[OPINION] Remembering Dr. Joe Lieberman

Westport native and 1987 Staples High School graduate Linda Hall has written for the New Republic, New York, Daily Beast and other publications. 

She recently learned of the death a couple of years ago of a very impactful teacher. Linda writes:

In my freshman year at Sarah Lawrence, I studied with a professor I’d read about in “Lisa Birnbach’s College Book.”

It said of Dale Harris: “High expectations, won’t take any sh*t, and writing and editing skills are superior.”

Harris, an Englishman, seemed unimpressed with education in this country. When he deemed me “better prepared in grammar and syntax than most students nowadays,” a number of Westport teachers deserved credit.

At Hillspoint there was Joanne Gage, who taught me in 5th grade what many of my undergraduate classmates had never learned from anyone. At Long Lots there was Evelyn Burack and her outside reader of our papers, a young Brown alum named Dan Woog.

At Staples there were too many to mention — but only one on whom, that first semester of college, I wrote an entire essay: Joe Lieberman.

Dr. Joe Lieberman (right) with another revered English Department colleague, Karl Decker.

Not Senator Lieberman of Connecticut, but Dr. Lieberman of New York. He commuted to Westport by train with his dog. Man and pooch — his name was Kid — were both small and preternaturally alert. Kid watched Dr. Lieberman; Dr. Lieberman, in a way that suggested his eyes could do the work of most of his senses, watched everything.

On day one he told us that he had never missed the first train out of Grand Central, and if we were late, he would avail himself of his right as a faculty member to impose “academic consequences.” It was one of many ways in which Dr. Lieberman was fearsome. Yet I was never exactly intimidated by him, not even when he wrote “AWFUL” next to a passage, or tore off my final paragraph.

Linda Hall has kept Dr. Lieberman’s comment, for all these years.

What intimidated me was Westport. I wouldn’t have said it then, and it still sounds odd.

Let me try another way. Until it was demolished in 2024, there was a 695-square-foot cottage on Hillspoint Road facing the Sound. I visited it as a child, because a friend of my parents’ — another employee of the Westport schools — lived there.

A house overlooking the water in Westport: consider how that sounds to the outside world. But even decades ago it was dwarfed by the castles that were starting to go up. I can easily imagine what it would be like these days for a kid living someplace similar to ride the bus with classmates coming from homes 10 times bigger. (Westporters, what is in all your rooms?)

My own house was an ordinary postwar ranch, yet I was often made aware that it didn’t measure up. So were others. “There aren’t enough levels,” a friend advised our math teacher. A French teacher went around the class posing this question: Combien de pièces y a-t-il dans votre maison?

“Cinq,” I said. The teacher replied in English: “Five rooms? Small house!”

It astonished me that a small house could seem so remarkable to those who didn’t live in one, and by the time I got to Staples, I had some ideas for essays that Dr. Lieberman would have called cultural criticism.

When we weren’t analyzing literature, he let me write them. He was open to anything I wanted to say. Probably I was also emboldened by his own joyful irreverence. He introduced us to the phrase “the one percent” (it was years before I heard it again), chortled when a student described most Westporters as “just middle class,” and drew stares when he informed us that he spent only one evening a year in town: back-to-school night, as mandated by his contract.

A 1993 Staples yearbook poll.

I first had Dr. Lieberman as a sophomore. I was determined to take him again as a senior, but the only appropriate course conflicted with orchestra.

I quit orchestra. This earned me a visit from the administrator in charge of the arts, and left my guidance counselor aghast. How would my quitting look to Sarah Lawrence, where I was applying early decision?

Partly because I knew that the college recognized the importance of life-altering teachers, and partly because Dr. Lieberman, who had written my recommendation, had also bolstered my confidence, I didn’t care.

In 1987, the year I graduated from Staples, Dr. Lieberman published a book, “We Can Always Call Them Bulgarians: The Emergence of Lesbians and Gay Men on the American Stage” — but under the pseudonym Kaier Curtin.

I learned this in a social media post about his death. Some in Westport have recently argued that gay educators should stay silent about their personal lives — after all, don’t straight educators?

A social media post, announcing Dr. Joe Lieberman’s death. 

I thought at once not only of Staples journalism about straight teachers’ love stories, but of the fact that I wasn’t able to congratulate Dr. Lieberman on even a professional milestone.

My timing at Staples was lucky; Dr. Lieberman’s spirited jabs at affluence likely wouldn’t be tolerated today.

Of his own timing, what would Joe Lieberman say? He was hired the year before Stonewall, when it was easy to be fired for being gay, and retired in the early 1990s.

I do remember hearing that he later came out. In any case, of the many things I wish I could tell him, the first is this: His book is in the library of the college where I teach.

I just borrowed it.

Joe Lieberman’s book. Curtin was his mother’s maiden name.

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