Notes from Memorial Celebration:

"BE BRIEF" sign: display on podium if possible. Dissertation anecdote: you can’t get every single idea into a single paper, dissertation or speech.

Everyone sitting in this hall — speaker or not — has something to say about John. It’s not all going to get said today but the number of those present — the fact that we’re all here — speaks eloquently of John’s wide-ranging influence and the importance that his teaching, scholarship and friendship had in many different lives.

My written comments are in "the record."

I knew John since 1988, when I started at the U as a 42 year old "quirky" graduate student. He was on the verge of starting his phased retirement. We worked together and became good friends: a friendship that lasted, whether I was in the Twin Cities or not over the next 13 years (most of the time I was not).

Part of this friendship involved "corresponding" with each other: seeing and reporting to each other interesting events or phenomena we encountered or read about. What did we see in the landscapes through which we traveled — and why were things where they were?

I’d like to share just a handful of these.

Selected letters and post cards are just a portion of the ones I have around — amount to great examples of John’s view of the world: his effort to see it and try to understand and explain what here was seeing.

Some are notable because of choice of subject, others by his typically understated and often droll comments

Ike’s Chicken Shack, near Brown’s Valley, MN (1994)

The "Shack" was closed but he and Jane had stopped by Herman, MN to "check out the nationally advertised covey of bachelors."

Post card of alfalfa elevator (1993)

Nebraska Alfalfa Dehydration Plant

"Nebraska is responsible for nearly half of total U.S. production of dehydrated alfalfa."

JRB: "Dear Bill: I don’t think the producer of this card even had tongue in cheek."

New Salem, ND (1995)

JRB: "Dear Bill: Please add this to your collection if you don’t already have it. Smithsonian will surely prize it in 2095 AD. Remarkable thing is these Russian Germans out here far from any major market still carrying on dairy farming — in semi-arid country, too." …

JRB: "At our hotel about 15% of all items on the tourist ‘information’ rack was comprised of brochures like these. The natural resource of the area is so seriously over-developed … there’s so much imagery and stylized stuff and so many people with not much to do — I wonder if these factors explain any of this.

 

John in retirement: like the expanding universe: increased interests, more things to be understood, more things to do.

Recent examples: rules of golf, suburbinization of NYC area

Data for chart of cars on Hi-Line trip in March. (Show yellow paper with collected data for the map and chart I was planning on making for John.)

Actually, I had invited John and Jane to accompany me on this road trip. This wasn’t possible but John was thrilled as he tracked my progress east and west on old U.S. 2 by merans of email messages we exchanged. On my return, he and Jane looked over my photos from Montana, North Dakota and other places with great interest. But one thing that never got done, was the data I collected on varying car types as I made my way west through the high plain, the Rockies and so forth.

Speaking of car expeditions, I feel as if I saved John’s life many times — as anyone did who drove a car or van allowing him to look out the window and ruminate on the passing landscape.

Student and teacher, teacher and student, I’m thankful for John Borchert and am lucky to have been his friend over the past dozen year.

We should all be so lucky to get as much out of life the way he did.

Thank you.

Original Eulogy:

In December, John Borchert was in the Regions Hospital ICU, battling pneumonia for the second time in the year 2000. His resilient, seemingly indefatigable body was laying the groundwork for yet another of his miracle recoveries, although no one even suspected as much at the time. When I walked in, the nurses wanted to know if I were a family member, I said no, I wasn’t — but that he was my best friend. They let me in — then and each time I showed up to hang out with John over the next 10 days.

For the past 13 years, it has been a privilege to be counted among John’s friends. He was an extra-ordinary person traveling under the guise of apparent ordinariness. Beneath an unassuming, relaxed exterior, his unique combination of intelligence, insatiable curiosity and personal warmth were far from ordinary. They made him a special person to the many who knew him or who worked with him — or who neither knew nor worked with him but were nonetheless influenced by him and his work.

Less than a year later, I was a graduate student in geography at The U, with John as my professor for his definitive "Geography of Minnesota" course. I’d been told that Professor Borchert’s door was "always open" and that stopping by his office would be a good idea. "You’ll like each other," Clark Chambers suggested.

And John’s door really was open. Like a thousand students before me, I just meandered in. And as he’d no doubt done a thousand times, Professor Borchert put aside whatever it was he was working on and gave me his full attention. He was intensely interested in who I was, where I was from, what form and directions my interests were taking — and how we might work together.

No matter that I was already 42 and John was a few months from beginning his phased retirement: The Borchert style of warmth, interest and openness was his trademark in 1988, as it was forty years earlier, when he and Jane moved to Minnesota with their children.

Not long afterwards, having enrolled in a land-use seminar with John, I turned out to be the only student. No problem: for the first session, the two us chatted about metro area issues non-stop for three hours, laying out a research plan on which we collaborated over the next couple of years.

It was my exceptional good fortune that the two of us became fast friends. What an honor and pleasure it was to get to know John and his wife Jane intimately over these years. During that time, I’ve spent time as well with Dianne, Bill, Bob and David — and their spouses and children as well. each of the many exceptional members of the extended Borchert Clan has treated me as an extended family member with a characteristic graciousness that is sincerely appreciated.

Though I moved to Washington. in 1992, our relationship continued to flourish. Both of us enjoyed discovering and sharing news articles, data sets and assorted factoids that piqued our mutual interests. This relationship was important to both of us and persisted during the seven years I was away from Minnesota and in the two since my return.

John Borchert’s priority of describing the world as it exists, measuring its changes over time and documenting these continuing alterations captivated me from the outset. His focus on scrupulous observation, data collection and broad-ranging, thorough analysis —coupled of course with mental maps and real-world mapping — influences my own methods of approaching problems to this day.

John believed firmly in using collected data as a springboard for intelligent, considered action. He emphasized, time and again, that the best decisions can be made — be they by individuals, families, organizations or governments —starting with solid, accurate information. Forty years after the event, John’s eyes still sparkled with excitement as he recalled staying up for hours on the Moscow-St., Petersburg train in the last 1950s, introducing to puzzled but curious Russian academics the varied wonders of the "Statistical Abstract of the United States."

Viewing what we see around us every day as parts of larger, complex systems and trying to see ourselves at different scales were crucial themes of his that helped make geography real to those with whom he interacted.

Of many endearing traits, perhaps most memorable for me was John’s M.O. of complete and undivided attention. When speaking with John, you never doubted for a moment that he was fully engaged in the conversation. Weeks later, he’d follow up even the most casual comment with a relevant anecdote, an opinion or insight, a new idea.

I’m lucky to have encountered John Borchert and honored to have been good friends with him for more than a decade.