[on campus; North Hall, Room 120]
Although you made the government, then, sullen,
with politics deemed "undesirable,"
you were a great historian, Tom Cullen.
and your research achieved greatness in full.
Quite interested, since I was a nipper,
in that foul murderer called Jack the Ripper,
I found your book, "When London Walked In Terror,"
a balance to local ("well meaning") error.
That second day at college, freshman year,
I borrowed your book, and read through the night.
You taught me to respect the victims' fear:
to feel it in my gut. Your deep insight---
right to the last page, reached at dawn's first light---
meant more to me than all the crap taught here.
Starward
[*/+/^]
Author's Notes/Comments:
I cannot adequately express the homage and gratitude I owe to the great scholar, Tom Cullen, whose book, When London Walked In Terror, was the first book I checked out of my college library, on Friday, September 10th, 1976. (On the previous night, I had spent several hours, after going to bed, weeping silently for the separation---with almost eleven weeks remaining---from J-Wave; whether my roommate heard the sound of my sorrow at that time was of no concern.) While the first of many noisey and drunken parties was going on some distance down the hall, I began to read---shortly before midnight---Cullen's great monograph on the serial murders in the Whitechapel district of London, England, in the Autumn of 1888; broadly the same season, eighty-eight years ago, as when this separation from J-Wave took place. Fascinated I read---and in some parts, read repeatedly---his masterful prose. I read until the first light of dawn, and did not feel the least bit sleepy or exhausted. (Later that morning, I visited the bookstore, which was then open for purchases to be made by the incoming upperclassmen, and found a book of John Milton's prose essays---which I considered to be a favorable Cosmic sign that all might become well again; as it did on and after November 23rd.) Cullen's respectful and highly empathetic treatment of the fifth victim, Mary Kelly, led me to determine to specialize my interest in her particular case; and to aspire to find a resolution to the fife great anomalies that, prior to 2001, were never collectively explained (most theories could do away with one or two of them, but never all five: the end of the murder spree; the difference in both venue and the extent of the assault upon the body; the sighting of Mary Kelly by two documented---and three other, undocumented---witnesses; the coroner's finding that the body was not pregnant, although Mary Kelly had said, earlier in August of that year, that she was, indeed, pregnant; and the door of her apartment being locked from the outside, which would have required a key for the deadbolt). I am highly and ever indebted to Tom Cullen for teaching me about these.
My great regret, with respect to Cullen, is that he passed away shortly after I acquired my first computer and did not yet know how to contact him through internet email in order to tell of him my gratitude. I believe that privilege is reserved for me in Heaven.
