RIP, Oakley Ray

March is here, looking exactly the same out the window as its predecessor, though the month did start with a rumble in the sky -- distant thunder in the middle of the night, which is certainly belongs to springtime more than winter. On and off throughout the day, it rained, with the puddles in the back yard by the fence growing dramatically. Not all of the snow melted, however.

March also brought news of the death of someone else I knew -- Oakley Ray, a former Vanderbilt professor. Not breaking news, since he's been dead nearly a month, but sometimes news still travels at 19th-century speeds.

Actually I only knew of him, since I might not have recognized him if I'd seen him in recent years on the street, and I'm certain he wouldn't have known me. As a professor of psychology, he taught the popular "Drugs and Human Behavior" class at VU. I think that was the class title, but it's been 25 years so I'm not sure. In in any case everyone called it the "Drugs" class. For it he used a text he'd written, Drugs, Society and Human Behavior, which, I understand, is still in print and quite popular.

I didn't really take his class. On the advice of friends, I audited some of them. ("Let's take Drugs with Oakley Ray!" was the undergraduate witticism.) Dr. Ray did not, in fact, advocate the recreational use of pharmaceutical chemicals, unlike certain notorious ex-Harvard profs, though of course he understood that such goings-on were entirely likely at a private institution of higher learning populated by affluent youngsters. Perhaps he thought he was doing his part to educate consumers.

He was a good lecturer. It's probably outdated information now, but I remember clearly his lecture on nitrous oxide. "Does anyone here know the chemical basis for how laughing gas affects the brain?" (Pause.) "Of course not. Nobody knows. But dentists discovered that it has an affect a long time ago."

An article about him in the Tennessean is here.