Charles Styron

Although Hughes and I seldom spent time together in person the way that most friends do, he figured very large in my life because of the scope of his mind. Talking to him on the phone when we were in High School is a case in point, but it was like waiting for lightening to strike in a thunderstorm. Mind you, this is very different from watching paint dry. In a thunderstorm, lightening will strike, and it will strike multiple times; you just don’t know when. Additionally, when it does strike, it will definitely catch your attention. So it was with Hughes. When he got around to saying something on the subject at hand, it was always quite germane, and like lightening, it was brilliant and sharp. The phone was the principal way that he and I communicated during our High School years because we had different groups of friends and activities. As we continued our friendship after High School, he gradually became more predictable in conversational rhythm, and after marrying Nina, he became more voluble as well. In recent years, in fact, I noticed that if I could get him started on a subject that I liked and about which he was knowledgeable—and that qualifier included as much as it eliminated—Hughes could be counted on to hold forth for tangible periods of time. I would learn a lot during these exchanges. One of his favorite subjects in recent years was the noted Major League Baseball agent, Scott Boras. Hughes’ son, Tyler, has worked many years for him as an arbitrator and obviously provided his father with numerous interesting anecdotes. Hughes was unstoppable on this subject, and he turned me into a Tony Gwynn fan as well (along with George Will, an inveterate baseball devotee, who praised the San Diego Padres’ rightfielder no end). 

In the spring semester of our senior year in High School, Hughes and I and a few others used to gather once a week at lunchtime with our algebra teacher, Mr. Blakeway, while he introduced us to beginning calculus. Calculus is commonplace in High School these days, but it wasn’t back in our time except at elite prep schools. Blakeway had a trademark exercise of which he was very proud: the ability to draw a large, perfect circle on the blackboard (circles often figuring in beginning calculus instruction). He would position himself in profile to the board with his right side toward the surface, stand so that his outstretched arm with chalk in hand made about a 60% angle with the board, contact it with the chalk at the top of his reach, and then rotate his arm around in a circle so as to keep the rigidly held chalk in contact with the board. The motion was smooth and moderate in speed, and his shoulder remained stationary. The chalk would swing round to complete a perfect circle at the apex. Mr. Blakeway would then turn and smile at us after a flawless execution. Hughes and I often laughed out loud. We were also mildly competitive with each other in math (along with Megan Stuart), and we awaited the announcement of who would win the Class Math Prize at the end of Senior Year. Hughes won by a whisker, and he never let me forget it. 

In The Brothers Karamazov, Dmitri offers a proposition that has been paraphrased with the famous phrase, “If God is Dead, then All is Permitted.” Hughes was quite taken with this moral question, and we debated more than once as to whether God was necessary for there to be a basis for morality (neither of us taking a definitive position). I can remember arguing that this was not the case, and my current position continues in this vein—that morality, in fact, is the distilled wisdom of human beings that has filtered down to us over the millennia. Whatever the case, however, this is an example of the kinds of things that Hughes regularly discussed. He had an expansive and very inquiring mind. 

Hughes was also probably the principal reason that I studied architecture after returning from two years in the Peace Corps in Nepal after college graduation. I didn’t really have a clue what to do with my life, but I felt compelled to do “something professional.” Architecture was the obvious choice since it was vaguely similar to what I had just been doing in Nepal with some success. I had determined in college that biological sciences were not my metier, ruling out the study of medicine for which my father, a physician, consistently lobbied. I guess I thought that if Hughes found architecture worthwhile, I would as well. And I did—sort of—for 20 years until changing my career into clinical psychology, which I am still practicing today. 

Hughes, finally, had an eidetic memory for many things earlier in his life, and he would often amaze me with the details of what he recalled. When I returned from the Peace Corps and enrolled in the Architecture School at MIT (from which he was about to graduate), I apparently stayed with him for a couple of days in Cambridge. He remembered practically everything about my visit, particularly the fact that the Red Sox were having a banner year at the time. It was the fall of 1967, and they were in a pennant race. You could walk down the street in the afternoon and hear peoples’ radios giving the play by play of every September game. How could I have forgotten THAT? Anyway, Hughes filled me in, replete with detail, and told me all kinds of other trivial things that I had forgotten. It’s a good thing that he was never subpoenaed to testify against me in Court; I would have been screwed! 

HAIL CLAUDE HUGHES POPE, JR. HAIL

Leon Spencer

Thanks so much for a fascinating remembrance of Hughes Pope, Charles. I had not thought of the math lunchtime group in a long time. Mr. Blakeway called it "the Wranglers" after the famous Cambridge math recognitions. I think Charles Morris was in it too.

Charles Winton

I'd also forgotten about Mr. Blakeway's lunch time calculus sessions until Charles brought it up. I didn't know Hughes well since most of my high school friends were in band, but did have a nice chat with him at the 50th anniversary celebration. I regret I didn't get to know him better. I remember being fascinated by how Mr. Blakeway made x's by writing a backwards c adjoined to a c. He must have taught us something, because I found I had an edge in honors calculus at NC State my Freshman year (believe it or not, 6 days a week at 8am). After getting through the freshman-sphomore calculus survey sequence I was hooked on math, for which I think Mr. Blakeway deserves some of the credit. NASA decided I should go to graduate school at UNC rather than enlist, where I ran into Mr. Blakeway a couple of times when he showed up in Phillips Hall for some math-related event. Thank you Charles for you inciteful remembrances of Hughes and for bringing up Mr. Blakeway, certainly the best of the math tearchers on Broughton's faculty during our time there.

William Stroupe

To echo Leon Spencer's thank-you to Charles Styron for recalling such warm, vivid memories of Hughes, I'll ad that Charles was a remarkably appropriate person to do so: One great intellect with remarkable empathy for others eulogizing someone with those same qualities. Hughes had the gift, not only of conversing on the high planes of cerebral discussion, but also of talking to anyone about anything.

While we were on the Broughton track team, Hughes and I talked about a wide range of topics during practice: "The Untouchables" TV show, popular at the time; Jack Paar's temper tantrum in walking off the set of "The Tonight Show" because NBC bleeped "water closet" from his joke the previous night; and various science fiction stories. Hughes once mentioned reading that athletic trainers described Mickey Mantle's running style as totally incorrect. They suggested that he was capable of achieving much greater speed. Needless to say, Hughes remembered all of the details of how the star of the Yankees could improve, while I coulldn't comprehend, much less recall, the suggestions. Besides, I was too stunned by the idea of a faster Mickey Mantle.

Once I related to Hughes the gist of a science fiction story in which a male and female alien are sent to earth in human form, unaware of each other's presence, to select one human being of the opposite sex to basically restart civilization because the aliens consider inhabitants of our planet so corrupt and violent. The rest of humanity would perish. Unfortunately, the two aliens select each other. Hughes rejected the premise of the story because it leaves God out of the equation--consistent with his evaluation of The Brothers Karamazov, which Charles described in his excellent reminiscing. 

Hughes seemed at home whether discussing great literature or pulp fiction. Or anywhere in between. He once related to Charles (I think, or it could have been someone else at track practice) the improbability of the Reddleman winning back Clem Yeobright's gambling losses in The Return of the Native. I had naively swallowed the whole story but learned in that instant the difference between "willing suspension of disbelief" and "total gullibility."

But Hughes always seemed to know how to separate the wheat from the chaff. 

John Shelburne (Shelburne)

So sad to learn about Hughes' passing--he was a classmate and friend for many years. 

I wasn't smart enough to be in Mr. Blakeway's calculus class---instead I spent lunch times at the school store, adding and subtracting. But I did compete with Hughes once---it was in the third grade---the two of us were asked to write the multiplication tables on the blackboard, correctly of course, and as fast as possible. I have no idea who won--probably Hughes--but I still clearly remember the pressure. 

We were all fortunate to have known him. 

---John Shelburne