aikido made perfect sense. He was a kind, decent, gifted person.”
He is survived by his wife of 34 years, Susan Perry; his son, John Schleis II; and grandchildren Erika and Tyler Schleis.
John Stifler ’68