The ‘regular’ obituary in anticipation of something more formal later:

• Robert BUCK

From the Times-Dispatch:

John Luster Brinkley, retired classics professor and historian at Hampden-Sydney College, could recall interesting stories about the school partly because he witnessed so much of its modern history.

In 1959, before he graduated as valedictorian of his class, a fire erupted in a campus building that had been condemned. Rumor had it that students set it alight in the mistaken belief that the administration wanted the building destroyed.

He remembered in a 1987 Richmond News Leader interview the “carnival atmosphere” that reigned as students stood on hoses, turned on showers and flushed toilets to lower water pressure and thwart the Farmville Fire Department’s efforts to douse the conflagration.

One enterprising student sold refreshments. The students’ behavior “was not malicious,” he noted. The incident led to formation of a student fire department.

Mr. Brinkley, who wrote a definitive history of the school and taught Greek, Latin, classical mythology, Roman history and rhetoric from 1967 until he retired in 2007, died Friday at 75. He lived at Westminster Canterbury Richmond.

A celebration of the life of this H-SC icon, who for years routinely sat on the 15-yard line at every home football game and behind home plate at every home baseball game, will be held at 10 a.m. Nov. 10 on campus before the annual school game with archrival Randolph-Macon College.

During “Macon Week,” which precedes the game with Randolph-Macon, Mr. Brinkley served as the annual speaker at the “Beat Macon Bonfire.”

His unswerving support for H-SC teams earned him a special citation in the H-SC Sports Hall of Fame in 2007.

He was the first H-SC student to become a Rhodes scholar, studying at Trinity College at Oxford University from 1959 to 1962. He earned a master’s degree at Princeton University, where he taught in the classics department, and another master’s at Oxford before returning to Hampden-Sydney to teach.

“I can see him standing completely erect, cigar in hand, head held high, gently shifting his weight from foot to foot as he spoke with confidence,” recalled former student John Adams, an H-SC trustee and chairman of the Martin Agency.

In 1994, Mr. Brinkley rolled out a history of the school, originally written in longhand, called “On This Hill: A Narrative History of Hampden-Sydney College 1774-1994.”

There are no immediate survivors.

via: John L. Brinkley, retired classics professor and historian at Hampden-Sydney College, dies

The incipit of a lengthy biography at the Poetry Foundation:

Poet, editor, and translator Daryl Hine was born in 1936 in British Columbia. He studied Classics and philosophy at McGill University, and he earned his PhD in comparative literature from the University of Chicago. The editor of Poetry from 1968-78, Hine was also a highly regarded translator of Classical writers such as Homer, Hesiod, and Ovid, among others; Hine’s translation of Works of Hesiod and the Homeric Hymns (2005) won the Harold Morton Landon Translation Award from the Academy of American Poets. His numerous other honors and awards include fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the MacArthur Foundation, as well as a medal from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He has also received three Canada Council Grants, and his &: A Serial Poem (2010) was short-listed for the Governor General’s Award for Poetry. The award’s judges described the book as “a reflection on civilization as a whole,” declaring it “the summing up of a life in particular weighed against eternity.” […]

Daryl Hine 1936–2012 (Poetry Foundation)