Deceased Classmate: Carol E. Knoll
Date Of Birth: May-19-1954
Date Deceased: April -1-2011
Age at Death: 56
Cause of Death: lung cancer
Classmate City: Bay Area (San Francisco?)
Classmate State: CA
Classmate Country: USA
Was a Veteran: No
Survived By: Husband, Paul VanDerwalt

Carol E. Knoll Snowflakes, no two are the same. People, no two are the same. As I passed one mud-dotted leftover mound of snow after another on my way to the university on April 1, 2015, the end result of the clustered snowflakes that refused to melt seemed pretty much the same. Not to trivialize our uniqueness, but it seems our new friends often remind us of old friends, acquaintances, relatives and such. How often do we make a friend that strikes us as absolutely, unequivocally, unique? Carol Knoll was one such friend. Carol Knoll passed away on April 1, 2011. If there is some embarrassing Guinness Award for eulogy procrastination, I hereby submit this for consideration. I learned of her passing a few months after the fact and wrote to my friend Sherry Levy (Weinstein) saying I wanted to write something about Carol. I had planned to give it some thought, but I wasn’t expecting it to take more than four years. I often read through the “In Memory” comments and see what we write about that brief time we spent together with our peers many years ago. It often comes down to a brief flash—we were so young and our observations surely reflect our sophistication level at the time. When I think back on Carol, I know I was seeing her through the eyes of a kid, but I don’t think Carol ever was a kid. People say that all the time, to be sure, but this is certainly not a cliché to those of us who knew Carol Knoll. Carol was part of the “FLEX” program, so she curled up in the auditorium after lunch and read Nietzsche, while I trudged off to see exactly how increasingly miserable Les Miserables could be presented in one of my least favorite classes. I met Carol at Young Judaea, a Zionist youth group. Most of us were there to meet with other Jewish teens, study a little Hebrew, learn some history, but Carol was a staunch and committed socialist by the age of 15 and she was dedicated to the politics of it. Although she was often the voice of reason, Carol would always cut to the chase. In high school, I spent a lot of my time making a creative little journal of events with friends. Today, I’d most likely be a blogger. Back then, I was just a slacker. It was something that kept me from studying much in high school. Carol was the only one of my friends with the nerve to say to me that had I spent less time on my pet projects and more time studying I could have gone to a dozen different universities. I told her she was right. After confirming that they taught Japanese at OSU, I had checked out on that front. Carol spent two weeks at my house one summer. She had opted out of a family vacation. I didn’t realize that one could opt out of any family activity, so that, in and of itself, piqued my curiosity. During that time, Carol spent a lot of time talking with one of my younger brothers. He was ten at the time, but already at the opposite end of the political spectrum from Carol. She called him “Capitalist Junior.” They talked about societal issues. (If she were here to read this, Carol could say, “I told you so,” Capitalist Junior makes knick-knacks for Wal-Mart in China.) For the rest of us there that summer, it seemed like a very odd pairing of minds and mindsets. Of course, it was precisely because Capitalist Senior never took vacations that the urge to opt out of a family holiday was so foreign to me. It was a fascinating couple of weeks. My mother, who can no longer remember something that happened five minutes ago, still remembers the redheaded teen that came for ten days and stayed for fifteen. Wishing she made more trips to the shower and horrified that Carol’s parents apparently arrived home from their trip in the early evening yet waited until the next day to pick her up, my mother established a razor sharp image of our time together. Carol always made an impression. Another strong summer memory took place out of State. Our youth group had a summer camp in Barryville, New York. Carol, Sherry and I attended a session. It was set up as a mock kibbutz, but it felt more like boot camp to me. I remember a long walk from the girls’ side to boys for a Shabbat. We were dressed completely in white. I recall marching alongside Carol. I can still see this in my mind’s eye. She was taller, so I needed to take a step and a half to keep up. I had a sense of us as comrades in arms. One of my kibbutz-like tasks was cleaning out the private bathroom of the camp director. I rarely cleaned a bathroom at home and I was finding it hard to choke down a princess fit. I also started getting headaches from insomnia. The insomnia was exacerbated by holding my breath at night while listening to other bunkmates talking about their sexcapades and chuckling about how funny it was that there were so many people in the room but nobody else was listening. I decided that it was time to leave this kibbutzian paradise. Carol accompanied me to see the camp nurse, who kept banking hours. I was sitting on the rail of the fence outside the nurse’s office waiting. Carol stood beside me, enumerating the reasons I should stay with her voice-of-reason manner. I shifted on the rail and fell over so that I was dangling by arms. It is etched in my memory as Carol literally talking me down off the fence. I ended up sticking it out at the camp and it was a valuable learning experience. Perhaps my most vivid memory of Carol is our time together in a 9-week English course on The Comic Tradition in America our senior year. I had already made an unauthorized trip to a used bookstore downtown, with a bodyguard, a guy who was a junior and shorter than I was, to get material on Chic Young. In my final report for the class, I was focusing on the role of the Blondie comics. Carol needed help with her project, however, and talked me into being her sidekick. Although I have never been much for the number two role, I agreed to be Ethel to Carol’s Lucy. And, yes, Carol looked the part—she was a true redhead, which accounts for only 1-2 percent of the population. It might have been less daunting if we were actually doing an “I Love Lucy” routine, but Carol had found herself fascinated with minstrel shows. The day of her presentation, Carol and I ducked out of class and went to the lavatory to apply itchy blackface make-up. We then stood outside our classroom and waited for an interminable amount of time to make our entrance. While we were waiting, a tall, lanky African American lower classman walked by us. I learned how to calculate probability a few years later, but I’ve never been able to assess exactly how incredibly unlikely this was. I held my breath while smiling up at him. I assumed Carol was doing the same. I will always remember watching him laugh—In fact, I think about it whenever someone uses the expression “laugh his ass off.” I don’t recall much about our actual skit, but I have always remembered those tense minutes in the hallway. Sometime during our college years, I heard that Carol had left school and was running for office on the Socialist ticket somewhere. The rest of us had our noses to the academic grindstone. The last time I saw Carol was when she visited me in Columbus a few months before I graduated. It was some kind of role reversal, as if we had entered an alternate universe. One of our friends likened Carol’s quest and occasional return to a 1971 TV movie of the time, “Maybe I’ll Come Home in the Spring.” She came upon me when I was racking up academic achievements, summa cum laude, distinction in Spanish (thesis on 15th Century Ladino), Humanities Student of the Year). We were as out of synch as we’d been when she’d been the scholar and I the rogue high school student. As much as I could not understand her, I still had the feeling that she knew something I did not. In the years since her passing, the number of Americans that would accept a Socialist candidate for president has increased more than 15%. Carol truly was ahead of her time. She will be remembered for her political aspirations and as a champion of the underdog. Carol did legal work for many years and was attending law school when she fell ill. Most of those who knew her would say she was exceedingly serious. However, Carol had a funny side. There was a slight twitch about her lips much of the time and an accompanying twinkle in her eye. A couple of the jokes that I still remember from those days were told by Carol and are too off-color to share. She may have been one of my accomplices in an April Fool’s prank. Now, I think of her on that day, the anniversary of her passing on the Gregorian calendar. I apologize to Carol and to all of you for taking so long to put my thoughts into words. Carol deserves to be moved from the “lost list” to the remembered list. Respectfully, Shari J. Berman