Remembering Buzz

Few Barrytowners will be more sorely missed than "Buzz" Gummere, who died late last spring at the age of 94. No one who visited him and his long-time wife Peg in their octagonal lantern house up the slope on Station Hill Road, where they lived for almost 60 years, came away without being won over by this man who lived his life as if it were "a great artistic and intellectual adventure," as Cindy Kubik put it in her fall 2002 profile published in AboutTown ("The Sage of Barrytown," available online at our website).

Buzz came from a long line of Quaker educators, and was himself a Latin secondary school teacher when he met and married Peg in 1941. He became an early advocate and spokesperson for former Shakespearean actor F. M. Alexander's method for relieving muscular tension, the Alexander Technique. With dreams of becoming a writer, he took jobs as a grade-school teacher, greengrocer, and door-to-door World Book salesman to make ends meet. In 1950 he settled down as Bard's Assistant Director of Admissions. Buzz loved the college and the opportunity to listen to students rather than teach them but was hopeless at paperwork. He grew restless, and in 1961 moved the family's base of operations to New York City, where he eventually become involved in career planning at Columbia University. He loved the city, which he considered the center of the known universe. He also found the time and energy to write a book, How to Survive Education Before, During and After College, while living in an apartment with a menagerie of musicians, several teen-agers, a cat, and a very large dog. (In the book category, Buzz also wrote one on the Roman philosopher Seneca and one on the wise men of Colonial America.) After his retirement in the early 1980s, he and Peg moved back to Barrytown full-time, where Peg devoted herself to her art and music teaching, and Buzz explored and promoted the work of British thinker Lancelot Law Whyte, who wrote about "the unitary principle" of physics and biology.

Buzz always said that people should never give up searching for the work that gives them joy. He was a man of grace, intelligence and humor with an unflagging interest in people. He asked that he be remembered as "a gentleman, a scholar, and a judge of good whiskey." His last clear word was marvelous.