Ed Palumbo is a colleague of Larry’s and had the dubious honor of sharing an office with him for many years.

During our co-extensive tenures at the College, Weller has ever and always been at the head of the forces determined to keep the place human. This is not just a matter of his effectiveness as a communicator of humane and progressive values in the literature classroom. Or even a matter of his genuinely human engagement of his students in the office. And, believe me, I have watched his patient tutoring for years. (He is not a legend among generations of students for no reason.)

Remarkably, he has brought that magnanimity, that human spirit to much else at the College. First and foremost, in the various roles he has played in the English department. But also through his service on the Board of Governors, through labour relations work with JACFA, through his expert management of our faculty’s insurance, even through his various referral services—

need a physician?

need a masseuse? 

need an accountant?

need an excuse?

need a toaster?

need some faxes?

need a broker?

need to file taxes?—

he’s your man, the human yellow pages.

He is the soul of practicality with a heart, who can pound on the table like a ward heeler. He knows a thing or two about a thing or two. Larry, let’s not forget, worked in film production, i. e., writing and negotiating contracts. Whoop-dee-doo. He returned to the College after a couple of years because he was getting fat working in an office, and he just wasn’t getting to meet starlets.

Despite the blow-out in the film biz and in the face of his retirement from the College classroom, Lorenzo has no intention of putting performance behind him. His teaching skills, which by all accounts are incredible (just ask him), have been edifying and enlarging the general public for the last year or so in a series of lectures on books. Watch your local papers for dates. Catch him while he’s still working small rooms.

When you reflect on Weller’s polished dome, you can only marvel at the breadth of his humanity. What you see is what you get with him. Except for the dark stuff. But you do see things beyond the “great man” crap. Plainly put, Lorenzo is as mad as a wigmaker. His movie star fantasies—lately Brad Pitt; once Robert Redford. (They age and fade; he doesn’t.) The menacing baseball bat. His quaint idea of practical jokes. Recently he circulated a photo of the College’s Secretary General smiling, looking at a photo of Weller mooning with the whitest ass since Roy Rogers. He has entered me in jello wrestling contests and sent idiotic memos in my name. He has framed three photos of the balding top of my head. (Have you ever spent more than a minute or two in his company without a reference to hair or its absence?)  He has a kind of Milton-Berle devotion to the joke. Early mornings he sits poring over and laughing his ass off at his frayed and musty joke file for a knee-slapper to take to a class. Mad. But I’d trust him with my life. As long as it didn’t involve his having to swim.

-Edward Palumbo

Terry Tierney is a friend of Larry’s, and like everyone, has been subject to his continual bald jokes.

For years, Larry, who had gone prematurely bald, wore one very long strand of hair wrapped around his head. I do believe that he thought that no one noticed that he was BALD. In any case, Kevin and I were on vacation with his family and ours and I noticed his three foot wrap floating away from his head in the swimming pool. I was imspired. I got out of the pool and found a pair of scissors. In one fell swoop, Larry was shorn of his lock in something that has been known to his friends ever since as, DE-WELLERIZATION!!!!!! Maybe you had to be there...

-Terry Tierney

And from Larry’s Students:

…Larry is the best teacher ever. I hate school yet I loved going to his class, go figure. Larry isn't only a teacher of English, he is also a teacher of life. You learn a lot more than what you've signed up for.

…He’s an amazing teacher, he lets everyone in the class participate, and everyone's opinion counts. Say you ask a stupid question, he'll turn it around, take it into consideration, and make it interesting. You never feel awkward with him, his classes are very entertaining! Keep it up Larry!

…Larry was my instructor at JAC in 1980-81. We are dear friends, and he continues to challenge me, and make me laugh, all these years later.

…Inspiring professor - had him 14 years ago and still remember the course.

…He has the ability to enable you to look deep within yourself to discover your true potential that you never realized or had the courage to release.He's gifted.

…He defines the word Teacher. His personality, knowledge and heart allows him to fully give himself to his students. He's #1 on my list of the greatest teacher.

…The choices you make define who you are as a person. Believe in that? Larry does. One of the many things he instills in your brain; greatest teacher!

…Larry is a hard marker, but fair (this one was echoed many times).

And the last comment is from Larry himself, sent to me last year on the eve of his 60th birthday:

…I gave my classes the course/teacher evaluation today. They still love me and what I do. Plus ça change. How lucky I have been. There is much that resides in this teacher that remains from the original moment 36 years ago when I crossed that threshold. How wonderful it has been to know them; how wonderful it has been to meet them at this nexus in their lives.

More comments are coming in! Use the Feedback button on the left to send your warm wishes to Larry.

I have just finished the first year of my teaching career. I am a university TA, which places me on the academic totem pole somewhere between an amoeba and a filing clerk; that's when I am noticed enough to be so placed! 

 

I am a former student and have been a longtime friend of Larry's and the highest praise I can bestow is that in moments of doubt as a teacher I ask myself: "what would Larry do?"  (Actually, I am thinking of turning that thought into a bracelet that would read 'WWLD?' and marketing it the world over...) 

 

In all sincerity though, the thought has been said before and bears repeating: Larry epitomizes teaching in all the ways we mean  when we think of teaching as the vocation it really is and the powerful change a good teacher can bring to a person's life.  Way to go Larry. --Alison Braley

Thank you, Larry, for 37 years of mentoring. You have touched so many lives. You are a teacher in the best sense of the word, and that won’t end with retirement.

--Kim McDougall

From Raymond Filip:

Larry’s chortle, that falsetto laugh, his personal hallelujah ringing across the halls of the college, will echo unforgettably within my auditory memory. Larry and Ed, tickling each other’s funny bones, produced a coloratura of cachinnations inside the English department that perhaps could only be matched by the signature sounds of Bill Tierney whistling while working at opening his office door with 10,000 jangling keys to various kingdoms.

When I bumped into a teaching post at John Abbott College 19 years ago, I noticed that my reputation as an “enfant terrible” had preceded my footsteps. Solely the spiders in Rod Smith’s dark office dared to approach this angry young (39-year-old) man. And Larry Weller alone, it often seemed, could be trusted not to be judgmental. Larry listened. He tried to understand “tone” and image.

From the very beginning, I saw Larry as a disheveled Romantic. (The observer changes the observed!) And Larry beheld the blithe spirit of this literary figure framed by such fearful asymmetry. I enjoyed discussing our mutual political idealism. At that time, Lithuania had just gained its independence from the former Soviet Union. My poems had been read there clandestinely throughout the 1980s. I had visited the Jewish

Holocaust Museum in Vilnius during a performance tour in 1993, and then shared my disgust about the atrocities with Larry. Coming to terms with such a touchy topic, I asked Larry to screen a rough draft of my poem “Litvak.” Tone too angry? Too haughty? Too blue? Tone. Tone. Tone. Image. Image. Image. Premier Weller waxed diplomatic, smiled, a vital sign. Phew. The hard marker passed me!

Larry was never too busy, or too sciolistic to handle iconoclastic teachers, or the average student mark shark. The years have speeded by as quickly as the flip of a light switch. ON, OFF, BURNT OUT! Larry was definitely ON for 35 years. This enfant terrible is growing gray, and Larry’s mystifying dome now appears ready to move on to the next level beyond category ― that retirement trail in California ― to meditate and rock beside Leonard Cohen on Mount Baldy.

Don’t gaze at too many sunsets, Larry. Chortle heartily. We love you, and will miss you as long as the lights remain on at John Abbott College.