Bryan H. Bunch (1936-2025) and the vanishing American century of knowledge

For a budding opinion journalist, there can be no lonelier time than your first few posts, when almost nobody is reading and you spend more time begging people just to find your website than actually writing. When I launched my Attytood blog for the Daily News, 20 years ago this month, many of the initial posts had zero replies, until an anonymous commenter suddenly appeared every night.

He called himself “Archimedes.”

Much like his ancient Greek mathematician namesake, my Archimedes was a liberal thinker whose sometimes lengthy comments were always backed up with facts, sometimes a lot of them. He was there mostly to offer support and agree with my frequent diatribes against the George W. Bush administration, although he would also chide me — ever so gently — on rare occasions.

Ironically, his writings have largely disappeared now, just like the Greek original. He was certainly a mystery man, especially to my right-wing trolls who eventually discovered Attytood and began to quarrel almost as much with Archimedes as with me — but I’d figured out his identity from Day One.

Eureka! Archimedes was my dad, Bryan Hammond Bunch, still checking on his oldest son just before bedtime — albeit from 150 miles away, with a keyboard — to make sure everything was all right. Over time, the blog comments turned into nightly emails to his far-flung children and his brother that kept coming until Feb. 15 of this year, the night before he went into the hospital. My father died Tuesday at the age of 88, from congestive heart failure. The deafening silence of waking up and not seeing those missives is just part of a great void without him here.

There is a version of this story about my dad in which the moral is simply that he was a great father — always interested, involved, and supportive, and yet clever enough to do so with his anonymous alter ego. He was, indeed, always there for us whenever I, or my sister and brother, needed him, and over 66 years that turned out to be quite a lot.

He did all of the good dad stuff — teaching me the right way to put a wriggling worm on a fishing hook, or driving me to New Haven, Conn., to watch the NFL’s New York Giants in 1973 when their 2-11-1 record stank as badly as the hideous trough urinals at the Yale Bowl — and none of the bad stuff. In an age of ridiculous podcasts and online blather about what’s supposed to be “masculinity,” he showed me what it means to be a real man without ever raising his voice, let alone a fist, and by treating women not just with respect, but as equals.

But there’s also another version of the Archimedes story — one that speaks more directly to the uniquely American journey of Bryan H. Bunch that began in Great Depression-ravaged St. Louis on Dec. 19, 1936, and ended in the Hudson Valley exactly 50 days into the disastrous second presidency of Donald Trump.

His 88 years coincided almost perfectly with a star-spangled century during which the United States became the world’s most powerful nation by celebrating those same values that served as the spiritual force for my father: a relentless quest for knowledge, a passion for scientific discovery and new technology, a belief that government should be ruled by truth and a sense of community, and that it wasn’t corny to ask what you could do for your country, or your hometown.

The Archimedes pseudonym was almost too perfect, and not just because my dad in those years was laboring to write a novel called Beyond Eureka! The Adventures of Young Archimedes that imagined the great mathematician’s childhood on the island of Syracuse in a perilous time, 280 years before the birth of Christ. In my father’s version, young Archimedes survives war and natural disasters not with brute force but through his intellect, dodging disaster by inventing levers or catapults or through one weird scientific trick or another.

This almost religious faith that knowledge was the pathway to a better life came partly from a remarkable woman named Arline Hammond Bunch — his mom, my grandma — who saw education as her own escape route from small-town life in Lowry City, Mo., and who — despite her own lack of a degree — became the driving force in building the accredited Midstate College in Peoria, Ill., where my dad grew up.

But Bryan Bunch was also blessed to come of age in a magical time of ambition and opportunity in the United States: the 1950s, when an explosion of higher education opened up what seemed like an endless blue horizon for the children of victory in World War II, and a college diploma became the American dream for a triumphant middle class. He’d skipped two grades in an old-fashioned one-room schoolhouse when his family lived in a rural town outside Peoria, then learned at Central High School about a unique scholarship, only offered to Illinois students, to get a free ride at Connecticut’s elite Trinity College.

It was the time before obscene student debt and rampant preprofessionalism on campus. The most ambitious young people in 1953 were still naive enough to think knowledge was a means to becoming a better human, not just a career, and that the job thing would somehow work out. My dad arrived in Hartford planning to follow Archimedes’ footsteps and study math, but — amid a soundtrack of Charlie Parker records and beat poets — he was drawn ceaselessly toward a writing life. He majored in English, got a summer job at the Brooklyn Public Library while couch-surfing the Big Apple, and threw himself into cowriting a musical called Never Do Today.

And, of course, the job thing worked out, eventually. He never abandoned his love of mathematics — nearly earning his master’s degree at New York University before fatherhood and whatnot got in the way — and combined his unique skill set to become the top math and science school textbook editor at Harcourt, Brace and World, helping to educate the vast baby boom. After a stint as editor-in-chief at a smaller publishing house, he shifted gears in 1980 to become a freelance writer and editor. The spirit of the Renaissance man is captured in his diverse bibliography, which includes popular reference books (The Timetables of Science) and a couple of dense mathematical tomes, but also his autobiography (Entangled) and even a book on herb gardening. He worked on a fictionalized novel based on his mom’s life until his final weeks, when he couldn’t walk more than 10 or 20 feet without stopping to rest.

His love of knowledge could almost be a bit much. My sister Sally, brother Jim, and I learned early on not to ask “Why is the sky blue?”-type questions at the family dinner table, unless we wanted to hear the entire 20-minute encyclopedia answer. At what became an annual Thanksgiving Day feast, the turkey often served as an excuse for the real highlight: a cutthroat evening game of Trivial Pursuit. In 1967’s Summer of Love, when I was maybe too young (8) and he was maybe too old (30), he brought home the Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band LP because he always wanted to know about new things.

Was my father perfect? Of course not, but — like the classic job interview trick — he turned his greatest weakness into a superpower. In 1991, just before becoming a grandfather, he finally grasped that the hillbilly gene or whatever that has addicted too many family members to The Drink was ruining his life. Not only did he never have a drink again after his first boozy Alcoholics Anonymous meeting, but, as Bryan B., he sponsored, mentored, and counseled so many others out of the depths of addiction over the next 33 years.

That’s the thing about my dad’s so-called Silent Generation, maybe the dumbest nickname ever. Growing up in an America that offered real opportunities like his college scholarship — that wasn’t all about every-person-for-themself bitter individualism — inspired these citizens to give something back. It would have been easy for my father, then in his late 50s, to retreat into his large garden when he and my mom moved to a 6-acre tract in Dutchess County, N.Y., in 1995. Instead, my dad threw himself into his new community on everything from Rotary and the local library board to a MARC Foundation that supported area addiction recovery, and he never said no when they asked him to be board president.

Sure, he was a liberal. What would you expect from a man whose very name, Bryan, came (by way of his own father, Alfred Bryan Bunch) from William Jennings Bryan, the fiery Democratic prairie populist of the early 20th century? So you won’t be surprised he was appalled by the rise of Trump and gave small-dollar donations to some of the folks opposing him, because deep inside his failing heart he knew MAGA was opposed to his most cherished value: the truth. When they sent him home from the hospital last Friday because there was nothing more they could do for him, one of his last requests was to make sure he saw Rachel Maddow’s monologue at 9 p.m. that night.

The pain of losing my dad is only compounded by watching the America he stood for — a nation where college campuses were hallowed ground and not a battleground for culture war pagans, where a Socratic quest for the truth trumped disinformation, and where scientists were heroes and not objects of vilification — unravel at the very end of his life. He spent his last days on Earth watching these barbarians dismantle a Greek republic of knowledge, an outrage that never, ever should have happened.

After he died Tuesday, I went back out of curiosity to read his very last nightly email, which he sent out on Saturday, Feb. 15, when we knew he needed to get to the hospital but his long rural driveway was waiting to get snowplowed. He managed just a few words: “Watched Anora. Late. I live another day."

It’s sad but also somehow fitting. As long as there’s somewhere in America where someone is fighting to defend knowledge against ignorance, arguing with facts and not flights of fantasy, or volunteering to make their community a better place, then the spirit of Archimedes and his apostle Bryan Bunch does, indeed, live another day.