George Tindall Obituary

George joined my senior fitness class several years ago--the class was a gift from Blair, who realized how important it would be for George (and later Blossom) to keep moving in their later years. What a blessing for everyone in the class! George made us laugh, answered our questions about politics, and was a regular exerciser for years. One day I asked him a question about Stephen Decatur, and the very next class George brought me a copy of his 2000-page book, America: A Narrative History, with a note inside: "Salli, the important thing is not in knowing it all, but in knowing where to look it up." The inscription inside the cover says "For Salli Benedict, who may find a batch of these useful for weight-lifting classes." I miss George every day, but I know I am among the very lucky to have been his friend.

What wonderful memories I have of our dear Dr. Tindall. It has been heartwarming to be in touch again with those who knew and loved him--and whose lives he changed. Our son, Robert, was born on his birthday--a special tie remembered by dear Mrs. T. and our dear GBT. He renewed my special ties to our dear "South" and the best of its traditions. He will be missed by so very many.

Please join us for a celebration of George Tindall's life
Sat., Jan. 13 at 2:30 pm
Assembly Hall
Carol Woods Retirement Community
750 Weaver Dairy Rd.
Chapel Hill, NC 27514

I wrote this message upon learning of George's death. Following is an edited version: I was a HUGE fan of George Tindall. I was so deeply saddened to learn of his death this morning.

I was executive director of Southern Growth Policies Board, when in 1986 we did the Commission on the Future of the South. George was our lead speaker, as he had been in 1982 when we celebrated the Board's tenth anniversary. The Board was chaired by Bill Clinton and the Commission by William Winter--the glory days of southern governors and leaders. The name of the report was /Halfway Home and a Long Way to Go/, one of the most important regional policy documents ever issued; and many of us still quote George's opening speech to us. Former Governor Winter, upon learning of George's death from me, replied that "he was a hero in the South when we did not have many."

I stayed in touch with George through the years and renewed our friendship when I came back to NC in 2003 and joined Carolina. He was a giant to me--I had quoted him so often in my doctoral dissertation in the seventies that I was overwhelmed to meet him. What I found was a gentle, elegant, and genteel giant instead of a scary one.

Please accept my condolences. In your sadness, be comforted by what a splended scholar and fellow George Tindall was and how much he meant to so many people.

Late in the summer of 1965, looking like something out of the “Grapes of Wrath,” the Weare family pulled into Chapel Hill towing a U-Haul trailer with a boxspring and a bicycle tied on top. Far from home–a benighted region in the foothills of Colorado–we wondered if we belonged in this “Athens of the South.” But George and Blossom made us feel comfortable. George, the former English major, taught me the difference between the Joads and the Snopeses--the difference between survival and endurance--often citing the last lines of “The Sound and the Fury,” where Faulkner returned to Dilsey’s people, the soulful black folk, and noted simply, “they endured.”

Refusing to view the downtrodden in history as mere victims, George was ahead of his time and provided a model for his graduate students who would teach and write African American History. Through the pioneering example of his own dissertation, he demonstrated the difference between a study of oppression and a study of what some of us began to call “real black history,” the resilient side of “life behind the veil.”

George also modeled how a mentor could be both an uncompromising critic and a warm friend, both Dr. Tindall and George. Similarly, he thought it possible to seek both disinterested truth and social justice, knowing full well the elusive nature of such pursuits. From this perspective, Alan Paton’s “Cry the Beloved Country” served him better than did Faulkner’s novels, and George never tired of quoting the South African’s closing question: “When will come the dawn of our emancipation?” To which Paton answered, “Why, that remains a secret.”

As other Tindall students have noted, George’s philosophic forbearance came packaged, necessarily so perhaps, with sparkling wit. After the publication of “Emergence,” George and I were walking across the quadrangle in front of Wilson Library, talking about his reviews and postpartum concerns, when he turned to me, all serious, and said, “Enough about me, let’s talk about you. What do YOU think of my new book?” More than a generation later, I can answer with great certainty, “Like you, George, it will endure.”


Bud Weare

I was blessed to be the "history wife" of one of Dr. Tindall's students for twenty-two years, and while many will remember George always as a wonderful teacher and a great scholar, standing behind a podium or lecturing in a classroom, I can not think of him without remembering Blossom by his side. Their partnership set the standard for many of the young "history couples" they mentored outside the classroom, including my husband and myself. Wherever we went, we took both George and Blossom with us, nurturing and mentoring our own students as they had theirs, with gentle encouragement and gracious hospitality.

My heart goes out to you, Blossom, at the loss of your husband and best friend. My love to you, to Bruce and Blair. God bless you all.

George was a great historian, and, what is much more important, a wonderful human being. The Mixons will miss him immensely.

Dr.Tindall's lessons have always stayed close to me. Even as I write this from my office in an entertainment company in New York City, Strunk and White and Fowler's Modern English Usage are on the table next to me. He was a wonderful mentor and teacher when I was an undergraduate and graduate student in Chapel Hill and a wonderful friend after I left.

On my bookshelf at home is a photograph of Dr. Tindall taken about ten years ago in Chapel Hill. It is one of the few photographs other than those of my family that I display. I think it says so much about him as a teacher, a mentor and a person that he made such a strong impression on the life of a student who took his courses more than three decades ago. Signing up for "The South Since Reconstruction" was one the greatest things that ever happened to me, and I am so very grateful for all that followed.

I am deeply saddened by the passing of George Tindall and as deeply grateful for his having lived. His gracious prose and graceful life have been models for us all. Especially, I am grateful for the fact that George Tindall never gave up on me, even when I might have given up on myself. Jean and I send our prayerful good wishes to Mrs. Tindall and their children. Many thanks for allowing us to share in the life of a fine teacher and scholar.

I was deeply saddened by news of Dr. Tindall’s death and offer my deepest sympathy to the family of Mr. Tindall. I never had the pleasure & honor of meeting George but as a keen reader of his works, I always felt nothing but appreciations for Dr. Tindall for providing me and others with so many excellent works. History of the south and Dr. Tindall’s name are inseparable.

Unlike the vast majority of people who signed this guest book, I never took a course from Tindall and in fact only met him a couple of times. But I have great respect for his scholarship, from which I continue to learn. And I'll always be grateful for his favorable referee report on "The Shaping of Southern Politics." I guessed that he was the referee before I positively learned it, because he was my ideal referee. I know that my mentor, Vann Woodward, shared my opinion of George Tindall. As sorry as I am to see the giants gone, I'm glad to see them celebrated.

Academic lives follow a pattern. The end of each semester is marked by ceaseless grading, visits and calls from frantic students-- and then the sudden quiet when it is over, when you can sit back and think that all is good. That’s where I am today, and I’m there because of George Tindall. Without his encouragement and support, his model of the gentleman academic scholar, my life would have turned out very differently.

Blossom, Blair, Bruce--My thoughts are with you.

George understood the need to explore new ways of reconstructing the past. He was a great believer in oral history as a source of historical evidence and supported the establishment of the Southern Oral History Program at UNC. As one of the first staff members of that program in the 1970s, I have always been appreciative of George's encouragement. I am sorry to hear about his death and I extend my sincere condolences.

our deepest sympathies to the familly of our former neighbor,such a gentlemen.We will miss you.

I was only fourteen when my grandfather died, but I can still remember my own father sadly walking out onto the front porch afterwards and saying to himself aloud: “Now there’s no-one between me and the ditch.” I feel something like that as I think about George Tindall.

First as my major professor and then as my friend, he was always there between me and whatever ditch I encountered (or managed to dig for myself). I can think of at least three critical occasions in my life when, at my request, he gave me advice. I took that advice on two occasions and I wish I had done so on the third.

Much has rightly been said about his wonderfully wry wit. While it seemed to reflect a way of laughing at the world, I think it was his weapon against revealing that he deeply cared about that world. For underneath the careful scholarship and the thoughtful balance of his writing and speaking was a passion—in the words of the Greek Poet Aeschylus—“to make gentle the life of the world and tame the savage heart of man.”

Talking about the importance of “mentors” has become one of the most cliché-ridden aspects of our modern therapeutic cultures, but any of us who knew George would recognize that there is something to those clichés. If he was not one to tell us how to live our lives, the truth is: we didn’t need a lecture on the subject. We had George.

I first heard of George when a Japanese friend of mine, Natsuko Akimoto, told me that her husband (whose specialty was southern history in the U.S.) had come here to study with the well known southern historian, George Tindall. So we were somewhat in touch through that contact, but mostly later when George joined our Senior Stretching class taught by Salli Benedict at the Senior Center here in Chapel Hill. He was a wonderful addition to our class, full of wit as well as wisdom and has been much missed in these last months when he was absent. He usually had a joke of the day -- often inappropriate but always funny.

We did benefit from his presence and suffer in his absence

In the spring of 1990, in my sophomore year at the University of North Carolina, I had the privilege of taking the last undergraduate lecture course to be taught by George Tindall before his retirement. George had also served as the dissertation advisor for my father, Dan Carter, when he took the Ph.D. in history at UNC over two decades earlier. George had graciously given me a personal tour of the campus when I visited it during my senior year in high school.

I remember being enthralled over the course of the semester by George's skills as a lecturer as he taught “The History of the New South” for the last time. He possessed the timing, the cadence, and the narrative and organizational skills of a consummate orator, and I felt tremendously fortunate to have him as a professor.

On the last day of our class, one mid-morning early in May, George was delivering a spell-binding analysis of the emergence of the Sunbelt economy and the reemergence of the South as a key broker in national politics. He had nearly twenty-five minutes to wrap up the lecture, and I remember my eagerness to see how he would find his way “home” in the conclusion.

Abruptly, in mid-sentence, he stopped, and turned to face the row of open windows, looking out at the quadrangle. For those who don’t know it, the main quadrangle on the campus at Chapel Hill, studded with magnificent trees, is a beautiful things to behold at that time of year. We all turned to follow his gaze, and it seemed as though the whole world was in bloom.

I remember him prefacing what he said next as a quote. For the life of me, I cannot remember the source. But turning back to face us, George, with a wistful smile, said simply: “And now I have a date with spring.”

Then he gathered his notes, picked up his briefcase, and without another word, walked out the door, leaving us in silence.

To have George Tindall as a mentor and friend is a gift. And, as in the case of all significant things, this grew in importance over time. I have reflected on many occasions over a 36-year academic career on some insight or egregious pun traceable directly to him. Among other things, he taught me that how something is communicated is perhaps as important as what is communicated (and somewhere he is helpfully taking the pencil to this comment). Yet the “D” I received on my first test in his 1880-1920 class clearly communicated that while grand ruminations on the differences between the Populists and Progressives might be interesting, it was the firm grasp of facts that he was looking for, because they were the essential structure for the narrative. I tried mightily never to make that mistake again. My extensive notes from that class constituted the foundation of my first lectures at Purdue University. As his assistant, I had the task of checking footnotes in the manuscript for The Emergence of the New South—an experience that taught me (1) that even the best historians need help with footnotes and (2) that the best historians will go to great lengths to get them right. His wit is something that those who did not know him cannot fully appreciate. The punning duels in his seminars—with graduate students more courageous and clever than I—were carried over into the library carrels and pubs of Chapel Hill. At a very memorable dinner at Berghoff’s in Chicago, during an AHA meeting, George Tindall regaled my family, including my two children, with stories they remember to this day, including two elaborate jokes that might still not be considered suitable for network television. For George Tindall to depart his profession, family, and friends at any age is lamentable; but we are all so fortunate to have known him and benefited from his wisdom, humor, guidance, and searching intelligence.

Dr. Tindall was an excellent teacher, an outstanding scholar, and a kind person. He was helpful to me when I needed it. He was funny with his exceedingly dry wit. I still remember "West Raleigh Tech" as his way of referring to NC State.

I didn't have a chance to tell him this when some of us in his seminar gathered in Chapel Hill last year. My then 11th-grade son, preparing a school paper of the impact of "Birth of a Nation," was able to use Dr. Tindall's writing on the matter in "The Emergence of the New South." It was one of the few books I had kept from my CHapel Hill days. Sort of a second generation learning from Dr. Tindall.

I was saddened to learn of Dr. Tindall's death and it is with a fond memory of his contribution to so many students that this message is written! His Southern History Seminar provided us with a deeper appreciation of our heritage as Southerners and the challenges that have confronted us and still confront us! What better legacy to the living than to pass on the contributions and challenges of the past. His imprint on our lives will remain. Very sincerely, Ann Parker (Maust)

I was in Dr. Tindall's History 164 class at UNC in Fall of 1972. It was a pleasure to have been in his class. I'll always remember his wit. The last time I saw him was in the spring of 1973, my last semester at UNC. He and Dr. Isaac Copeland were walking together in front of Wilson Library. That gave me the opportunity to express my gratitude to both of them for the lessons they taught me.

Although I graduated in 1973,Dr. Tindall still comes to mind when I think about my favorite professors at UNC.

I thankful to know that he lived life to the fullest!

My prayers go out to the Tindall family in your time of sorrow.

Brant Hart
AB 1973 UNC

Dear Blossom,

When word came of George's death, David Tindall McMath and his young family were visiting us from California. I am grateful for having been able to talk directly with Dave about what you and George had meant to our family over the years.

He had heard much of it before, but we talked about George as a wonderful mentor and about how you two welcomed us almost as members of your own family. The strongest memory of that moment, which I had never shared with my children before, involved something that happened during the first year Linda and I were in Chapel Hill. In 1968-69 the army, desperate for warm bodies, was calling up the mentally, physically, and morally defective and graduate students (not mutually exclusive categories, of course). I was drafted and ordered to report at the end of spring semester.

George and I were just getting to know each other, but he could not have been more supportive. From that moment until I returned to UNC, he was a constant source of encouragement to his absent student. I will never forget his kindness. It was typical of the kind of man he was.

Linda and I hold you and Blair and Bruce in our thoughts and prayers. We share with you the sadness of this moment and the deep gratitude for a life well lived.

George was friend to my mother in first grade and through high school and then Furman University.

He was always for me the model for me the model of the good man, gentlemanly and yet quite activist in politics and very much ready and able to lead change in his New South. His careful research and preparation, his many strictures about how to write and how to write well, these things are with me and everyone else forever.

When my mother passed away on 5 September 1987, I was a visiting professor at UNC, and George took time out from a hectic schedule to come by and sit and talk with me on a day when I surely needed such kindness.
I miss him terribly, and I offer prayers for family who remain behind.

Ever the soul of courtesy, George Brown Tindall nonetheless indulged in the sparring that often takes place between an author and his publisher until he discovered that my forebears, too, ended up on the losing side of what he loved to call "The War of Northern Aggression." His words will be preserved and read wherever people care about wit, elegance, and narrative brilliance.

George befriended me early in my career, and I always found him a wonderful source of good humor and good sense. His wit was legendary, and his work inspired and informed me in ways too numerous to mention. My deepest sympathies to his family and his many devoted former students

Smite the Philistines with the first blow! Full name at first mention! I love to thunder Tindall-isms at graduate students. He was always a gentleman and sweet and funny with his grad students. We will miss George Brown Tindall.

I was very saddened to learn of Dr. Tindall's death. A great teacher and a masterful seminar leader and scholar, he taught with subtle wit as well as great erudition, and I have used many anecdotes from his classes and seminars in teaching my own classes. One rule he emphasized was to use the full name of any person when first mentioned in any writing. I had the temerity to suggest that maybe the rule should not always apply, noting that Ida M. Tarbell had never used her middle name "Minerva." Dr. Tindall insisted that the rule would still apply, and I dutifully put Minerva where I had had an "M." The lesson was driven home when the seminar members received their invitations to a tea at the end of the semester, and all were addressed with full names used--except mine, which was addressed to J.B. Thomas.
--Jerry Bruce Thomas, Shepherd University (UNC PhD, 1972)

Blossom:
The news of George's death is, of course, very sad. But the memories are warm and frequently funny. He was a mentor for me as an historian for many years, and then, when I was seasoned enough to recognize it, he became a role model for just being a very decent and responsible human being. Now, as I enter that period we call "retirement", he still is out there pointing the way to do it right.

Beth and I send our deepest sympathies to you, Bruce and Blair.

Les Lamon
South Bend, IN

George read my first book-length manuscript more than thirty years ago, and his advice and enthusiasm helped to launch my career. Perhaps some of my fondest moments together with George and Blossom occurred trading restaurant recommendations and reviews. Though we'll miss him, his good cheer and great work provide a wonderful legacy

George kindly came to The Citadel to participate in a couple of our conferences on Southern History--and indelibly left his mark of wit and insight into the human condition here as he did in so many other places. We shall miss and remember him always.

To a wonderful mentor, teacher, and friend.

I had the great good fortune to know George for twenty years. He was a wise and patient mentor, a man of great dignity and dimension with a charming wit and lively curiosity. His prose was as lucid and as engaging as his conversation, and he loved to read, to teach, to write, and to laugh. He grasped virtue not for its obligations but for its grace, and he generously shared with his family, friends, and colleagues the gift of his great example.

Welcome to the guest book for George Brown Tindall. I hope you'll leave a remembrance and enjoy the words of other friends, colleagues, and former students.

Memorials may be sent to:
George B. Tindall Endowed Lectureship & Scholarship
Fund
Furman University
3300 Poinsett Highway
Greenville, SC 29613