Deceased February 25, 2004
View alumni profile (log in required)
In Memory
John Stringer, my younger brother, died on Feb. 25, 2004, in Phoenix, Ariz. He was murdered—tied up, beaten and strangled. As I and the rest of my family struggle to find meaning in what happened to him, I will try to frame his life and death in the context of Amherst College.
The truth is that I do not know much about John’s life at Amherst. I am eight years his senior (Amherst ’64), and while he was in college I was teaching high school in Ann Arbor, Mich. We rarely wrote. I know that he majored in anthropology, that he was proud of his experiences with crew (a team photograph and his letter were among the few wretched possessions in his apartment) and track, though both sports faded from importance when LSD and other drugs encroached upon his life. His final project at Amherst, as our perplexed father reported to me, was a wooden elbow rest designed for arm wrestling.
After Amherst, John went on to battle substance abuse and later, schizophrenia, for the rest of his life. He worked briefly in landscaping in Colorado and then in Phoenix—both jobs sent his way by our older brother, Bob. For the last 20 years of his life, he hardly worked at all. At one point in the late ’70s he flew to England to visit a friend, and he made the mistake of telling customs and immigration that he planned to work there. They sent him home. He learned his lesson from the experience, rarely working after that.
Instead of working, he channeled much of his energy into distance biking, winning several competitions in Arizona and completing some amazing cross-country bike trips: from Phoenix to Denver, for one, and then from Phoenix to Key Largo. As his health deteriorated and his bikes were stolen, his biking became walking, though he planned bike trips to South America and back to an Amherst reunion.
John lived on and off the streets, in a crack house, and for about two years under an expressway bridge, preferring not to opt into a system that included electric bills, rent or taxes. Despite the physical and psychological hardships that seemed to dominate John’s life, he was somehow able to maintain what he called his “sense of humor”—his appreciation of the follies of much of human experience, including his own. John’s rebellion, if that’s how we can characterize it, was not political, despite the protests of the early ’70s that reached even Amherst. John chose instead to parody the political passions of the day, posing for a picture he sent me showing him holding signs about fighting the establishment and “I hate pigs,” with a message on the back: “This is exactly what I am NOT.” I never heard anything about John’s political interests except for one conversation we had about the 2000 presidential election. John said he was going to support Gore (not vote for, but support with psychic energy) because once he met a really beautiful woman who told him he was a shaman. He thought that was really cool, and this woman was, he thought, Jewish. And since Gore had picked Lieberman to be Vice President, Gore was his man. That was, I believe, the extent of John’s political involvement. What began as parody at Amherst became a way of life.
In his plentiful letters John often referred to himself as “the Bumbler.” He had an innocence about him beneath such odd behavior as his refusal to watch live television because of his intense communication with the figures on the screen or his belief that he communicated telepathically with the dogs of Phoenix. We saw this innocence in his discovery of the wonders of fitted sheets when we replaced his bedding on a family maintenance visit, and in the discovery of Polygrip a year after starting to wear his false teeth. A comical and an innocent figure, he would laugh at himself and at the sheer “sense of humor” of the human condition. He enjoyed my observation about the etymological links of humor, human and humus.
Amherst taught us to question our values and assumptions, and this is a disposition that John continues to teach. What is the significance of a human life? How can we appreciate the human heart? What can we do with our tentative answers to these questions? He was a sweet guy and a good brother.
David Stringer ’64