Ecstasies of the Spiritual Life:
Recollecting the Life and Words of W. B. "Bill" Macomber
Philosophy Professor
University of California at Santa Barbara

Part V: Biographical Information

Gregory Desilet

      

            William Barnes Macomber was born on July, 13, 1929. This was Friday the 13th of the inaugural year of the Great Depression—a portentous point of departure as Bill liked to point out years later. He was born to Harold Stacy and Anne Macomber in a middle class neighborhood in the comfortable southern California town of Redlands, about sixty miles east of Los Angeles. 

            He was the youngest of four children, two brothers and a sister, all separated by four years in age. Had his father not died when he was four, Bill believed he would have had a younger brother or sister in line with the next four-year interval. Harold was a veteran of World War I and contracted a lung condition from the trenches in France that eventually caught up with him.

            Following his older brother Robert’s departure to private high school, Bill lived alone with his mother. With growing tensions in Europe, neighbors gathered at the Macomber residence during the evening hours to listen to the BBC and Winston Churchill. Following the broadcasts and in response to the adult lament, “What does it all mean?” the precocious young Bill became the center of attention as he interpreted the social and political significance of the speeches and news reports.

            Armed with a growing ability to understand and interpret current events, Bill attended the Jesuit Loyola High School in Los Angeles where he received extensive training in the classics. Having begun high school under the cloud of World War II in 1943, he emerged on the other side of the war in 1946 with a high school diploma and new prospects in a war-free nation. 

            That same year he began studies at the University of Santa Clara, which in later years he affectionately described as “high school with ash trays.” Nevertheless, by 1950 Santa Clara had prepared him sufficiently to gain entrance into the University of Toronto where he began work on a PhD in philosophy at the Pontifical Institute of Medieval Studies.

            In 1951 his education was interrupted by the military draft brought on by the Korean War. The war began June 25, 1950 when the Soviet equipped North Korean People’s Army crossed the 38th parallel into the Republic of South Korea. By July of 1951 the fighting had been reduced to a stalemate around the 38th parallel and negotiations for an armistice commenced. These negotiations reached an impasse and continued with little progress for another two years until a breakthrough led to the signing of an armistice on July 27, 1953. During the war Bill was stationed in Japan doing military clerical work. After the armistice he commenced work again on the Ph.D. But rather than returning directly to Toronto, he studied for a year (1954-1955) at the University of Heidelberg and then spent another year (1955-1956) at the Institut Catholique in Paris. 

            With newly acquired German and French language skills, Bill returned to the University of Toronto in 1956 to continue work toward the doctorate. In 1963 he completed his dissertation entitled “The Phenomenological Notion of Truth in Hegel and Heidegger” and then returned to Germany for post-doctoral research (1963-1965) at the University of Munich. Here he re-wrote the dissertation into a book on Heidegger alone.  It was the first book length study of Heidegger in Northwestern University’s Studies in Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy and was eventually published in 1967 with the title “The Anatomy of Disillusion: Martin Heidegger’s Notion of Truth.”

            On his return from Munich in 1965, indeed on the day he boarded ship to return to the United States, Bill’s mother died. After arriving in New York, he learned of her passing when he called his sister to get directions for a visit to her in Washington D. C. Consequently, he missed the memorial services. Later that year he returned to California to live for a time in Riverside while applying for teaching positions at various universities.

            Bill accepted a position in the philosophy department at the University of California at Santa Barbara and began teaching German philosophy from Kant to Nietzsche in the fall of 1965. At UCSB Bill initially lived alone but began living with former students in 1970. These included Mike Lawson from 1970 to 1971 and Rick Long from 1971 to 1973. 

            Bill taught at UCSB until 1973 when he was not granted tenure (for reasons outlined in the text above). At the end of the academic year in late June, he left Santa Barbara for Berkeley where he lived with Tom Chance, a former UCSB grad student in philosophy who was then studying classics at Berkeley. Here Bill met and became friends with Andy Burnham, who at the time was a street artist selling jewelry on Telegraph Avenue. According to Andy, Bill responded to an invitation from some friends in British Columbia and moved to Vancouver in 1974. While in Canada he joined a theater company and played a part in several performances of Oscar Wilde’s Salome. Andy provides details of what happened next:

During Bill’s Vancouver chapter, he and I corresponded, and around the middle of 1975, I suggested that he come back to Berkeley and move into a house with Tom, me, and two other former UCSB grads, George Cannon and Jane Rogan. The plan was to start a kind of intellectual gathering place, which Bill jokingly referred to as Utopian University—U.U.! I rented a run-down brown shingle house on Hillegass Avenue, a few blocks south of People’s Park, and sent Bill money to cover a train ticket down from Vancouver. A few days later, he arrived at the station in Oakland, where we picked him up and drove him to Berkeley to begin our great adventure together.

 

Unfortunately, utopia never really materialized. There were some incredible conversations—talking about Kant, Hegel, Nietzsche, Heidegger, and of course Plato. Also, Tom and George were both in the classics department—Tom studying the Greeks, and George the Romans—so we spent a great deal of time discussing those eras as well.

 

But before too many months had passed, arguments rather than conversations became a regular part of the household. The relational chemistry of the house began breaking down and Bill became increasingly upset with the situation. Tensions grew until all of us felt like we were walking through a minefield, hoping to avoid an unpleasant explosion.

 

One night in January of 1976 Bill became very upset with the situation in the house, and soon afterwards, I left, hitch-hiking across country (a wee bit brisk in January), then hopping a cheap charter flight to Germany, where I knew a German girl who eventually became my wife. I later learned that U.U. had continued in meltdown-mode after I left, with everyone soon parting ways. To the best of my knowledge, Bill survived on government help and food stamps and lived in several locations around Berkeley from 1976 to 1986.

   

            As the years passed, the window of opportunity for Bill’s possible return to teaching and academic life narrowed to nearly nothing. The bitterness following the failure to get tenure at UCSB, combined with the ensuing complications for his personal and financial life, took a toll on Bill’s teaching ambitions—which remained lukewarm in the wake of the UCSB experience. He eventually moved to Oakland and lived alone in an apartment there until 2001 when he was forced to leave by the sale and renovation plan for the apartment building. Completing a grand circle, he moved into a residence for seniors in his home town of Redlands in 2001, where he continued to reside until his death on June 21, 2009.

Click for Part I