Amherst Magazine Joseph V. Glass '62

Picture From Freshman Facebook

Joseph (Joe) Victor Glass died April 15, 1994.
No obituary can found.

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Joe was born in the Bronx in January 1942. He majored in English, played the clarinet, was in the Amherst Band and a member of the Smith Amherst orchestra. Joe was a loner and a gentle person with a keen and brilliant intellect. The Sadlers report that Joe developed an interest in the game of squash in our junior year and reported on it for the Amherst Student. He hung out at practices, attended matches, including many away matches. Jerry Fink recalls that Joe was an avid NY Giants fan and quite astute about game strategies.

Nick Prigge, among others, recalls vividly Joe’s Chapel talk freshman year but no copies have turned up. Nick describes it as a "send up/parody of an intellectual speech … The content was somewhere between Dr. Irwin Corey (the world's greatest authority) and Norm Crosby, the master of the malaprop."

Bruce Farnham has shared a story about Joe in Professor Roger Sale's classroom. Bruce describes that classroom, "he [Sale] strode across the front of the room and in a voice that spanned octaves, invited us humble mendicants to join him on a quest for enlightenment. It was not an easy thing to do for those of us with modest I.Q.'s and limited verbal skills, but Joe could play ideas ping-pong with the best of them and never hesitated to entry the fray. While the rest of us held back until Sale had asked a question or at least finished a sentence, Joe showed no hesitation in interrupting him mid-thought and voicing a question or objection. Sale would smile that mischievous smile of his and turn to the rest of us with a look that said, 'Why aren't the rest of you doing that?' and then reply to Joe in mock disbelief with something like, 'Mr. Glass, Mr. Glass, surely you don’t believe that!' And thus it would begin, a two- or three-minute, no-holds-barred bout between The Champ and The Contender. Owing to my own limited powers of cognition, I can't honestly say that Joe ever won one of those exchanges, but my impression then and now is that he occasionally fought Prof. Sale to a draw, an incredible accomplishment and one that none of the other … [s] in the class ever came close to accomplishing. That is how I remember Joe Glass."

Compiled by Sandy Short '62 with special thanks to Craig Morgan and Stu Filler