Born September 10, 1929 in Baltimore, MD, Bob was the son of Eustis Espey Morsberger, a printer and newspaperman, and Mary Burgess Morsberger, a teacher. He went to Thomas Jefferson Elementary School #232, Gwynns Falls Park Junior High School #91, and Baltimore City College High School in Baltimore and attended the Peabody Preparatory School of Music for classes in piano and percussion. Bob received his BA in History from Johns Hopkins, which his father had also attended, in 1950.
After college, he served in the Korean War. Because he was fluent in German, he was stationed with counterintelligence services in Nuremberg and Garmisch-Partenkirchen. He always maintained that this probably saved his life.
Bob used the GI Bill to go to graduate school, receiving his MA and PhD in English from the University of Iowa, where he met his future wife, Katharine Sanderson Miller. After a whirlwind romance, they were married on June 17, 1955. They celebrated their 64th anniversary the day before he died.
Bob taught in the English departments at a number of universities before landing at Cal Poly:
Miami University in Oxford, Ohio, where his daughter Grace was born; Utah State University;
Michigan State; New Mexico State University in Las Cruces; and Eastern Kentucky University. While at Michigan State, he spent two years at the University of Nigeria in Nsukka, which had a sister university relationship with Michigan State. Family lore states that he came home in the middle of a brutal Michigan winter and asked his wife if she’d consider moving to Africa and she replied, “When do we leave?!”
As a professor, Bob took the admonition to publish or perish to heart, producing several books and countless articles throughout his career, on topics ranging from swordplay on the Renaissance and Elizabethan stage to the French Revolution to a playful rant against commercialese entitled “Ramathon and the Ness Monster”. His publications included the first critical biography of James Thurber; two grammar textbooks, noted for their use of cartoons and popular culture to make the subject more palatable--How to Improve Your Verbal Skills and
Commonsense, Grammar and Style; and a biography, coauthored with Katharine: Lew Wallace: Militant Romantic. He also edited the Dictionary of Literary Biography. A specialist on John Steinbeck, Bob coedited the Steinbeck Quarterly with Tetsumaro Hayashi for many years and wrote introductions to a couple of Penguin reissues of shorter works by John Steinbeck, including The Short Reign of Pippin IV and Zapata, as well as to The Mark of Zorro.
A nature lover and historian, Bob enjoyed using his summer breaks to work as a seasonal park ranger at the Great Smoky Mountains National Park for seven summers, where he led guided hikes, gave campfire talks on the Trail of Tears, and learned to pay the autoharp.
Bob was an avid film fan and a walking encyclopedia of film lore, able to reel off the titles, directors, stars and costars of countless films as well as to bang out their soundtracks on the piano. He and Katharine were also theater critics, contributing reviews to the Claremont COURIER for many years of plays at the Los Angeles Music Center and the South Coast Repertory, among others.
In the days before audio books, Bob also contributed to the community by using his sonorous voice and impeccable diction to record readings for the blind. And he remained politically engaged, and outraged, to the end.
Bob is survived by his beloved brother, the painter Philip Morsberger; sister-in-law Mary Ann Morsberger; wife Katharine; daughter Grace Morsberger and son-in-law Rich Stern; grandchildren Emma and Jake Stern; niece Wendy Morsberger; great nephews Ben, Jesse, and Elan Morsberger; and countless Morsberger cousins in Catonsville, MD. He was predeceased by his nephew Robert Edward Morsberger, a musician.
“The past is an old armchair in the attic, the present an ominous ticking sound, and the future is anybody’s guess.”
James Thurber
“for life’s not a paragraph
and death i think is no parenthesis”
e e cummings
A memorial service will be held this Sunday, June 30 at 1:00 pm at Christ Church Parish, 1127 N. San Antonio Ave., Ontario, CA 91762. A short reception will follow the service.
In lieu of flowers, please consider making a donation to the Alzheimer’s Association, PEN America, the ACLU or the Southern Law Poverty Center.
Eulogy:
My dad was an early champion of women’s rights. As the devoted husband and father of women, he could never understand why anyone would want to oppress or suppress them. He encouraged my mom to write and publish and insisted on her having coauthor status on the biography of Lew Wallace that she had helped him research and write.
And he was always eager to help a friend and to make enthusiastic book or movie recommendations. A walking encyclopedia of history, literature and film lore, he was my Google before there was an Internet. He was a wonderful storyteller, too. I badgered him throughout my childhood to “Tell me another story!” When he ran out of fairy tales to tell me, he would tell me the stories from his favorite novels. Years later, when I saw the movie Les Miserable, I remember thinking, “This seems so familiar,” and realized it was one of the tales he had told me. And his version of the climactic chase through the Paris sewers was so much better! His storytelling charmed his grandkids as well and so much of him lives on in them. My son has his chocolate brown eyes and sweet expression and he and my daughter both share his fierce sense of justice and fairness and his love of books and movies.
He and my mom were so happy to have found this congregation, where they felt so welcomed and at home, both spiritually and among all of you.
I learned so much from my dad throughout my life about his intellectual passions and about how to live a good and ethical life in an increasingly complicated world.
We are each of us rare and unique, especially to those who love us, but my father, I believe, had a truly rare and unique goodness and sweetness of spirit. In the words of Hamlet:
He was a man. Take him for all in all.
I shall not look upon his like again.
I was profoundly lucky to have been raised by this lovely man and I will miss him every day for the rest of my life. I love you madly, Papa.
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