One day after English class in 1962 at LMS, Omar pulled out of his desk drawer the thin paperback BLACK LIKE ME which may have been censored from LMS library and handed it to me. I was incredibly moved by John Howard Griffin’s journey through the Jim Crow South, a white man who painted himself black for the experience. The reading shock my white, unexposed foundations such that I memorized a chapter and recited it to my home Mennonite Church.

And I have built on that reading ever since. I owe a lot to Omar and that’s a big one.

In later years, Omar lived with my father Harold D. Lehman in Yoder House at VMRC. Not long ago, I again thanked Omar in person for sharing his rare talent with our journal and congratulated him for earning a literary accolade rare among Mennonite writers. Now he and my father are gone, as is David Foster Wallace, for that matter.

RIP, Omar.

He was gracious as he responded after reading it. Perhaps he saw something. He didn’t send me off in tears. He somehow invited me into the world of writing, story formation and treating both as a craft. That was inviting me to be part of his life and as I eagerly accepted he was a huge part of mine. He helped me become a writer and journalist. He warned me of the “Mennonite ghetto” of writing. He was a model of someone who could be both honest and gracious.

I was fortunate to be allowed into the fold. Not everyone was the afforded that or chose that, but because of those times together, Omar became a dear friend who continue to shape my life long after graduation.

I am grateful for those times in the classroom with him, those times in his office and visiting his garden. And the connection that remained in recent years. He was a dear man who loved his Creator, his students and stories. I am so grateful.

During my sophomore year word got to me by way of a Work-Study student who had been asked to retype it that Omar had chosen my essay from Expository Writing to be passed out for peer review in the class. I soon discovered that it wasn’t because it was necessarily good.

As a bit of a caricaturist, I enjoyed drawing caricatures of Omar in my notebooks (when I should have been taking notes) and one time I drew his visage on the inside wooden door in a second floor Men’s Room in “Old Main” that I was sure he would see, eventually. With his carefully coiffed hair, patrician eyebrows, and trademark Van Dyke, Omar was easy to draw and be immediately recognizable.

While taking his Creative Writing course in the fall of 1977, I was required to keep and submit a journal. It was during that semester that I produced some of my best writing, much of which was in that journal. One of his written responses in that journal is classic Omar:

“I’ve seen Eric Bishop in three classes now, other than IDS 102. If I were a new, insecure college instructor, I’d probably be worrying about those many days when I got no indication of connecting with Eric. He has a far away look in his eye, a nervous restlessness—can he be attentive —-have any power of concentration for one subject/topic/interest/? Has the passive activity of listening to music by the thousands of hours affected him? How? So I don’t worry about my teaching so much — as Eric — will he really endure the daily demands of a high school classroom teacher? Or will he in another 10 years be in more the type of thing his brother is now in — public relations? Maybe straight out newspaper work -as a cub reporter on a small daily— May the years deal kindly with Eric.”

NOTE: I went on to teach English at Christopher Dock Mennonite HS for 37 years, and Omar was pleased.

On the Acknowledgements page of my doctoral dissertation I included: …..and Professor Omar Eby, of ˛ÝÝ®ÉçÇř, who always affirmed my writing skills.

I photocopied that page and sent it to him. He later told me that only one other of his former students, to his knowledge, ever gave him that particular kind of acknowledgment of his contributions to some aspect of their formation.

The last time I was with Omar, it was in his room at VMRC and we shared some of our mutual struggles. I will always cherish that time together (though I wish he wouldn’t have noted, twice, that I had, indeed, put on a good bit of weight since the last time he had seen me!)

It has been difficult to see the old guard English professors die off: Hubert Pellman, Jay B. Landis….. and now Omar. These men gave me, and generations of students, the quantity and quality of attention that you often don’t get at big name schools where many of your teachers in the early years are Teaching Fellows and Graduate Assistants while the “stars” are away, speaking at conferences, jet-setting around the globe and conducting research of sometimes dubious value to be published in obscure journals with minimal circulation.

Omar was a stickler for precision and excellence. Long before laptops and spellcheck, Omar would deduct one-third of a letter grade for each misspelling on a term paper!

His influence laid the groundwork for my eventual employment at Laubach Literacy international in Syracuse, New York following my graduation from EMU. Coincidentally, I learned later that Omar had also done an internship at Laubach Literacy while working on his masters in journalism at Syracuse University — and, thus, we had occasion to compare notes on world literacy in the years after I graduated from EMU.

On the creative side I will always associate my love for William Wordsworth’s poem, Tintern Abbey, with Omar. Omar helped to illuminate Wordsworth’s world to me — a precious gift!