Mel Kalfus Remembered

I’m saddened to hear about the death of Mel Kalfus. He was my student first and then my close friend. For about 15 years he fought cancer with courage, remarkable equanimity, and a dogged determination to go on with his professional life. How many of us would have walked away in the face of such pain? Not Mel. He was a vice president of the Muller Jordan Weiss advertising agency when he came to talk to me in his mid-40s and to talk his way into NYU’s graduate history program. Kalfus could talk with the best of them, always and forever. He went on to take my courses, pass his exams with flying colors while working full-time and, with Alma, raise their three children.

To complete a dissertation on Frederick L. Olmsted, I told him, would require his tooling up with some graduate psychology courses, given his take on Olmsted’s recounted dreams, his wispy memory of his sainted mother, and his many years in an asylum at the end of his life. I told him two psychology courses should do it. Naturally, Mel’s obsessiveness (in the best sense of the word) led him to take eight graduate courses in psychology, transforming himself into a pioneering psychohistorian and psychobiographer with no help from me.

I helped Mel get his dissertation published, in an NYU Press series I co-chair. Frederick Law Olmsted: Passion of a Public Artist was and is a great piece of work, unique when it came out for

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the sophistication of the interpretation and a standard still for any work on Olmsted, even after 12 years in print. I prize what he said of me in his introduction to that book and what he wrote privately in the flyleaf of the copy he gave me.

Mel and I shared an enthusiasm for sports, though I could never understand his unfailing loyalty to the baseball Giants he had cheered for as a child. Sometimes we would go to Shea stadium together to watch the Jets play football. I will treasure the years of shared friendship with one of my very best – and certainly my most determined – PhD students.

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