My friend Bud

by Zorina Shah

Bud (right) with his friend Lynn Ludlow

I had lost touch with Bud several times during the 34 years I had known him. Once I tracked him down to China during his tenure as Fulbright Professor at a university there. I found him in Oporto, Portugal by calling the US embassy. I was in Frankfurt in 1989 for Buchmesse and woke up on October 18 (Frankfurt is nine hours ahead) to the news of the North California earthquake. Bud and his wife, Georgette, lived in the Bay Area. I tried desperately to contact them through San Francisco State University where he had been Chairman of the Department of Journalism. I finally made contact with the new chair and she told me Bud was no longer there. A couple weeks later I received the information through snail mail. Bud had retired and he and Georgette had moved to Mercer Island, Washington. I wrote. He wrote back. Serendipity, he said. They had moved before the 7.1 earthquake hit.
Writer that he was he painted the most beautiful picture of the view from his sun deck, Mt. Rainier, Lake Washington. I don't remember exactly what he said about the Puget Sound.
Bud was my journalism professor at the Caribbean Institute of Mass Communications, Mona Campus. He was driven around by Assistant Professor Vivien Carrington until he and Georgette acquired a VW Rabbit and she drove him around instead. I started off not caring too much about him, maybe the little halting speech, maybe the face which reddened too easily in the blazing Jamaica sun.  He adjusted quickly and so did I. He had a wealth of experience in newspaper production, but boy, was he on the ball with the writing techniques and nose for a story? He could show you how to first get the information and then how to use that information to craft a wonderful story. During that time we were able to look at global coverage of Jonestown massacre in Guyana, the Grenada Revolution and the Iranian Revolution.
Bud could tear your story to bits in the kindest way. Most people fell for it. I knew what he was doing and worked hard for his approval. I was rewarded with editing the department newspaper. He referred to Marcia Mentore (Erskine) and me as "the dyad from Trinidad".
I maintained contact with him because I had promised to before leaving Jamaica, It would drop off, sometimes for months, and start again. The last time I found Michele Liebes on the internet. I knew her name. That's my father alright, she said. He had moved from Washington State to Bethesda, Maryland after Georgette died. I called often. Sometimes he wouldn't be there. Like when he had gone to take Georgette's ashes to Grenoble in the French Alps. Her family is French. He met her while working for Stars and Stripes and I like to think it was around this time http://www.stripes.com/news/foreign-entrants-pace-tour-de-france-cyclists-1.122021.
During the war young Bud was a waist gunner on B-24 raids into Germany. I thought about it often, but strangely, I never asked. The halting speech may have been linked to fragments of shrapnel in his chest although I have read elsewhere it may not have been his chest at all.
At the end of the war Bud's combat unit was in Rome and he was one of several allied officers sent to an audience with Pope Pius XII at the Vatican. Twenty four years old, meeting with the pope, what else would he remember? "My feet sank into the carpet". I found a picture on the History Channel website and hoped to ask if he was in it.
On another occasion no one answered the phone in Maryland for weeks. Michele had died. I had communicated with them weekly during her illness. Many times I would speak to her when he was out. I often leaned on the church wall across the way from where I live on Sunday evenings for the call. We talked politics, global economy, US foreign policy, the effect of internet on print media. I also read the books chosen by his club for review. He sent me newspaper clippings and books in the mail starting way back with copies of feed/back, the review of newspapers in Northern California when he was at SFSU. He once asked me what I thought the greatest threat to US national security was. "George Bush and Donald Rumsfeld", I said.
We had been in contact for about seven years, I called, he sent email messages and the regular packages. When I returned from an assignment at Guyana Times/ TV Guyana, and overwhelmed by the loss of my own nephew, I couldn't find Bud. I only knew the first names of his two grand daughters. At first the phone rang, then it was disconnected. Late last year I googled BH Liebes. I found two items, one at http://thetardytimes.blogspot.com/2009/11/going-to-mall.html written by his friend Lynn Ludlow and this other http://storify.com/hfinberg/bud-liebes-journalism-professor-extraordinaire for Bud's 91st birthday.
I try most times not to feel regret, but it is impossible to communicate how sorry I am that I ignored my instincts and did not comment on or share the tributes from his students at San Francisco State. I have written so many email messages over the last year with no response. On the night of Sunday, February 10, a few days ago, I googled Bud again. This time I typed his first name Bernard and I saw it. It never occurred to me before that I should type his first name. I had asked once what the BH represented. He told me. "If your middle name was Hxxxxx you wouldn't use it either", he said.
Bud was a real person and I never saw him as anything else. I know that because not once in 25 years did I ever think that he was Jewish. It suddenly dawned on me one day while I was at the University Chaplaincy in St. Augustine, Trinidad and I was talking to my friend Fr. Michel de Verteuil about the Middle East. Fr. Michel is the closest I have come to finding Bud in all the people I know, but for all his scholarship and humanity I always told him he was a distance behind Bud. Next phone call I asked and he was surprised that it had taken me so long to figure it out. I had failed the test, I said. I had been a great fan of war time movies and I'd tell him about the ones I had seen, mainly of family of holocaust victims and how they tried to adjust in their new lives. He particularly liked my story about Paula Richman, Professor of South Asian religions at Oberlin College, Ohio. When Paula told me she was Jewish, I said I knew from the name. "That's not how we got this name. When my grandfather arrived here, he was asked by immigration why he had come. To be a rich man, he said. They recorded his name as Richman."
So many things in the last year reminded me of Bud, the front page of The Irish Catholic  http://issuu.com/mellyg/docs/oct_18th_full_issue or a reference on a Jamaican website to the late Belgian artist Claude Rahir. Rahir's murals grace the walls of the administration building and the Institute of Mass Communication at Mona. In 2007 Bud sent me a clipping from the Jamaica Gleaner with a story I had written about the artist. I offered to contact Rahir only to discover that he had died on the same day the envelope was postmarked in Washington. We missed out on talk about the 2012 US presidential elections, something we had done several times before; the 2008 campaign was an exciting time. Whenever I thought of US politics, I imagined I was talking to him.
I never gave a thought to Bud  dying. He was always cheerful. He always sounded as if I could find him if I needed guidance, as I always had. For me everyone else was mortal, but not Bud: February 19, 1921 - May 01, 2012