Death of a Teacher Frank Chodorov, RIP (The eulogy delivered at Mr. Cho- dorov’s funeral by Wm. F. Buckley Jr Most of you know, some of you bet- ter than I, the biography. He was born in New York, poor, the son of Russian immigrants, and he lived in the lower West Side, even as it was slowly becoming fashionable. “They painted the fronts white and the shutters green,’ he wrote fifty years later, “and invested the section with profitable romance by reviving its ancient name of Greenwich Vil- lage.” He finished high school and en- rolled at Columbia University where, during his first year, his principal interest was football, and he made the varsity squad. He graduated, and married, and went out to make his way in commerce, “having,” as he wrote, “given up as hopeless for a Jew the ambition of becoming a pro- fessor of English.” He worked, and made a modest living, for himself, his wife, and his two children. And then, in the Thirties, his two children grown, he turned one day to his wife, and asked her permission to leave his life, and the little security it had given him, in order to teach. Up until then, like Paul Gauguin, he had most- ly seen; and now, like Gauguin, he wanted to express himself. Her con- sent, to that as to every request he ever made, was instantly given. And he began the career, quietly, studious- ly, passionately, which made him friends among so many people who never laid eyes on him.
During all the years he had worked as a salesman and in advertising he had continued to read, and early in his post-graduate career he had fast- ened on Henry George as the object of his primary fascination. At first he was drawn to George because of the literary style. “Here,” he once recalled, “was something of the cameo clarity of Matthew Arnold, a little of the parallel structure of Macaulay, the periods of Edmund Burke. I know
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