Kim Reid

Michael and I were colleagues in Greeley. I have many fond memories of him during the eight years that I worked there: 

He laughed uproariously when he and some colleagues introduced me to Rocky Mountain Oysters when I first arrived in Greeley.

Several years Michael organized a group of faculty to attend the Telluride Film Festival.  We watched movies all day and stayed up for the “midnight special.”

He conducted an independent study in Marxism for my son when John was a senior in high school.

He served as the outside reader on several of my doctoral students’ dissertations.

He invited literally hundreds of people to my party (“Hey, there’s a party at Reid’s Friday night”) the night before commencement. I have to smile when I remember how the faculty procession snaked a bit more than usual the next morning.

Michael, our friend/student Molly, and I attended a Cajun dance in New Orleans during a conference. Of course, Michael had two left feet, so watched the rest of us dance.

We saw and dissected scores of movies and ate an unknown numbers of meals together--cafeteria lunches (Michael always had salad), Mexican café dinners on the north side of town, straight-laced academic banquets, and relaxed home cooking. 

The most entertaining story I have to tell took place the day I met him. I had phoned his office a few months earlier saying that I needed an anthropologist for a grant I was writing. He told me if I got the grant to call him back and he hung up. When I did get the grant, I called him again. He came to my office. Picture this: he wore a yellow shark-skin suit-like jacket, a plaid shirt, Bermuda shorts, argyle socks, and some kind of boots (I can’t quite remember them). He announced aggressively that he was a Marxist within the first thirty seconds—as if he were daring me to include him on the team--and let fly a string of expletives throughout what is generally a very proper and polite discourse. I thought, “What have I gotten myself into?”

Over the three years we worked together on that project we became friends and I came to have a very deep respect for him as a person, colleague, and friend. I read and admired all of his books. When I left for NY to take a job at Columbia, Michael was one of the few people from Greeley I kept in touch with.  Just a few days ago, we were commiserating about his ankle and the tendinitis I have in my foot.

And then he was suddenly gone. A part of me is still in denial; another part deeply saddened. I grieve for my friend and for his wife and family. What a terrible shock. I miss him.

Kim