The evening of our arrival in Georgia Bill developed intense pain and we drove him to the small hospital in Madison.  He was given medicine for pain but the emergency staff was unable to determine the cause.  The doctor said she had never seen such a degree of abdominal pain in her entire career.  Early Saturday morning Bill was transferred by ambulance to Athens Regional Medical Center. A number of strategies were applied and the pain level was reduced although his condition continued to deteriorate.  Stress, pain and morphine made him very confused and that brilliant, humorous man never regained intellectual contact with us.

At 2 PM on Sunday, Bill was taken for exploratory surgery.  He was only in surgery for 20 minutes as the surgeon immediately determined that Bill’s condition was terminal.  He had had a bowel infarction (technically a stroke of the bowel).  Probably several days before we left home a tiny blood clot had lodged in the mesentery artery that keeps the bowel alive.  The entire bowel was necrotic.  The surgeon said that by the time the intense pain began there was no chance of survival.

We learned long ago that “no extreme measures” isn’t enough. One must ask for “nurse for comfort.”  We had all support medications, respiration tube and restraints removed leaving only a hydration drip through which pain medicine could be delivered.  At about 12:30 AM the last morphine dose was administered.  Around 3 AM Bill’s numbers began to go down.  Both Richard and I were at his side when all the fires went out.

Bill was cremated on August 18^th.  There will be no formal memorial service although groups of Bill’s friends are planning small, informal get-togethers to tell funny Bill stories of which there are many.  The family will have a tree with a small brass plate planted somewhere on the Berea College campus.

I’m sorry to have to inform you in this way.  For the first time in our travels I purposely left our address at home (in a vain effort to stop obsessing), so I have only a few telephone numbers with me.  Many people have helped by seeing or phoning people who need to know.

William J. Schafer            Obituary

               By Lawrence Jones

     William J. (Bill) Schafer, who died suddenly and unexpectedly in his seventy-second year in late August, had several homes away from home, and Dunedin was one of them. He died while on a visit to his son Richard and their family in Georgia, and he and his wife Martha had planned to go on from there to England to visit their daughter Amelia and her family.  Travel was a big part of Bill’s life, but it was always travel to and from one of those homes away from home, whether it was to Minnesota, to Georgia, to New England, to England, or to New Zealand.  The centre from which he and Martha travelled was Berea, Kentucky, where he had taught at Berea College from 1964 until his retirement in 2002.  Berea College is a unique institution, a high-quality small liberal arts undergraduate college with  (in Bill’s words) an ‘historic commitment to interracial education, multiculturalism, and the diverse intellectual, moral, and spiritual values of humanistic study’. There Bill became Chester D. Tripp Professor of Humanities, an innovative teacher and a valued member of the close college community.

     Bill and Martha first came to Dunedin for a six-month sabbatical year visit in 1995.  They had, Bill said, done a lot of ‘reading and dreaming about New Zealand’ beforehand and were perhaps primed to fall in love with the place.  One lasting result is Bill’s book, Mapping the Godzone: A Primer on New Zealand Literature and Culture (published 1998), written ‘in a sustained burst of enthusiasm for New Zealand, its people, places, culture and literature’.   The book, with its personal response to New Zealand, especially as portrayed in New Zealand fiction and films, is both an introduction to New Zealand culture for those who don't know it and an engaging idiosyncratic slant on it for those who do.  In subsequent visits, usually of two months each summer, Bill taught a number of Summer School papers with me focused on different aspects of American culture, music, film and literature – race and racism, the Great Depression, the Cold War, jazz and the biographies and autobiographies and fictional portraits of jazz musicians.

     That ‘sustained burst of enthusiasm’ was typical of Bill.  Beneath his usually quiet surface an intensely creative mind and imagination expressed itself in critical and historical writing, fiction, music (he was an excellent jazz drummer), the visual arts, and woodworking.  The week before his death Martha sent photos of some weird and wonderful garden sculptures and of a series of paintings of old Dunedin buildings he had just done.  The published results of a creative lifetime included academic articles on American literature, jazz reviews, fiction, personal essays, a co-edited online periodical (Journal of Provincial Thought) and four books on various forms of popular music (rock, ragtime, New Orleans marching bands, and the music of Jelly Roll Morton).  They will remain, but his many friends around the world will miss this man who created them.  He is survived by Martha, Richard, Amelia and four grandsons – Michael, Robert, William and Frederick.

Two Songs Martha Wanted Played:

1.      ‘Ready for the River’ –  Jimmie Noone (clarinet), Joe Poston (alto sax),
                                               Earl Hines (piano), Lawson Buford (tuba),
                                               Bud Scott (banjo), Johnny Wells (drums).
                                               Noone and Poston (vocal) [1928]
 Ready for the river,
The shivery river,
The river that goes down to the sea

Going to drown my troubles,
I’ll just leave the bubbles
To indicate what used to be me.

Made my will, wrote some notes,
Got to keep walking till my straw hat floats.

I said I’m ready for the river,
The shivery river,
So get that river ready for me.

2.  ‘My Buddy’ – Stan Getz (tenor sax), Jimmy Rowles (piano and vocal),  Buster
                             Williams (bass), Elvin Jones (drums)  [1975]

[All} Nights are long since you went away.
I think about you all through the day [every single day].
My buddy, my buddy,
Your buddy misses you.

I miss your voice, the touch of your hand,
And just to know that you understand,
My buddy, my buddy,
Your buddy misses you.

A Song Bill Wrote About: ‘Deep Creek’ – Jelly Roll Morton (piano), Edwin    
                                                                            Swayzee (trumpet), William Kato
                                                                            (trombone), Paul Barnes (soprano
                                                                           sax),  Russell Procope (clarinet), Lee
                                                                           Blair (guitar), William Moore (tuba),
                                                                           Manzie  Johnson (drums)

Text: William J. Schafer, The Original Jelly Roll Blues (London: Flame Tree 2008), pp. 78-82.  
[excerpted here:]

But we must be grateful for having had any experience of his remarkable being.
Best to you,
Henry [Blackburn]

The Otago Daily Times, today Saturday, printed Lawrence's article on Bill in New Zealand. The paper had an excellent photo of Bill. . .
Marion [Jones]

Like you, we are having some difficulty believing that Bill isn't with us anymore. It doesn't seem possible.
John [Rice]

I will not get to go to Creation Museums with him, and we will not go to look at aeroplane and car museums any more. He will not tell me abstruse and arcane details of jazz musicians' lives. He will not write to correct the authors of detective stories ref same lives. We will not have cause to question our sanity as the womenfolks fight. He will not teach his diminutive grandchildren foul language. . . God rest his soul. He is in a better place.
Fred Chuffington

I was just exploring the JPT site and I saw the obit. for Dr. Schafer. My condolences . . no comforting words for when one is staring into the abyss. Hang in there.
Bruce Lindsay

Bill will be a great loss to many fields of human endeavour. . . I enclose some photos should you wish to run a caption competition, the wheelchair racing seems particularly surreal. I can hear the Sheesh from his lips as I write.

He would have enjoyed the planned holiday in Dorset.
Simon Rutherford