It was after spring quarter at UC Davis ended that Joe Fracchia made the long drive from campus to Lodi where he planned to ask his history professor, Eugene Lunn, for a letter of recommendation.
It was 1973. Driving Highway 99 for long, straight stretches through flat farmland was a sharp contrast to the winding path that brought Fracchia to this moment. He had switched majors from mathematics to history and added an extra year of studies to get his grades up. His hopes were now set on graduate school.
Lunn’s home was a farmhouse far from the main road. When Lunn opened the door, he looked like a man taken from a street in New York City and dropped suddenly among the golden flatlands of the Central Valley.
“Nice place you got here,” Fracchia told him.
Lunn’s eyebrows raised and his eyes went wide. He exclaimed, “And there are cows right outside the window!”
Lunn wrote the letter, but Fracchia wasn’t accepted to the history Ph.D. program at UC Davis that year. It was after receiving his M.A. from UC Santa Barbara that he was accepted, and Lunn became his Ph.D. advisor and dissertation director.
While pursuing his Ph.D., Fracchia shared a graduate student office with Patricia Hilden, who was working with Lunn while pursuing her master’s degree. She remembers Lunn as always being overjoyed the see his students. She would often see him outside the Memorial Union under an umbrella drinking coffee and having conversations with students who stopped to greet him.
“I never saw him turn a student away,” said Hilden. “For hours and hours and hours and hours he would be having lunch.”
Lunn served as a professor of history at UC Davis for two decades before his untimely passing in 1990, but his work as a scholar and his deep commitment to his students left a powerful impression that continues to resonate today.
A lecture that changed a life
Eugene “Gene” Lunn was born in Brooklyn in 1941. His parents were both teachers. He left New York to attend Brandeis University then pursued his Ph.D. at UC Berkeley. He taught for two years at Reed College in Oregon before joining the Department of History at UC Davis in 1970 where he taught European intellectual history.
Lunn was passionate about the rich complexity of European intellectual history, about which he would publish two influential books published by the University of California Press. His first book was a richly nuanced analysis of the German philosopher and writer Gustav Landauer. His second book was a meticulous study of Georg Lukács, Bertolt Brecht, Walter Benjamin and Theodor Adorno.
Lunn was also known as much for his physical size as his intellectual intensity. He stood at 6’2”, and while he lectured would sometimes put one foot up on the table while a stream of words flowed out across the classroom.
“He was a very powerful lecturer,” said Fracchia. “You would just be kind of blown back in your seat.”
One of Lunn’s lectures was the second pivotal moment in Fracchia’s life. The first came in December of 1969 when he watched the draft lottery on television to find out if he would be sent to fight in Vietnam like so many of his friends and peers. He was a junior at UC Davis at the time.
His draw was #312, a high number that meant he would not be drafted. Life suddenly changed.
Fracchia dropped out of school and with two friends spent the last four months of 1970 driving 1,000 miles across Europe in a used Volkswagen bus. Fracchia visited family in Sicily, where his grandparents had emigrated, and then spent time with his friend’s family just outside of Venice. They saw first-hand all the places they had only read about in class.
When Fracchia returned in January of 1971, he was so intrigued by all he had seen that he decided to take a course in European history. That winter quarter, the only class that fit his schedule was a course on European intellectual history. Fracchia had no idea what the course title meant, but he decided to at least sit through the first class.
“As we said in those days, it absolutely blew my mind,” said Fracchia. “I remember very clearly walking across the quad after class and one of my roommates saw me and looked at me and said, ‘What's wrong with you?’ Shaking my head, I replied, ‘I don't know what that guy was talking about but that's what I want to learn.’”
Helping a student find her own way
Hilden had known about Lunn from when she was an undergraduate student at UC Berkeley while he was finishing his Ph.D. She was the first in her family to go to college. Her Native American family members had been sent to Indian boarding schools and never had the opportunity.
As soon as Hilden graduated from UC Berkeley in the 1960s, she became a teacher to primarily African American children on probation from the California Youth Authority.
“In a weird way, that was more my home than Berkeley had ever been,” said Hilden.
The work was rewarding but after eight years it left her completely burned out. She found a job at UC Davis teaching in Upward Bound as well as part-time work in the Learning Assistance Center.
That first summer, Hilden began thinking about graduate school. She had studied English at UC Berkeley, but she had come to understand how much history mattered.
“There were some really interesting people on the history faculty,” said Hilden. “Very white, very male, but all of them that I encountered were open to really supporting you as you went on your own way.”
I felt closer to Gene Lunn than to any of my colleagues at Davis. We shared our love for European intellectual history, our distaste for history conferences, and our Jewish background. He was such an intellectual in a world made up of academics. He respected women, encouraged my interest in women's history and his students' work with grace and constructive compassion.
— Ruth Rosen, Professor Emerita of History
Hilden was accepted to the master’s degree program at UC Davis. She originally planned to study American intellectual history and wanted to write her thesis on the philosopher Susanne Langer. She was assigned a faculty advisor, but it wasn’t a good fit.
“He was just awful to me,” said Hilden. “He was very white and admired the Puritans above all, and of course if you're Native and you know anything about the Puritans you talk about genocide.”
Even though she still felt insecure about her place in a university at all, she tried working with him. One day she wandered into Lunn’s office and told him the situation. They had an easy rapport as they were almost peers in age.
Lunn asked her to share what she had written so far and to come back in a few days. When she saw Lunn again, he said her work was brilliant.
“I thought good,” said Hilden, “because I was going to drop out of graduate school.”
Learning to listen
As an undergraduate, Fracchia took every course Lunn offered, and as a Ph.D. student he covered all of Lunn’s courses multiple times as a teaching assistant. He knew all of Lunn’s lectures inside and out. He could tell when the jokes were coming.
“It was just fun,” said Fracchia. “I mean, it was great fun.”
For several years, Lunn regularly received glowing student evaluations until one year in the early 1980s when his evaluations came back much lower. Shocked, Lunn asked Fracchia what had changed.
Fracchia knew the students well through leading small discussion groups. The problem came from a misunderstanding. As soon as Lunn thought he knew what a student’s question was, he would launch into a long and detailed answer that rushed ahead like a freight train going down the tracks.
Gene’s passion for every topic he took up electrified his audiences. He confronted the students with the moral and political challenges that we encounter when we approach a figure such as Rousseau or Marx or Nietzsche or Foucault. He did not tell them what to think and do, but showed them the problems such thinkers raise for our own time. This made his lectures highly relevant to how we live in the world and make choices about our actions in it.
— William Hagen, Professor Emeritus of History
To Fracchia, Lunn’s interruptions were merely a sign of exuberance and excitement. To students, they meant something else.
“The students revered him so much,” said Fracchia, “and when he interrupted them, they felt that he thought they weren't very smart. Of course, that was the furthest thing from his mind.”
Fracchia’s advice was to do just one thing: when a student asks a question, don't talk until the student is finished asking it.
A week later, during a lecture Fracchia heard so many times that he knew it almost verbatim, Lunn called on a student. The room went quiet. Almost as soon as the student began to ask the question, Lunn tore off into his answer.
Then there was a pause.
“Oh, I’m sorry,” said Lunn. “Go ahead. I didn’t mean to interrupt.”
Fracchia watched Lunn listen to everything the student had to say.
“He started listening,” said Fracchia. “Once he learned to curb his enthusiasm and excitement long enough to listen to students’ questions, he developed from a very good teacher to a brilliant teacher.”
A deep curiosity
Hilden described Lunn’s curiosity as voracious, and it extended to the people all around him. He was always interested in his students’ intellectual choices. He asked them to share with him the books they were reading.
“He was maybe the first male professor I ever encountered who came into class and just talked about what sexism had done to women and how he had had to overcome his own sexism,” said Hilden. “He would ask for help all the time. ‘Tell me if I'm making a mistake. Tell me if I get it wrong.’ He would just keep on working at it.”
At that time, Hilden and a handful of other graduate students held a regular reading group and drank beer afterwards at Larry Blake’s Brewster House, a second location of the popular restaurant in Berkeley. The one in Davis occupied an old shingle-roofed house on G Street before it was torn down. Lunn would join them sometimes when he stayed in Davis to teach.
One of those days, the jukebox was playing “Dropkick Me Jesus,” a 1976 country/western sung by Bobby Bare and written by Nashville songwriter Paul Craft.
“Dropkick me Jesus through the goalposts of life,” Lunn repeated. “Did I hear that right? What could that possibly mean?”
It’s about football, they said. They began to explain that kicking the football through the goal posts is a way of scoring points.
Lunn didn’t follow football but had always been a fan of sports. He had won medals as a runner growing up in New York. Until his last year teaching, he played softball in the student-faculty league at UC Davis.
That evening in the bar with Hilden, Lunn said, “Well, I’m just a kid from Brooklyn. I don't know anything about football. But why would they do that about ‘dropkick me Jesus’?”
“We were trying to explain country music to Gene Lunn,” said Hilden. “It was just hilarious. We were all laughing, and he was having a good time, but he was very intent on adding that to what he knew about. I think he did that with everyone.”
My specialty is Chinese history, but in Germany one summer I came across the story of the Golem, a well-known East European fable about a sort of Frankenstein-like monster that protected and awed locals. I once asked Gene if he knew about Meyrinck's recent novel, Der Golem. Gene was astonished and asked me how a Chinese historian happened to know about these European things. This, of course, led to further discussions about the development of both our backgrounds and interests, and a richer friendship.
— Don Price, Professor Emeritus of History
After receiving her master’s degree from UC Davis, Hilden went on to Cambridge University where she wrote her Ph.D. dissertation on Marxist, socialist working women in France. When she was writing her second book on a similar group in Belgium, she looked out at the King’s College Chapel from her office window and realized she wanted to go home.
Hilden spent the majority of the rest of her career teaching in Department of Ethnic Studies at UC Berkeley and just recently retired as Professor Emerita.
Of the hundreds of graduate students Hilden has mentored across her career, like Lunn she has never turned anyone away. Because of this, she said, she also learned about things she would never have known otherwise.
“That was Gene,” said Hilden. “Gene knew that the joy of being a professor is that you're constantly forced all the time think, think, think, change, think, change, think and learn about something you never thought you'd be learning about.”
Life in and out of the classroom
In 1989, Lunn received the Magnar Ronning Award for Teaching Excellence, an annual award given by UC Davis students. He died of cancer a year later at 48 years old, 20 years after he joined the faculty.
Today the annual Eugene Lunn Memorial Lecture Series, hosted by the Department of History and supported by donations of time and money, brings scholars and writers from around the country to share their work at UC Davis.
While Lunn might have stood out as the quintessential New Yorker at a university known for agriculture in California’s rural Central Valley, Hilden doesn’t think of Lunn as a fish out of water. Instead, he was someone who brought his pond with him wherever he happened to be.
“I think he just swam in whatever water was there with joy and enthusiasm,” said Hilden.
Gene Lunn was an exceptional scholar, outstanding teacher, and greatly admired colleague. He joined the history department in 1970, a time of dramatic expansion in its size, and quickly became a close friend of other young faculty in the department including myself. He will always be renowned for the depth and originality of his scholarship in the field of European intellectual history, remembered with fondness by his colleagues, and admired by his undergraduate students for the brilliance of his lectures and by his graduate students for the unstinting support that he gave them.
— Ted Margadant, Professor Emeritus of History
Fracchia’s first class with Lunn more than 50 years ago led to a life of scholarship and teaching. When Fracchia completed his Ph.D., he joined the faculty at Clark Honors College at the University of Oregon where he served until his recent retirement. Even today, the books all around his home office are related to the ideas and people he first learned about in Lunn’s classroom.
Across a teaching career of 35 years, his own students benefitted from all he learned from Lunn as a teacher. He received the University of Oregon’s two highest honors for teaching.
“I doubt that I would have won those awards had I not had the opportunity to work for so long as Gene’s teaching assistant,” said Fracchia. “Those awards belong as much to Gene as to me.”
Sometimes Fracchia still thinks about the times he looked after Lunn’s oldest daughter, Rachel Gatoff (née Lunn). He never minded. Growing up, Fracchia always enjoyed working with kids, and Gatoff still has warm memories of the times she spent with him.
One day, Fracchia took Gatoff to Central Park to play on the swings while her father was teaching. Gatoff was maybe 10 years old at the time.
They arrived back at the Lunn’s classroom a few minutes before he finished lecturing. Fracchia doesn’t remember the topic, but Lunn’s eyes were wide and on the blackboard his hands were marking out a tangle of meaning while his students watched in awe.
Of that moment, Gatoff remembers wanting her father to notice she was there. Then his voice tapered off. Students turned back to see who was there.
“He gave me such a big smile,” said Gatoff. “As a child you love that recognition.”
Throughout her life, Gatoff always knew that teaching fueled her father. Even today, when she meets his former undergraduate students they can’t stop telling stories about him. Standing in the back of her father’s classroom that day so many years ago, she glimpsed a small part of what he gave to them.
“The students absolutely loved seeing it,” said Fracchia. “This is a guy they revered so much and only saw him as a talking brain and there's this little daughter. Taking her to see his class was absolutely one of the best things I've ever done.”
Learn more about the Eugene Lunn Memorial Lecture Series.
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