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Man on Board, for the Long Haul

As the tanker that would haul oil to Bahrain by way of Aruba and Naples picked up its crew in the slicing wind off Brooklyn Flats, Robert Brustein thought, “I’m going to be the loneliest man in the world.” It was 1945, and although the war had ended, his hitch in the service had a year and a half to go. He was 18 years old.

Robert Brustein, a central figure in 20th-century American theatre, joined Suffolk University's College of Arts Sciences in 2006 as a Distinguished Scholar in Residence, a permanent faculty appointment.

Following an accelerated course of study at the High School of Music and Art in New York City with a final year at Columbia Grammar School, Brustein graduated at 16 and entered Amherst College in 1943. The war had swept most of the students from the pristine New England campus, leaving only the underage and the 4Fs, those deemed physically unable to serve. “We ruled,” he says. “We were the football team, the baseball team, the drama club. One hundred-fifty kids.”

Enlisting for service in April 1945, he entered the Merchant Marine, which capped four months of basic training in San Mateo, California with six months at sea, eight months at the Merchant Marine Academy at King’s Point, Long Island, and the rank of Cadet-Midshipman in the Naval Reserve. On one of his seven-hour monthly leaves from basic training on August 15, 1945, Brustein witnessed V-J day in San Francisco. “It was orgiastic. Women tore their clothes off in the street. People climbed to the top of huge statues. I’ve never seen a city go so berserk. And all I did was watch. The envious observer.”

These powers of observation later fueled one of the signal careers in American theatre. Defying his father, who wanted him to go into the family yarn business—“His greatest dream was to have what he called a vertical combination, in which he would have the sheep, then he would get the wool, card it and comb it, dye it, knit it, and sell it as sweaters.”—he embarked on a life in the theatre, eventually supervising more than 200 productions, writing 15 books, and training such luminaries as Meryl Streep, Henry Winkler, and Sigourney Weaver.

In December 1945, however, Robert Brustein was one of thousands of men aboard the tankers and Victory ships that navigated the world’s mined waters in the wake of the deadliest war in history. “I took to the sea,” he says. “There was a lot of adventure.” Crossing from the Panama Canal to Pozzuoli, passing through Casablanca, Alexandria, and Milan, he saw more of the world than he could have imagined growing up on the relatively homogeneous Jewish Upper West Side of Manhattan: narrowly navigable ports cluttered with sunken ships; abject poverty along the vanquished coasts of Italy; a humorous mutiny against the captain who tried to prevent the  women on the supply boats from clambering up the sides of his vessel; a case of “yellow jaundice.” The romance of the sea ebbing by the time his tour of duty ended, Brustein returned to Amherst College hungry to continue his education.

When the Korean War erupted in 1951, he and other merchant mariners found themselves subject to the draft. The US government had reneged on its pledge of veteran status to the Merchant Marine, which suffered a higher percentage of casualties than any other branch of the military in World War II. This Brustein saw as a profound injustice.

“I determined that I would not stay in the country, or would cut off my finger, or go to Canada, or anything to avoid being drafted into what I considered an unjust war.” Instead, he obtained one student deferment after another, including two Fulbrights in England, finally earning a PhD that he had never intended to pursue.

After a career that took him to Columbia University, as well as Cornell, Vassar, Yale, and Harvard, Brustein at last arrived at Suffolk University. “Suffolk tries to maintain the purity of its original ideals,” he observes. “There’s a gritty urban honesty about it that is impossible not to admire. The more I learn about Suffolk, the more I want to moor here.”

He plans to drop his anchor in this port for years to come.

smiles

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