A Six-Decade Friendship

I knew Simon Ottenberg for nearly sixty years. We met in 1975 in a New York hotel room where he interviewed me for a Foreign Area Fellowship, which I got, thanks to his positive recommendation. We met subsequently at ASA and ACASA conferences and became quite good friends in the 1970s through the ‘90s, when I first visited him and his then wife, Nora, in Seattle. Simon took over her book business after her death, and ran it out of his home for several years.We sailed together several times, first aboard his 35-foot cruising cutter in the Seattle area. Later, after Simon married Carol Barnard, we sailed together aboard my ketch in the San Juan Islands, where my wife Shelley and I had a summer cabin (Fig. 1).Their Seattle home was filled with African and Northwest Coast art, and Simon and Carol were always gracious and welcoming hosts. Shelley and I shared many a meal in their home or on Crane Island, the Cole family retreat in the San Juan Islands. Our last shared meal, with about seventy others, was his elegant 100th birthday dinner hosted by Carol in June 2023.Simon read and offered helpful critical comments on my 1968 dissertation on Igbo mbari houses, and after several years, when my book was published much later (in 1982), he correctly found fault with my having cast mbari arts in an “ethnographic present” of the 1930s— the glory years of mbari—which, by the late 1970s, was no longer acceptable in studies purporting to be art historical.Simon's warmth, friendly nature, and generosity of spirit, along with his clear and abundant professional advice, have long caused me to consider him, along with the late Douglas Fraser, as a major influence and mentor in my academic and personal life. Never strident and always quietly effective as a thinker and speaker, Simon was a great model for his many students, among whom I count myself. Despite his being primarily an anthropologist as a professor and author, to this day I consider Simon to be the very best of all art historians of Igbo arts, including both native Igbo and non-Igbo scholars. He remains a treasured friend, very much missed.