Two years later, at Hamilton College, where I chaired the college's Lecture Committee, I invited Jonathan (and his wife, Georgia), to come to Clinton, New York, and give a reading at the Red Pit Lounge on the Kirkland side of the campus. The reading went well enough, as did the dinner beforehand (Sambuca on the house in Clinton's one Italian restaurant), and the party at my apartment after.
Fifty years have gone by since I met Jonathan, and the really weird thing is that my most vivid memory of him is of the November morning in 1975 when he and I were walking between buildings on the Brooklyn College campus. Lionel Trilling had died a week earlier, and I told Jonathan, "It's very sad. I was Trilling's research assistant the year before last." "So you worked for LT," he said, paused, and then added, "You were his BLT." The phrase cracked him up. This, incidentally, was years before the emergence of Lawrence Taylor, the great Giants' linebreaker, who was known as "L.T." so I'm not sure why the initials held a charm for Baumbach. Jonathan's remark didn't seem all that funny to me, and yet that's what came to mind the other day when someone dropped his name. So capricious is human memory.