A Tribute to Amy M. Charles (1922-1985)

A Tribute to Amy M. Charles (1922-1985) by Elizabeth Cowling Amy Charles's death on March 24, 1 985 created a sense of deep loss throughout the University of North Carolina at Greensboro community. Her Chancellor, William E. Moran, expressed it when he said, "The death of Professor Amy Charles is hard to absorb. Quality of teaching and scholarship marked her career at every point. She contributed distinctively to campus governance over the years, most recently as the elected leader of her faculty colleagues." "Indeed," Dr. Moran continued, "she served the University so long, and in so many ways, and so well, that we had come to count on her. She was an original and striking presence. Her death at the end of a difficult, painful illness leaves us all with an acute sense of personal and professional loss." In the following remarks I would like to do a little differently than provide a chronology of Amy's contributions. Having shared this house with her for twenty-seven years, I feel that I knew her in a way few others did, and my remarks will therefore be of a more informal nature. Amy had a fine education rooted in the liberal arts: B.A. from Westminster College (New Wilmington, Pennsylvania), and an M.A. and Ph.D. in English from the University of Pennsylvania. Her values surely came from this background and were right in order before she even began teaching. Her highly trained mind was tempered with a compassion for her students. She loved teaching, and the letters I have received from some of her former students are radiant with praise of her distinguished teaching as well as helpfulness in guiding them in times of need. 2 Elizabeth Cowling One of the attributes of this remarkable woman that impressed me particularly was what I chose to call her "contrapuntal" mind, that is, the ability to pursue several trains of thought simultaneously. She could be writing a detailed and technical committee report or even her articles or books, listen to music — perhaps by her favorite musician, Kathleen Ferrier — and plan what she was going to do to improve the yard in the coming week, all at the same time. She also had a fantastic memory, including a musical memory better than my own, and I am a musician. If she had had proper training in piano when she was young, she certainly could have been a musician. Her love of music did not include avant-garde contemporary music but otherwise she had versatile tastes, liking vocal and instrumental music equally. She loved viola da gamba music (because George Herbert played the gamba?), so I taught her how to play it, and she was good at it. Another trait was her sense of humor, which ranged from the delicately ironic to the earthy, not to say scatological, and Mozartian. She had many hobbies including photography, gardening (she knew all the Latin names of all her flowers), cooking, entertaining, traveling in England, and reading catalogues from which she shopped. (I can't stop them from coming!) Amy was very generous with both her time and money. She served on committees during her nearly 30 years at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro, including nine years as Chairman of the Faculty Welfare Committee, where she initiated many improvements in the retirement and insurance benefits. She had not been trained in the financial aspects of this sort of assignment but she nonetheless learned it quickly. For two years towards the end of her career she was elected Vice Chairman of the Faculty Council, the highest elected office on our campus. Moreover, her interest remained undiminished in the A.A.U.P. She served as President of the local chapter several different times and once as State President when she went to Raleigh to appear before the State Legislature to fight the Speaker Ban backed by Jesse Helms. It didn't pass. That she was generous with her money is illustrated by the fact that a few years ago the 1RS questioned her list of gifts, not believing that anyone with her limited resources would give so much money away to tax-deductible...