Ben Dunlap's Lecture of a Lifetime (page 2 of 2)

"I reckon that would be Kings Mountain, Mr. Teszler," the man said, referring to a nearby area in North Carolina.

"Good. Buy us some land in Kings Mountain, and then announce we are going to build a major plant there." The man did so, and shortly afterward Mr. Teszler received a visit from the white mayor of Kings Mountain—at that time, the textile industry in the South was notoriously segregated.

The white mayor said, "Mr. Teszler, I trust you're going to be hiring a lot of white workers."

Teszler told him, "Why are you saying this? Did you think you were coming here to help me?" It had been Teszler's intention from the start to hire the best workers, regardless of race or color.

He also received a visit from a member of the black community, a minister, who said, "Mr. Teszler, I hope you're going to hire black workers for this new plant." And Teszler gave this answer: "When the time comes, I will call you, and you will recommend to me high school graduates—boys and girls—from honest families." In the end, Mr. Teszler hired 16 workers: eight white, eight black. They were to be his seed group, his future foremen. In an abandoned store in the vicinity of Kings Mountain, Teszler had installed the heavy equipment needed for the new double-knit manufacturing process. For two months, these 16 employees would live and work together, mastering the new procedures.

After an initial tour of the facility, he gathered them all together and asked if there were any questions. There was hemming and hawing and shuffling of feet. Then a white worker stepped forward and said, "Well, yeah. We looked at this place, and there's only one place to sleep, only one place to eat, only one bathroom, only one water fountain. Is this plant going to be integrated, or what?"

Mr. Teszler replied, "You are being paid twice the wages of any other textile workers in this region, and this is how we do business. Do you have any other questions?"

"No, I reckon I don't."

And two months later, when the main plant opened and more than one hundred new workers, both white and black, poured in to see the facility for the first time, they were met by the 16 foremen, white and black, standing shoulder to shoulder. The group toured the facility and were asked if there were any questions, and inevitably, the same question arose: "Is this plant integrated, or what?"

One of the white foremen stepped forward and said, "You are being paid twice the wages of any other workers in this industry in this region, and this is how we do business. Do you have any other questions?" And there were none.

Mr. Teszler was one of the first to integrate the textile industry in that part of the South. It was an achievement worthy of Mahatma Gandhi-handled with the shrewdness of a lawyer and the idealism of a saint.

In his 80s, Mr. Teszler, having retired from textiles, adopted Wofford College, auditing courses every semester. Because he had a tendency to kiss anything that moved, he became affectionately known by all and sundry as Opi, which is Magyar (Hungarian) for "grandfather." Before I got there, the library of the college had been named for Mr. Teszler, and after I arrived, in 1993, the faculty decided to honor itself by naming Mr. Teszler "professor of the college." This was done partly because he had taken all the courses in the catalog by then; but mainly it was done because he was so conspicuously wiser than any of us. To me, it was immensely reassuring that the presiding spirit of this little Methodist college in upstate South Carolina was a Holocaust survivor from Central Europe.

Wise he was, indeed, but Mr. Teszler also had a wonderful sense of humor. Once, for an interdisciplinary class I was teaching, I was screening the opening segment of Ingmar Bergman's great 1957 film The Seventh Seal. As the medieval knight Antonius Block returns from the wild-goose chase of the Crusades and arrives on the rocky shore of Sweden only to find the specter of death waiting for him, Mr. Teszler sat in the dark with his fellow students.

And as Death opened his cloak to envelop the knight in a ghastly embrace, I heard Mr. Teszler's tremulous voice. "Oh, oh," he said. "This doesn't look so good."

Music was his greatest passion, especially opera. On the first occasion that I visited his house, he asked me to choose the piece of music we would listen to. I delighted him by rejecting Cavalleria rusticana in favor of Béla Bartók's Bluebeard's Castle. I love Bartók's music, as did Mr. Teszler, and he had virtually every recording of Bartók's music ever issued. It was at his house that I heard for the first time Bartók's Third Piano Concerto and learned from Mr. Teszler that it had been composed in nearby Asheville, North Carolina, in the last years of the composer's life. He was battling leukemia, and he dedicated this concerto to his wife, Dita, who was herself a concert pianist.

Into the slow, second movement, marked adagio religioso, Bartók incorporated the sounds of birdsong that he heard outside his window in what would be one of his last springs. He was imagining a future-for her-in which he would play no part. Clearly, this composition was his final statement to her. It was first performed after his death and, through her, to the world. Just as clearly, it is saying, It's okay. It was all so beautiful. Whenever you hear this, I will be there.

After Mr. Teszler's death, I learned that the marker on Bartók's grave in Hartsdale, New York, was paid for, in part, by Sandor Teszler.

Not long before Mr. Teszler's own death at age 97, he heard me deliver a lecture that described history as a tidal wave of human suffering and brutality. With gentle reproach, Mr. Teszler said to me afterward, "You know, human beings are fundamentally good." And I made a vow to myself then and there that if this man who had such cause to think otherwise had reached that conclusion, I would not presume to differ.

What he showed me in the brief time I knew him was the secret of his success. It was an insatiable curiosity, an irrepressible desire to know—no matter what the subject, what the cost, even at a time when the keepers of the Doomsday Clock are willing to bet even money that the human race won't be around to imagine anything in the year 2100, a scant 91 years from now.

"Live each day as if it is your last," the saying goes. "Learn as if you'll live forever." That's what I'm passionate about. It is an inextinguishable appetite for learning and experience, no matter how risible, esoteric, or seditious it might seem. And this truly defines the Sandor Teszler I was lucky enough to know.

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