Adams House Friends Remember Former Tutor

Dozens of students, friends and associates gathered yesterday evening in the Adams House lower common room to remember Benjamin E. Teel, the house's assistant senior tutor who died July 31.

"This is a an Adams House remembrance. We wanted to think about something that Ben would have liked, and everybody knows Ben liked a good time," said Adams Master Robert J. Kiely.

Friends recalled the French enthusiast and Romance Languages Ph.D. candidate as someone who always had time to care and who liked to see other people enjoy themselves. Some of his friends spoke, some read poetry, some sang, and some played the piano and violin.

One of his closest friends while at Harvard, Professor of Romance Languages Wilga Rivers, who advised Teel on his Ph.D. dissertation, said that "he was never sitting around. He became fascinated with the learning of literate and non-literate people." For example, Rivers said, Teel studied the Haitian Creole language to better understand how illiterate Haitians learn French.

At the service's end, after French poetry, an old spirtual, the second movement of Dvorak's "American Quartet," and a period of silence, everyone joined in singing "Amazing Grace" led by the Kuumba Singers.