Stevie Wolf, A Lynchpin Indeed! – Wayne Bodle

The sad news of Stevie Wolf’s death could not have been conveyed or written any better, but I guess it can be annotated or e-mended. Stevie pulled me into the McNeil Center for Early American Studies orbit on a crisp October evening in 1985 at her house, or really manse, on West Hortter Street in Germantown, in her characteristically decisive way(s). (I think it was the night Vince Coleman got trapped in the “Killer Tarp” machine before a World Series Game in St. Louis). Running a reverse-receiving line at her front door after a session of a salon (it would not be renamed “THE Salon” for a decade after that) she tugged at my jacket and said “how come you’re not coming to our seminars?!?” In a desperate effort to be both smart and dumb in equal measure, and in just a single short sentence, I asked “what seminars?” She looked at me like someone who just got off the midnight train from Mars and said, “Look!!” (full stop). “The next time you’re in Philadelphia, preferably tomorrow, stop at the Historical Society of Pennsylvania, go upstairs and see Marlene, and get on the mailing list!” It was just one part of her role to solicit attendance. The next morning, virtually at dawn, I think, I was on the 4th floor of the HSP for the first time ever, moving among dangling overhead light bulbs, spider webs, and long strange avenues of dark, shadowy, half-empty shelves. There I found Marlene’s office space and signed up for the mailing list for papers that until the mid-1990s were mailed out every other week or so, to lists of people who easily numbered in the low hundreds.

Figure 1. A mug baring the name “The Philadelphia Center for Early American Studies,” now known as the McNeil Center for Early American Studies. McNeil Center for Early American Studies. Photo courtesy of Rosalind Beiler.

That was how Stevie did things. They got done, and once they did, they stayed done; I’ve attended the low-to-many-hundreds of seminars by now. Two years later Stevie single-handedly saw to it that Jacqueline Thibaut and I became late-admissions, and thereby shared the David Library Fellowship at the Philadelphia Center (McNeil Center) in 1987, months after the Library board decided not to fund or award it that year. But the grant had been announced on the printed PCEAS brochure that was mailed every January listing seminars and other news or notes long before the Internet existed, so Stevie went to work. (Of the brochure, only readers and savers of it may recall that when Richard Dunn turned the Center over to Stevie and Rick Beeman as co-directors for six years in the 1980s, he made himself the Chair of the Advisory Council!). Stevie’s plain-spokenness, decisiveness, and keen operational instincts didn’t in any way mask–much less suppress–the kindness, loyalty, and generosity for which she was known. I think I can safely list her as one of a very small number of people who, if they had not said yes when they could have said no, or otherwise come to my assistance I wouldn’t have gotten far, if anywhere, in the sluggishly reviving academic sphere of the late 1980s–’90s. The Center was that kind of a bridge and Stevie was often the Captain on it. I’m grateful to think that the week before I heard the sad news of her death, I had an opportunity to add her name to the acknowledgments section of an article.

Lynchpin indeed!

Wayne Bodle retired from teaching in 2017 after doing so at four different universities over twenty-five years, and returned to Philadelphia, where he remains deeply involved in research and publication. He is currently a Visiting Scholar in the Department of History at the University of Pennsylvania, his long-time formative institution. The position is “non-stipendiary,” to use a term of art that Richard Dunn in particular favored, but that has largely vanished from the academic landscape. It provides an abundance of opportunity for robust conversation and other forms of welcome colloquy.