A lifespan even of 80 years is not enough, on its own, to earn a person the status of village elder.
The other qualities that conferred the honor on Charles Chatfield were celebrated Jan. 24 in the stone and wood sanctuary of Springfield’s Covenant Presbyterian Church – qualities echoed in loving condolences sent by students who enjoyed his classes and company from 1961 to 1999.
“Charles Chatfield had a profound impact on my life path,” wrote Richard Tracy ’77. “After he brought the Lutheran Bishop of Chile to speak against the Pinochet coup in Chile, I switched majors to Spanish and Latin American Studies... joined the Peace Corps and married my Columbian bride.”
Paul Tuttle ’83 called Chatfield “a big part of why I dropped my intended career path and went to Divinity School instead.”
Sandra Bennett, a 1983 exchange student from Liverpool, England, summed up Chatfield’s character when she said he both “taught us American history ... and was our Guardian Angel.”
Just as he welcomed Bennett, Chatfield sent a host of Wittenberg students abroad through the Global Issues and World Churches international studies program. He did so with the help of Mary, his wife of 57 years, whom one colleague called his “constant partner, editor and co-conspirator.”
Son David Chatfield, who chairs the Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry at Florida International University, called that period of collaboration “one of the happiest times” of his father’s life.
A graduate of Illinois’ Monmouth College who earned his master’s degree and Ph.D. at Vanderbilt University, Chatfield made his first contributions to peace studies when he proposed a dissertation topic and heard his adviser ask, “Was there a pacifist movement?”
Chatfield’s full answer came in 1972 with “Pacifism in America, 1914-41,” winner of the Ohio Academy of History’s publication award.
President Emeritus William Kinnison said that in his years at Wittenberg, Chatfield was part of a “hinge generation” linking “what was to what was to come.”
At the memorial service, Mary-Kaye Soderlind ’65 captured the feel of Chatfield’s early days by invoking bow ties, Berlin and balderdash.
“His lectures were better, his jokes funnier and even his terrible puns (“egregious,” suggested his obituary) were more understandable when he wore bow ties.”
When Soderlind studied abroad in Berlin, Chatfield persuaded her to interview one of the best-known German pacifists for him, arguing: “You are in Berlin ... your German is better than mine, and you can do it.”
“Balderdash” is a PG version of the word Chatfield actually used to chew her out during her graduate years, Soderlind said. If she couldn’t adjust her dissertation subject to suit her committee, he continued, “maybe you don’t deserve the degree.”
“Only a friend would have talked to me that way,” she said. If Chatfield stood up to his friends, he stood up for them, too.
Sandi Cooper, a professor at the City University of New York’s Graduate Center, recalled that when an Oxford University don sought to discredit the field of peace studies at a conference, “In about two or three quiet sentences, [Chatfield] managed to puncture both the egoism and the absence of moral content in everything that had been said and re-establish (the) larger moral-intellectual project which we had to engage.”
Kinnison described Chatfield as “a humble and gracious advocate of peace and reconciliation” who, even in the “highly charged” late ’60s and early ’70s “remained a voice of calm, showing respect for others.” He never came unhinged.
Chatfield often remarked on the happy historic coincidence between the birth of peace studies and the rise of a peace movement.
“The Vietnam war just picked us up and moved us,” he said in a 2012 interview with the Springfield News-Sun. “It was so exciting,” he added, as was being in “a field that attracts people with a real sense of values.”
One of those people was University of Toledo scholar Charles DeBenedetti, who had composed 1,100 pages of a book, 840 of them in the first-draft stage, when he was diagnosed with a fast-growing brain tumor.
Four years after DeBenedetti’s death, An American Ordeal: The Anti-War Movement of the Vietnam War won the Society of Historians of American Foreign Relation’s Keuhl Prize, and as “assisting author,” Chatfield drew praise from parties as diverse as The chronicle of Higher Education and radio commentator Paul Harvey.
The first holder of Wittenberg’s H. Orth Hirt Chair in History and the first recipient of the Peace History Society’s Lifetime Achievement Award, Chatfield also was named a “Peace Hero” by the Dayton International Peace Museum, received an honorary doctorate from his alma mater, was a Danforth Fellow, and received the Wittenberg Alumni Association’s Distinguished Teaching Award.
That he had remained in regular contact with campus after retirement contributed to the sense of reverence and respect in which he was held. So did his continued contributions to Wittenberg, notably in two articles he wrote for this magazine: “Breaking In: The Vietnam War Comes to Wittenberg” and “Breaking Out: The Sixties Reshape Wittenberg.”
David Holmgren, son of the Chatfields’ daughter, Carol Anne, described his grandfather as a “realistic but ever hopeful man” who had “a lifetime of knowledge and perspective that he could – that he wanted to – share.”
“He never lost his sense of wonder and shared that wonder with everyone around him,” the 18-year-old added. “From him I learned that the world is a wonderful place, and it is all the more beautiful for his having been in it.”
There could have been no more apt epitaph for the 80-year life of a grandfather, teacher and village elder.