Van Beck Hall, history professor emeritus honored with the creation of the department’s annual Van Beck Hall Graduate Teaching Award for his “52 years as a beloved and master teacher,” died Aug. 11, 2023, at 88.
“You don’t hang around for 50 years unless there is something keeping you there — and that was teaching, at which he excelled in every format,” from large lecture courses to seminars, said long-time departmental colleague Bruce Venarde, professor emeritus. Venarde remembered a teaching assistant in Hall’s Early American survey course remarking: “Van Beck Hall is a rock star.”
“He took me under his wing, early on,” as a mentor, Venarde said. “Van was a wonderful, generous mentor” to him and to others in the history department. “He was just a marvelous presence. Almost always cheerful. He would go around the hall whistling.”
And, Venarde added, “he was a very proud eccentric” who never used a computer, although he retired in 2015. Occasionally, he would ask an office colleague to check his email or enter his grades. He had no cell phone either.
In 2007, the University Times reported that Hall, advocating for increased bus funding at a public meeting, began his remarks by noting: “I’ve lived in Squirrel Hill since 1964. We got rid of our automobile in 1965, so I’ve done a considerable amount of PAT bus riding over the years.”
And a lot of walking. Fifty-year colleague and friend Seymour Drescher, distinguished university professor emeritus, used to walk with Hall to and from campus, in any weather, using trails through Schenley Park to get to Oakland.
He recalled Hall as “a man of measured and forceful words. When I was asked to serve as chair of our department of history, my only condition was the appointment of Van to be my assistant, and he served me very faithfully and well.” In turn, he said, one of Hall’s great traits “always was his own leadership in the faculty drive for unionization,” during the earliest efforts of decades ago. Drescher remembered once when Hall gave a speech to a group of liberal arts faculty, “to a rousing ovation, and a colleague sitting next to me whispered, ‘That was Lenin’s ghost.’”
“He was committed to a faculty union, starting in the early 1970s,” Venarde added. “I’m glad he lived long enough to see that.
“He was totally genuine,” Venarde added. “You always knew exactly where you stood with Van, which is not to say he was unkind. Quite the opposite. But he was completely direct, completely genuine. Just a wonderful person.”
Hall was twice chair of his department, where he taught American history and authored the 1972 University of Pittsburgh Press book, “Politics Without Parties: Massachusetts, 1780-1791.”
He served on Faculty Assembly in the 1990s and 2000s, and as co-chair of the Senate Council's Plant Utilization and Planning committee.
Born in Charleston, W.Va., he was a captain in the U.S. Air Force and beginning in 2003 chair of the board of trustees of First Baptist Church in Oakland, where a memorial service will be held at 11 a.m. Sept. 23.
He is survived by his wife of 63 years, Paula Hall, and his children, William Blake Hall and Elizabeth Ann Hall. Memorial gifts are suggested to First Baptist Church or the Native American College Fund.
— Marty Levine