William O’Grady was a tutor at St. John’s College from 1970 until his death in 1986. In a relatively short time at the college, Mr. O’Grady made a lasting impression on many students and tutors, and his absence is still felt.

Mr. O’Grady now has a permanent memorial: a framed collage of pictures taken on his wedding day, unveiled during Homecoming in the Coffee Shop. Several former tutors, friends, and colleagues of Mr. O’Grady gathered to share their memories. Santa Fe tutor Cary Stickney, A75, offered this tribute:

When we call to mind the dead that we love we sometimes make them better than they were. Especially if they died young or untimely we try to balance our sense of what was taken from them with the most generous account of what they took: unable to see why they should be gone while we remain, we conclude that it should be vice versa. So a certain kind of eulogizing is distantly akin to what Priam does when he calls his remaining sons worthless after the death of Hector, or even heaping dirt and ashes on his own head. There may also be a kind of suspicious ease in praising the dead: let their virtues be what they will, we feel we cannot be properly compared to them until our lives, too, are over.

I mention these dangers not supposing that by naming them I can be sure of entirely escaping them, but as an invocation of the spirit of truth. It should be possible to praise someone, even extravagantly, while speaking truly. I hope you will take what I say with less than a grain of salt.

I knew Bill O’Grady first as my sophomore math tutor, then through his Friday night lectures, then as a colleague when I became a tutor in Santa Fe and he spent several years on that campus.

I do not remember much of that math tutorial 32 years later; I was not working at it with real devotion or deep interest. I may not have been atypical: what I remember is Bill reading aloud to us sometimes—an essay or maybe a story—in what I now recognize were attempts to kindle a fire in our unseasoned, soggy souls. He did not try to blame or intimidate the class into more serious learning, nor did he lecture on what he himself had learned or was learning. He kept presenting us with opportunities.

Of the things he read, I remember only one. It was about a Mexican bullfighter whose nickname was “El Loco,” perhaps because on his bad days an unprejudiced observer might decide that he had just as good of a reason to be in the bullring as a lunatic escaped from an asylum. On those days it seemed a miracle he was not killed. But on his good days every move he made seemed a miracle of grace and skill. You left the stadium proud of the whole human race. El Loco had an enormous following, whether in spite of or because of one’s never knowing if a particular performance would be his best or his last. What, asked the writer, would it be like for us to judge one another and ourselves not on the basis of our everyday fumblings but according to what we are at our very best? That question continues to resonate for me, occasioned not only by my students or colleagues but also by my own mysterious inertia and capacity to disappoint myself.

But it was as an interpreter of texts in Friday night lectures and question periods that Bill O’Grady seemed to me to fully manifest his own gifts. He was the most penetrating reader I have ever known. He read not only with his mind but also with his heart. Under the light of his attention books revealed themselves to be more beautifully put together than I could have imagined possible, and to be more directly addressing my own heart and soul than I could have dared to hope, and these were not separate ... He never talked down to students. I think this was because he had read and thought, to paraphrase Pascal, not like a professional scholar, but like a human being.

He once proposed as an example of what Socrates meant by finding his corroborating witness within the very one he sought to persuade the story of Nathan the prophet rebuking King David for his murder of Bathsheba’s husband, Uriah. Nathan tells David of a rich man who has taken his poor neighbor’s one ewe lamb, his beloved pet, and slaughtered it to feast a visitor, though he had many flocks of his own. David exclaims, “That man deserves to die!” and Nathan replies, “Thou art the man.” It is the vividness of David’s realization that the story is about him that I find in all of Bill’s encounters with texts. He is not present as a specialist, an impartial expert who has built an airtight case that will be most interesting only to fellow experts, but as a fellow doer and sufferer with the author, with the characters, whose own fate is tied to the questions of issue.

We are all prone to imagine that it might after all be best and most admirable to be some kind of expert about something. Even El Loco on his good days looked as if he knew everything about bullfighting. And whether best or not, all kinds of expertise are necessary, if life is to be more than just survival. But whether all things in the world are as they are merely by necessity or because it is somehow for the best is not a question to be decided by expertise. And those for whom that question can be a matter of their own happiness or misery, of life or death, could do worse than to take Bill O’Grady as an exemplar, to read what he wrote and remember what he said and did, and to find his spirit alive in all that is best about St. John’s College.

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