I have on a number of occasions spoken of my good friend Milton Cantor although not recently on this blog. Milton is a retired history professor at the University of Massachusetts. I met him shortly after I transferred there from Columbia in 1971 and I think of him to this day as my best friend, although in recent years we have had very little contact. Milton is 95, by the way. I had a lovely conversation with him yesterday on the phone – he was very much his old self. What was his major complaint at 95? That he could not get into the Frost Library at Amherst College to check some footnotes.
God love him! There is no one like him.
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Milton Cantor may have been the first ever college professor I encountered...in Herter Hall on a Monday morning at 8am at the start of my first college semester. Coming down from the hills of Western MA as a teenager, I had never encountered anything like him.
I think his hair was still wet from swimming, but I assumed it was just super slicked back with pomade or something. You really had to sit up front and lean in to hear him, and I remember him quoting at length from "A Man For All Seasons" in a U.S. History survey course, as he paced back and forth in his maroon turtleneck.
Over the course of my checkered UMass career, I took every course he taught and gained a respect for the intellect and for scholarship that has lasted my life thus far. That never would have happened without his example. I just picked up a recently published book of his off of Amazon, "The First Amendment on Fire", that I'm looking forward to reading, so it was great reading your post about him, Professor Wolff.
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