Beverly Bruninga will not be able to participate in our group any more

Beverly Bruninga has moved on to the eternal library where the point of view is perpetual and the pages always smell fresh and are alive with words pungent in all languages and in every format: on slates and vellums and scrolls, leather-bound volumes and paperback books and on monitors while sitting, on tape while driving, or in the ear nodes while walking. She still does it all and if she isn’t enjoying it, I think we’d have heard – she’d have gotten more than a little snappish and been whining about it by now.

I’m pretty impressed that editors/leaders of three different groups that remember Bev asked me to write something about her. As my former editor at work, she won’t be surprised I waited until I felt less pressed by a deadline to finish one of my back page interviews for Tennessee Town & City that she edited more than 20 years and then passed the job on to me.

The three groups with memories of her represent just a few of her interests. I was contacted by Billy Fields of the Sherlock Holmes group, the Nashville Scholars of the Three Pipe Problem. She once hosted a Sherlockian meeting at her home where we discussed The Mazarin Stone and enjoyed an English tea, including her piping hot scones. Jack Brennan is the editor of the Diaspora Digest and contact with the Franciscan fringe friars who write for it that she came to know. I formerly published and edited both newsletters and she proofread them and read them with deep delight. The third group is one of her many favorite book clubs.

A devout Episcopalian and more of a rebel even than I in some ways, she helped found a new parish and was an early ardent promoter of women priests and all other equity issues.

Bev was one of the loves of my life – like, you know, one of the four chambers of my heart shut down for nine days. She had the right pedigree. The daughter of a couple of journalists, her father was the famous editor that brought the Miami Herald to top 10 status in the nation. She was an excellent editor and book reviewer herself and always an abiding critic who saved me from myself in my over-writing for years. She was a former librarian, a constant traveler to every continent and area so far discovered including Iran during the time of the Ayatollahs. She was a passionate gardener, edited the Rose Society’s newsletter – no surprise that her dozens of front yard roses were so impressive. The poison she used on them may have caused the rare and deadly interstitial pulmonary fibrosis that killed her at age 77.

For years, from shortly after I joined TML in 1983 until she retired April 1, 1995, we completed the Sunday New York Times crossword puzzle every Monday after work at her desk, always finishing them about the time we finished her two little cans of V-8 and my half pint of vodka. She graduated from Florida State University and was a diehard football fan – and hater of the teams of the Universities of Florida, Miami – where she grew up – and my Notre Dame. I usually agreed with her on UF and UM and we pulled against each other’s team though I always loved the Seminole chant.

She had exquisite tastes in books and all things literary, including the book clubs she invited me to join. Weekly discussions took place every Friday about 4 p.m. at the home of her friend Vanderbilt history professor Rev. Fred Schneider, then at the home of Tish Womack, our mutual friend at work and Bev’s church. Bev and I were near charter members of the monthly Second Wednesday book discussion group at the downtown library that she only recently ceased attending after 15 years.

She was a perpetual student and invited me to attend many a lecture series with her. She went to many more on her own, some of them church related or sponsored by Vanderbilt on their campus. Her obituary appeared for the last time on May 14, next to country singer Eddie Arnold’s. It ends with her journalist daughter Susie saying that Bev requested a vote for the Democrats be made in her honor this fall. Just do it.

Arthur Conan Doyle’s gravestone epitaph has words of Robert Louis Stevenson’s poem “My Wife” that describe Beverly: Steel True, Blade Straight.

Bev would prefer Emily Dickinson’s: Called Back.

Sometimes I still start to pick up the phone to call her back. She intersected with nearly all my lifelong interests (literary, religious, athletic, and professional) so that our brains coursed in nearly the same stream. No one could come up with the missing word for each other like we could. Until recently, we were still calling each other for the missing word. Now she’s gone missing, and many a group feels the loss.

Gael Stahl – May 29, 2008