George Yaney Obituary

He made quite an impression on me when I took Russian courses in the 1960s.

I only just now stumbled across George´s obituary on the Internet. I remember George fondly as a fellow college park pick-up soccer player from the time I was a junior in high school, if not earlier, through the mid 70s. (Brian and I were teammates on the Northwestern HS team). "History Tigers" was the adopted name of our group as it included not only George but other professors and probably students as well from the U of MD history department. My conversations with George were limited to talk of soccer, although I gathered from my experience with him that he was a Russian history professor, and quite obviously from talking to him an incredibly erudite individual. I always felt somewhat jealous next to his impressive knowledge base as I would overhear, from time to time, George speaking with Igor or others from the history department about world affairs, mostly about Russia. I managed to set that envy aside, though, as my profound source of envy of George was his incredibly perfect tan, seemingly throughout 12 months of the year. We always played shirts and skins. George could also do handstands, and hold them for extended periods of time, which I tried to emulate and never came close. One of my memories of George was his story of climbing that church steeple seen from the pick-up soccer field with son, Brian. Don´t know if true or not as I wasn´t there to witness but I do not doubt it.
RIP George. A life well lived!

I took three courses from Dr. Yaney: Russian History I in Fall 1971, Russian History II in Spring 1972, and Russian Revolution in Fall 1973. His stimulating lectures provided much of the foundation of my world view as an undergraduate physics major, and continued to inform me throughout my life. He introduced me to the surprising idea that the democratic process may actually impede government decision making, as highlighted in his series of lectures “Great Failures of Democracy”. In particular, I remember his lecture detailing the demagoguery in Great Britain that paved the way for the Crimean War. He also made prescient predictions of the conflict in Eastern Europe that would occur if Russian and Soviet influence were to diminish—words I often thought of during the violent upheavals that lead to the post cold war dissolution of Yugoslavia. He also observed that without Marxist ideology, Russia could easily veer towards fascism, a drama that we see played out in the present day. His cogent observations on both world history and human nature guided me through many of the decisions of my life, as I sought to make sense of the world and find my place in it. Thank you so much Dr. Yaney!

I'm one of Gandalf's grandchildren, Conrad, by his son, Brian.

There's no way to cover even a small percentage of what was great about Gandalf (the nickname we grandchildren had for our grandfather), but here are some stories I love.

1) On a visit home, he asked me how New York was going, and if I had things under control. Lazily quoting a memorable moment of an Anthony Hopkins/Cuba Gooding Jr. movie, I said "control is an illusion, Gandalf." He looked at me for about 5 seconds, turned to my dad, and excitedly announced "Brian, your son just said something intelligent!"

2) Gandalf truly prided himself on his tan. Every year at the beach, he would sit out in the sun, perfecting it. He even got a spot of skin cancer removed on the tip of his ear one year, and thenceforth began applying sunblock to the spot on the tip of his ear when he sunbathed. One year, Dylan (my older brother) casually and Machiavellianically (if that can be allowed to be used as a word) observed to him that the undersides of his breasts weren't receiving so much sun, after all. A few days later, at the end of the beach week, during a rare quiet moment at the dinner table with the other 15-20 or so of us family members present, and after presumably considering this information at length, he opined aloud and to nobody in particular: "Do you know what I hate about the beach? It's the god-damned white marks under my ...!" It's still my favorite line I've ever heard uttered or seen written down in any form in my life.

3) He was the only person I ever met that wanted me to punch him or her in the belly, other than perhaps Dylan.

4) I used to brag to my friends as a kid that my granddad went bungee jumping over the age of 60. That's how I remember remembering being told about it, anyway.

5) Gandalf incentivized all his grandkids to high academic excellence and challenged us to things well beyond our grade level. We all memorized "the If poem" (AKA "If" by Rudyard Kipling) at one point around age 7 I believe, and if we got it word perfect, he would reward us with a hundred dollar bill, which, at least for me, was equivalent in awesomeness to seeing a UFO or something along those lines. The second time I learned the poem (sort of in tandem with my younger brother as I helped him to do it for his first time), it stuck, and I can still recite it for you today. A copy of it sits on my wall now, I try to live my life by it, and I even attribute the fact that I became an actor in part to that first experience of trying to uncover and understand every bit of meaning from that poem as possible. He also offered the even more challenging "map test" a few years later - a test feared by his college history students - which, in order to pass, the test-taker realistically needed to be able to draw a scale map of all of the major cities, rivers, borders, and mountain ranges in Europe, by hand, from memory, exactly.

6) On the subject of academic expectations, I once cheated on a test in middle school, or maybe high school, I don't quite remember. It was a chemistry test, so it was probably high school, in retrospect. I wrote a single number on my hand that I was paranoid I would forget. It was Avogadro's Number, an important constant having something to do with molarity or molality or some such thing. I don't remember, because I always despised chemistry with an irrational passion. The funny thing is, the act of writing the number on my hand had cemented it in my memory, and I didn't even remotely need to look at it during the test. I even forgot that I had written it there, so much so that I waved goodbye to my teacher with that hand on the way out of class, which I believe should earn me some version of a Darwin Award. I argued that I hadn't used it, and that I shouldn't get a zero on the test (as was school policy). The teacher liked me and agreed only to give me a zero on the questions involving that number, which, incidentally, I had still managed to get wrong anyway, despite knowing the number. Hardly punished, I felt pretty justified in the way everything had gone down. It made sense to me that I shouldn't really suffer, since I didn't actually follow through with my plan. My parents were disappointed in me, but that didn't really phase me. They were too close to home, perhaps, and I was accustomed to rationalizing my way past their griefs. However, when I heard from my father that Gandalf had heard about the incident in passing, and that he was deeply disappointed about it, it threw me for a loop. It surprised me that he actually even cared about one single smuggled factoid not even used on a couple of questions on one test, perpetrated by one of his many grandchildren somewhere across the country. It disturbed me profoundly to know that I had disappointed him, and it made me realize the cowardliness of my original action of writing the number on my hand in the first place. I never dreamed of any sort of cheating ever again. Gandalf's integrity ran so deep that it couldn't help but infuse me with a desire to try to live up to his standards, and I'll never forget the shame I felt when I failed to do it, and still do when I find my ethics to be deserving of higher scrutiny.

7) Somewhere between Gandalf, my father, and my older brother, the latter of two of which also got it in large part from the former, I presume, I was guided to the conclusion at a fairly young age that, when writing, even in the case of a mundane expository essay for school in which we were expected to repeat and reword what was already discussed in class, that it was actually never worthwhile to write down or turn in anything that wasn't expressing something new and useful to the reader. This made such essays much more challenging to write, and most of my efforts ultimately unsatisfying to me, of course, but far more rewarding in the end. It is to this lesson and concept in general from Gandalf and his spawn that I attribute my current passion for and attempted professional-ish work in writing. In fact, to sum up the last 3 of my favorite Gandalf facts, I think I can attribute most of my attitude about academics, art, and critical thinking at some level to Gandalf and his gold standard, and I can say with zero hesitation that he has had an enormous impact on who I am.

8) His nicknames were Gandalf and Vecchio, and that's wonderful in itself.