“I don’t know if that works for your life,” Dr. John Klanderman said to me after our first phone conversation. The phone interview was step two of applying to the School Psychology program at Rowan, and he had asked me if I might consider applying for a graduate assistantship.
Turns out, it did very much work for my life. I had the honor and pleasure of being Dr. Klanderman’s first graduate assistant at Rowan. I chose working for Dr. Klanderman over a job in the writing lab, and it was one of the best choices I ever made. And the writing lab was, to my mind, a dream job: a lab full of iMacs running Mac OS 9, on a fast ethernet network, full of students who needed my help either with their Macs or their writing.
I took the job with Dr. Klanderman initially out of careerist self-interest, but I never once regretted it.
We spent my time as an assistant discussing my independent projects for the department, but our conversations ranged across topics near and dear to his heart, such as the adorability of the Burmese Mountain Dog, his early life in the midwest, and of course, travel, which was his greatest pleasure.
One day, I apologized for some grease stains on my hands after working on a moped I had bought. He observed, approvingly, “you don’t like to sit around.”
Because neither did he.
One of my favorite roles in his service was that of computer support technician. I introduced Dr. Klanderman to the Stickies application on his Macintosh computer (a Toothintosh, if you remember those), and he would gush about Stickies’ utility to anyone who would listen. I met him in Philadelphia, at the Society Hill Towers apartment he bought, to help him set up his new iBook after I graduated, and we nipped out for dinner and a pint afterwards.
While working for him, Dr. Klanderman gently poo-pooed an idea for my graduate thesis, suggesting gently that I complete a study in the service of a colleague. He said I might be able to present the results at the National Association of School Psychologists conference that spring in Chicago. He was remarkably well-connected in a genuine way. That bit of advice, too, worked for my life.
That’s how we came to fly together and attend the conference, where I learned that it was very important to him to get off of an airplane before anyone else. He took delight in showing me around the Windy City; we had dinner at the Italian Village, an old favorite of his from his early days as a school psychologist, and took pictures from the Sears Tower. So smitten with the city was I that I skipped most of the sessions and walked the city, took the elevated train, and ate oysters and drank beer in a quiet corner of town.
An aside: I never really got around to calling him John. He was always Dr. Klanderman to me. He was wise, sagacious; funny and generous, informal but in charge. He was humble, yet distinguished; broad yet focused; self interested yet selfless. I was an adult but he made me feel like a kid, in a good way: his experience was honest and earned over the course of time.
Dr. Klanderman often worked the term “Gestalt” into his conversations, which in psychology is a nod to the theory of perception that we perceive more than the sum of individual sensory experiences.
His love of art: music, and the basoon, and later, of course, watercolor. Travel. Teaching graduate students. Remodeling his apartment and renting it out. All these bits, tremendous achievements in their own right, combine to form a mosiac–indeed, a Gestalt–far greater than the sum of their parts.
“You play the game well,” he complimented me that night in Chicago, over dinner.
Would that I could hope to play the game half as well as John Klanderman did: he loved to keep busy not for busyness sake, but because he loved life and the journey. His was a life fully lived. And mine was just one of many lives he touched.
Obituary
I asked John to be a reference for me when I applied for my first job in educational administration. He said to me on the phone that afternoon-and I remember where I was, in my car, driving that day-“If that’s what you want.” The subtext was “why would you want that?” He said a lot without having to say much.
