I was very sad to learn that our colleague Chuck Barrack passed away earlier this year. He was a generous colleague, easy to get along with, always the first one to volunteer to teach a class that needed to be offered, even as an overload. He loved to tell jokes and relate stories about earlier times in Germanics and at UW, or about growing up in a Lebanese-American family.
Chuck had joined the department first as a graduate student, studying history of the language with Joe Voyles, but also took seminars in literature and wrote papers on all kinds of different subjects. I remember one paper on medieval women’s literature that he wrote many years ago that he then returned to shortly before he retired. Chuck had broad intellectual interests and also loved life, his large circle of friends, and he enjoyed all kinds of different activities which made him such a fun and interesting person to be around and to talk to.
In the department, Chuck was Assistant Professor, Associate Professor, and then Professor of Germanic Linguistics; he served as undergraduate advisor for 20 years and taught history of the language, Germanic dialects, and graduate seminars on Gothic and other older Germanic languages. He was an accomplished author of academic books and papers on a wide variety of subjects, a second-year German textbook, and, later in life, Joe’s collaborator on a structural history of the German language and an acclaimed introduction to Proto-Indo-European.
But perhaps most importantly, Chuck left his mark as a teacher and mentor of many generations of language learners through his German through Film 100 and 200-level series that he offered every fall and winter and in which he used proctors (advanced speakers) for the conversation sections. I remember many former students for whom this was a pivotal experience. His corner office in Denny Hall was always filled with students who wanted to know more about the subject they were studying with him and who were eager to have him elaborate and go further into detail. I have also run into former students who would ask if they could bring their own children to observe the film class and to see how much fun even learning a difficult language can be. The films were hilarious short scenes of typical life in Germany and Chuck even acted in some of them!
When I was department chair, Chuck and Joe took me out to lunch a couple of times a year to thank me for my service and we always had a good time.
Chuck would spend spring break in San Diego visiting family and friends, playing tennis, and he would return from these trips with this incredible tan that we were all very jealous of. He was very close to his siblings and cared for his mother for many years before she went into Judson Park in Des Moines, the home that he later also lived in for the last years of his life. When Rick and I visited him there, he would wait in the driveway, greet us with a big smile, and then hopped into the car to join us for a nice lunch at Anthony’s just down the hill by the marina. Until just a few years before his death, he was still very active in the community including giving presentations on linguistic subjects. He absolutely loved living there and I was able to see what a great place it was.
During spring, usually in April, Chuck would disappear for a few days and join his dearest friends on a fishing trip to Spectacle Lake near Loomis in Eastern Washington near the Canadian border. One of his friends had a smoker so he would show up in the department with smoked trout, crackers, cream cheese, and a dry Riesling and we all sat down in our library, listened to his recollections from the trip, had a good time, and enjoyed his generous break from our teaching schedule!
The hummus he brought to departmental parties was also memorable: beans, olive oil, lemon, and lots of garlic! I wish I could replicate it.
Perhaps one of the saddest moments in his life was when his trip to Egypt and the Middle East was cancelled due to the financial crisis in 2008. He had looked forward to that trip which would bring him back to the area where his father grew up. Chuck was planning to take a group of friends and he was going to be their interpreter. Of course, he spoke fluent Arabic and, to keep up with the latest news, he always watched Al Jazeera (and not the English version!). Sadly, the trip never took place afterwards.
I want to end this recollection with a piece of information about Chuck that not many of you may know but that is also so typical: his memory was so perfect that he was able to count cards. In fact, he was banned from some of the local casinos, a fact that I learned when thinking about a retirement gift for him. We were looking into getting him a nice gift certificate for a weekend in a casino. I don’t recall which one we finally settled with but it was always fun to learn more about Chuck’s activities.
Chuck lived his life to the fullest and I was fortunate to be part of that. We will all miss him.
August 2024, Sabine Wilke
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In Memoriam: Tributes to Chuck Barrack by his dear friend Joe Voyles and his students.
"With Diana and Charles this is the final passing of the generation that had already been in place for almost 20 years when I came to the department in 1989. This core group had been gathered, as best I can tell, with the legendary Willy Rey. Let me just register that the entire group were were at bottom all of them kind, civil, forgiving, and extremely decent colleagues. I felt, and still feel, extremely fortunate to have spent almost thirty years in a department in which everyone made a point of being part of a constructive community for so long, and I wish for all of you another several decades of the same." --Jane K. Brown