Fred Yaffe Moments in time are marked by song for Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences Fred Yaffe. En route to New Orleans one Thanksgiving with his wife, Abbie, Yaffe decided every American needed to visit Elvis’s lair in Memphis. Abbie thought he was kidding until he popped in Paul Simon’s “Graceland” and proceeded to drive to the King’s elaborate dwelling. He says it reveals something about the American Dream. “You go to the house and there’s a moment when you understand a little more about yourself and America,” he says, explaining his theory that 200 years from now people young and old, who are brought to tears just standing at the music-note-lined gates to Graceland, may one day worship Elvis not only as “the King,” but as a god. He and Abbie took home a few Elvis “tchochkies,” a Yiddish term for souvenirs. On another trip to Yellowstone National Park, a year after Grateful Dead singer Jerry Garcia died, Yaffe was recognized. With his head of dark curls and an overgrown gray beard, he was just “Fred” to Abbie, who sat next to him on a bench eating lunch. But to a man whose frequent stares were becoming more and more obvious, he was the center of a Deadhead’s world. “Hey are you Jerry Garcia?” the man asked. “Yeah, man, peace, don’t tell anyone I’m still alive,” Yaffe said. He and his wife were more than amused, especially after man exclaimed, “I knew it.” Later they found another tchochkie — a cherub meant to be Jerry Garcia with sunglasses on his face and a guitar in his hands. It now sits in Yaffe’s office next to several of Elvis. Most of the other tchochkies that are scattered about his office, oftentimes serving as conversation pieces, are versions of the human eyeball: eyeball monsters, clocks, lamps, figurines, balls and other toys, as well as eyeball jawbreakers sitting in a bowl. He has eyeball ties at home but says wearing them would signify his entrance “into the weird,” never mind the fact that every few minutes the “Twilight Zone” theme song flashes on; the sound of a new email being received. As a psychology major in college, he became particularly interested in visual perception. His collection started with a four-foot picture of Marilyn Monroe’s eyes, which he posted in his lab in grad school. “It seemed appropriate for a vision lab to have a picture of eyes in it,” he says. “So it started like that and then people started bringing me things with eyes and I started looking for things with eyes myself. The whole thing got out of hand.” Even this picture of me is made from hundreds of eyeball pictures. It comes into focus the further away you move from the screen. “The reason it’s here is that my wife would not let me bring it home; it would be creepy in my home,” he adds. “I could cover the walls with pictures, but that gets a little much, as if this isn't a little much. When you start to look for eyes, you find lots of eyes.” As an only child, he grew up in Baltimore, Maryland and lived what he calls a perfectly normal childhood, playing in the streets, taking public transportation and enjoying school, especially science. His father played ragtime piano, though not professionally, and wanted him to follow in his path by becoming a concert pianist. He took lessons but discovered he lacked both talent and an interest in practicing. He remembers the first time he was introduced to rock ‘n’ roll. It was at a screening of the movie “Blackboard Jungle” when he and a friend heard Bill Haley and his Comets singing “Rock Around the Clock,” and were overpowered with shock. “Of course around the house, rather than take my classical music lessons, I started playing rock ‘n’ roll and my father was not so sure about it,” he says. For a brief moment he formed a band, handling piano duties while friends played clarinet and guitar. And though his parents believed something evil had consumed their son, he knew he was not destined to be a rock star. “My parents were sure the Devil was coming and were horrified that my friends and I were listening to the Black radio stations,” he says. These days he plays piano for his own enjoyment, slipping headphones on to hide any fingering mistakes from the rest of the world. And he regrets letting Woodstock pass him by. “My wife and I constantly try to one-up each other now with the concerts we went to as kids; she’ll say ‘I went to hear Cream when they played in Chicago,’ and I’ll say, ‘Well, I went to see Simon and Garfunkel,’” he says. He was originally interested in physics and biology but growing up in the experimental age of the 1960s, he quickly becoming more and more attached to the study of conscious thinking. Volunteering and eventually working in a mental hospital, he learned clinical psychology was too emotionally draining for him. It was an era in mental hospital history when as many as 8,000 patients could be “incarcerated” at once and when “help” came in the form of debilitating drugs that only worsened conditions. It was a “revolving door” of mental health. “So I left my clinical days to other people,” he says. With his diverse interests in consciousness, visual perception, teaching and researching he never stopped to ask himself what he was going to be doing with his life, he says. His parents died while he was in his 20s and he says he can imagine his father saying: “Who do you think you are? You, dean?” But the job found him. A position at Washburn University in Topeka, Kansas, opened up, allowing him to first teach visual perception. So he got out his map and, after talking to a friend, discovered the Midwestern city was not similar to the West of the 1800s. “It actually had plumbing and no gunslingers around,” he says. “I found I liked students, discovered I loved it.” “I wanted to be a cowboy,” he adds. “Not too many people start off saying ‘I’m going to be a professor.’ They become interested in an intellectual field and then teach to earn a living.” He went on to become the founding dean of arts and sciences at both Ashland University in Ohio and Frostburg State University in Maryland, before realizing he wanted to see the sun again. He joined the La Verne team four years ago and now lives five minutes from work. “We really do appreciate La Verne as a small town away from the L.A. madness,” he says. As a Midwesterner he also became involved in community theater, discovering a love of acting, which he hopes to return to upon retirement, though he says romantic leads have now surpassed him. “As a dean you have so much of a weight on you, and while acting you just have to remember your lines,” he says. But he says “freedom” is what makes his job and the entire college experience worthwhile. “You never lose it…it’s what makes college wonderful,” he says. “You have the freedom to enjoy intellectual and cultural pursuits and it’s priceless, just like the commercial says.” RETURN TO FACULTY LISTmailto:FYAFFE@ulv.edu?subject=HELLOHome.htmlshapeimage_1_link_1
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