Oh: Will Bonner
08-Jul-03
I just checked Hampshire College’s alumni website for the first time in forever.
Will Bonner died. He was one of the scholarship students from Springfield who worked at the RCC (rec center) with me. He was a great kid who was given an academic warning about his scholarship because he played basketball and the scholarship advisors couldn’t understand why he wasn’t studying (mind you, this is the school where it is possible to get a degree studying aerodynamics of frisbees). This particular scholarship made it so that about a half dozen poor black kids from Springfield could get a college education at Camp Hamp, but that scholarship was on such tightly-controlled terms, it frustrated everyone around them because it turned them into second-class citizens at our “liberal” liberal arts college, but without it, we would have had only one black student.
Will was a great guy. I really liked him. He was nice to everyone, and he played basketball for the same reason everyone plays basketball– to let off steam. [If you search for Will Bonner and Basketball, you will find hundreds of entries, but that's a different Will Bonner-- ours was from Springfield, MA, not Chico State.]
I wonder how he died, but at the same time, I fear the answer starts with his scholarship being lost and him ending up back in the inner city again, with all of the hazards possible there. He was a good guy who didn’t deserve to die young.
I was looking at the alumni site because last night I had a dream about Jonathan Wallander again, and I wondered if he’d made it onto the net. I thought it was interesting that, in the dream, I was talking with him and mentioned that I saw him in my dreams pretty often, but it was never real– he was never actually there, and had he finished his pursuit of history in college, or had he found another passion to take him along? He seemed to be involved in semiconductor R&D, though, and appeared to have delved into engineering instead of history. But when I asked him if he was really there, he just kind of smiled and didn’t answer me directly.