Stepping Outside the Box

Not the least of the pleasures afforded by The New York Times are its obituaries. No, reading the obituaries is not a morbid indulgence. Those of you who have read them - articles that summarize the lives of notable people who have recently died - know that they are often both witty and instructive and sometimes inspiring as well.

One of the most remarkable people who've had the distinction of a Times obituary was Richard T. Gill, who died recently at the age of 82. When he was almost forty and a tenured professor of economics at Harvard, he managed to break his two and a half pack addiction to cigarettes. In order to help himself stay clean, he took singing lessons. Without any prior formal training, he had nonetheless always liked to sing, but after a few years of lessons and rigorous practice, it became clear that he was a world-class basso profundo. "Mr. Gill soon forsook chalk and tweed for flowing robes and very large headgear."

The author of tomes such as Economics and the Private Interest: an introduction to microeconomics became a featured player, first at the New York City Opera and soon after at the Met, where he performed 42 times. His obituary, by Margalit Fox, quoted John Rockwell's review of Prof. Gill's 1975 performance as Pimen, in Boris Godunov. "He has one of the most beautiful, focused lyric bases around, mellow yet with a really black quality, and his shaping of this noble music was most persuasive."

One could die happy after a review like that, but I'm glad to say that he waited another 35 years. His career as an opera singer spanned 14 years, a period in which he continued to publish books on economics. He then returned to academic life, but instead of continuing with economics, he ventured into demographics, writing Our Changing Population, with Nathan Glazer and Stephan A. Thernstrom, and Posterity Lost: progress, ideology, and the decline of the American family.

As if this versatility were not impressive enough, before embarking on his career in opera, Prof. Gill published short stories in The New Yorker and The Atlantic Monthly. Later he hosted a 28-part television series on economics. Most of us, who are pleased if we can succeed in even one field, read such an obituary in wonder and awe at what's humanly possible if so rarely attained. Prof. Gill might at least have had the good grace to be homely, but he didn't oblige us even in that. The two photographs published with his obituary, one of them in the role of Frere Laurent in Romeo et Juliette at the Met in 1974, show a handsome man. This was hardly fair.

Few can aspire to such distinction. Still, Prof. Gill showed us what's possible when we have the courage to step outside the boxes that we create for ourselves.