04.Die.My.Love.2007 (2 page)

The best of friends, Jablin and Daly had first met during graduate school, while working on doctorates at Purdue University in West Lafayette, Indiana. While fi elds like drama and literature are centuries old, organization al communication was little more than a toddler at the time, still in its fi rst quarter century. Jablin was one of the fi eld’s rising stars.

Within a year of earning his Ph.D., he’d caused a stir that re-verberated through his fi eld when he compiled a benchmark paper, one that reevaluated all the existing literature.

“Fred had a real talent,” says Professor Lyle Sussman, Jablin’s master’s degree supervisor at the University of Michigan. “He could take mountains of research and sift through it until he saw overriding themes. Then he drew conclusions, unique ideas and concepts.”

More than that, his research was meticulous, well-grounded, and followed established scientific methods. This preciseness came naturally; Fredric Jablin grew up wanting to be a scien-DIE, MY LOVE / 7

tist. As a boy in the Jewish working-class Floral Park, New York, suburb—the son of Irving Jablin, an accountant, and Mildred, a bookkeeper—he watched a neighbor who worked as a scientist leave for work each day in his white lab coat. “I wanted to do that,” Jablin later told friends. “That’s how I saw my future.”

The Jablins were a close family. Irving was a quiet man, and Mildred, a petite yet robust woman, served gefi lte fi sh with purple horse radish, and on holidays her special chopped chicken liver paté. Fredric was born in 1952, the year Dwight Eisenhower was voted into the White House. It was a simpler time. Television was a new addition to America’s living rooms.
Romper Room
debuted when he was just two, urging children to “clean their plates,” and on
Howdy Doody
, Oil Well Willie sang songs while Clarabell honked his horn at Buffalo Bob.

In this warm, loving house hold, Fred was the second and youngest child, a few years behind his big brother, Michael.

While they were young, Mildred stayed home to care for her boys. Mildred and Irving had lived through the Depression, and the Jablins weren’t extravagant people. Yet once a month Mildred splurged, taking their sons by train into the city, to a Broadway show or to the symphony. Later in life, Fred would talk fondly of those memories.

In high school he wore that white coat he’d so coveted, when he worked in a reverse engineering lab, helping to tear products down to see how they worked. Mildred and Irving were proud of both their sons. “His parents were hardworking people,” says a friend. “His mom was the quintessential Jewish mom, who would have done anything for her kids. Like Mildred, Irving was dedicated to the children.”

After high school, Fred left Floral Park for Buffalo and SUNY, the State University of New York, where he majored in political science and speech. To help pay his costs, he 8 / Kathryn Casey

worked as a janitor and in the school cafeteria. A brilliant student, after earning his bachelor’s degree, Fred entered the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, where he worked on a master’s degree in communication. Along the way he met Marie, a woman of Italian descent from New York City.

They married in 1974, when Fred was twenty-two years old, and she went with him to Purdue University, where she took graduate courses in audiology and speech pathology. He became a protégé, working on a doctorate under the professor considered the father of organiza tion al communication, W. Charles Redding.

At Purdue, Fred studied hard and coached other graduate students. In almost every situation, he displayed a fi nely tuned sense of right and wrong, of morals and ethical codes. At times, friends would say, he had such a strong sense of living by the rules that he could be rigid, even to his own detriment.

When a student he believed in didn’t pass his comprehensives, Fred not only tutored him, but argued fiercely with the student’s supervising professor, urging him to help the student pass.

Within his own career, too, Fred set up param e ters he expected his mentor, Redding, to adhere to. Redding was well-known for delaying the graduations of his doctoral students, forcing them to work as much as a year longer on his research, a not unusual practice. Fred’s fellow students were amazed when he had the audacity to ask Redding to sign a contract detailing precisely what Fred would have to do to graduate on time. The eminent scholar, no doubt impressed by the young man’s chutzpah, agreed. “It was vintage Fred,”

says Daly. “He thought he knew how things were supposed to be, and he wasn’t afraid to stand up for himself or others, to fi ght.”

Later, many would describe Fred’s focus on how things should be done as nearly obsessive. “Fred didn’t like irrationality,” says Mark Knapp, one of his professors and col-DIE, MY LOVE / 9

leagues, who became a friend. “He believed that justice and reason should prevail in the world. The problem is that life isn’t always that way.”

At Purdue, Fred’s office was two doors from Daly’s. Often, Daly looked in and found his friend working late into the night under a green lawyer’s lamp. Fred wasn’t one for socializing, instead spending every available moment away from the university with Marie. Daly would always remember how Fred channeled all of his attention on work and his marriage. “When Fred was in a relationship, he was devoted,” he says. While other graduate students partied on Friday nights, Fred and Marie stayed home in their campus apartment and watched
The Rockford Files
.

Still, the marriage ended, just three years after it began.

Later, Fred would call it a “no-fault” divorce, an amicable and mutual parting. He’d say that they both knew the marriage wasn’t working, that they wanted different things in life, and that they made the decision to end it before they had children and property to muddy up the split. Yet, it was a painful defeat for Fred. “He wasn’t devastated, but he was hurt by the divorce,” says Daly. “He was saddened that it hadn’t worked out.”

That same year, 1977, Fred earned his Ph.D. in organization al communication and moved to the Midwest to take on his first teaching position, as an assistant professor at the University of Wisconsin at Milwaukee. It was there that he wrote his breakthrough work, an article on supervisor and subordinate communication that was accepted for publication in the prestigious
Psychological Bulletin.

“At that point, organization al communication was just getting its legs,” says Mark Knapp. “Getting an article published in another discipline’s leading journal was a coup.

With that paper, Fred leapfrogged to the head of his class and built a reputation for himself in the fi eld.”

Shortly after, Fred received an offer from the University 10 / Kathryn Casey

of Texas at Austin, where Daly had landed a teaching position. Enthused about the big name, high-profile school and about working with his old friend, Fred packed everything he owned, including his yellow Toyota Corolla, in a rented truck, and drove from Milwaukee to Texas.

With its rolling hills, Austin is a welcoming place, large enough to offer the pleasures of a city but small enough not to impinge on the enjoyment of life. Downtown, the skyline was dominated by the University of Texas clock tower—lit a burnt orange, the school color, when the university’s teams win—and the dome of the Texas State Capitol. Austin has the feel of a place where dreams can come true, and the big Texas sky with its vast horizons seems to promise all that is possible.

By the time he’d reached UT, Fred Jablin had realized his youthful dream; he didn’t wear a lab coat, but he was a scientist. Instead of chemicals in test tubes, he dissected the ways people interacted and how they affected success in the workplace. At UT he videotaped job interviews, then, armed with his observations, scrutinized the communication between recruiters and would- be employees. He researched the dynamics of brainstorming and the socialization of new employees into companies. In the end, Fred Jablin diagnosed how and why things happened between people in business, explaining how corporations could interview more skillfully and increase the odds of hiring the best candidate.

Always, he worked hard. During the fi rst five years of his UT career, he published an impressive thirteen articles in scholarly journals. Through it all, Fred’s enthusiasm was infectious. Decades later, many would remember how excited he’d get at the prospect of a new idea, a new theory.

Of the two in the Austin bar that night, where they’d gone after work, Daly was the tall, handsome one, with a commanding voice and presence. Physically, Fred was more av-erage looking than handsome. At one time he wore a straggly DIE, MY LOVE / 11

toupee to cover his balding pate, saying he did so to please his mother. When he drove himself to the hospital for an emergency appendectomy, it was lost in the fray, and to the delight of his friends, he didn’t replace it. Still, they saw him as somewhat eccentric. As quiet and intense as he often seemed—almost painfully so at times—Fred talked with a rapid- fire New York accent.

“Fred was always a bit of a nebbish,” says an old friend with a laugh. “But he had a great smile, an ear-to-ear grin, and an infectious curiosity that made him stand out in a crowd.”

“Once you knew Fred, with his wry sense of humor and his contagious love of life, nothing else mattered,” says Daly.

In Austin, Fred paid $50,000 for a 1,500-square-foot house on Harper’s Ferry, a quiet residential street, that he decorated with auction finds. He loved the excitement of bidding and enjoyed getting a good deal. Quickly, he carved out a social life. Halloween was big in Austin, and Fred covered the house with cobwebs, spiders, and carved pumpkins, and posed Mr. Meyers—a dummy with long, bony fi ngers, dressed in a flannel shirt and blue jeans—as if it were a guest at his annual party. “Fred believed that Halloween was a time when you could be a different person,” says Daly.

“He’d spend days making sure the decorations were just right, arranging and rearranging the cobwebs so they looked real.”

Along with adorning the house, Fred obsessed over his costumes. The year of the Extra Strength Tylenol poisonings in Chicago, he wore a giant pill bottle with the painkiller’s label affixed to the front. Another year, he was a black and yellow bumblebee. His favorite was an elaborate wizard costume. On the nights he portrayed a Merlinesque sorcerer, he walked around the party, waving a wand and casting make- believe spells on his laughing guests.

“Austin’s a liberal college town, and a few people at the 12 / Kathryn Casey

party smoked pot. Most of us stood around and talked shop,”

says Knapp. “Fred’s parties weren’t wild, but they were fun.

Everyone, including Fred, had a good time.”

In fact, for all his eccentricities and his dedication to hard work, Fred had a real knack for enjoying life.

In the summers, he and Daly rented Sunfi sh catamarans to sail on nearby Lake Travis, a spectacular setting surrounded by jagged hills and a tall pine forest. One year, they took flying lessons and went soaring in gliders. Years later, Daly would recount an incident one night while the two friends were scuba diving. Fifty feet down in the lake, Daly was spooked when an enormous catfish, “one that looked bigger than a whale,” swam into his flashlight beam, then directly at his face, staring at him through his mask. Daly panicked and leapt up to flee to the surface. Fred pulled him back down, turned off the flashlight so the fish would leave, and calmed his friend, so he wouldn’t surface too quickly and risk having bends. “He may have saved my life,” says Daly.

The things Fred Jablin loved, like his gas-effi cient Toyota and reading the
Wall Street Journal,
weren’t elaborate. More than anything, he enjoyed his friends, his work, and the small pleasures of life. Fred and Daly’s barking salutations before they left their offi ces became a tradition, yet it was a secret they shared with only a choice few, and they barely restrained themselves the day an elderly professor confi ded in them, “You know, at night, someone brings their dogs up here.” When the old man left the room, John and Fred erupted in boyish laughter.

Eve nings at the Austin bar were fi lled with merriment.

They talked and drank beer, comparing their days and feeding off each other’s ideas. They looked as if they hadn’t a care in the world, and perhaps they didn’t. It could have been argued that there was little that could have made the two friends happier than what they were doing. They had their differ-DIE, MY LOVE / 13

ences: Daly was married, and he’d expanded his career, taking on lucrative consulting jobs with corporations. Fred, single since the divorce from Marie, was resolutely devoted to his research and teaching. “Fred was a true teacher at heart,” says Daly. “There was nothing he enjoyed more than working one-on-one with a bright student.”

John Daly introduced Fred to one such student in the fall of 1981. Actually, Piper Ann Rountree had been in Fred’s communications class the previous year, but it was a large lecture hall fi lled with more than a hundred students. Later Fred would say he didn’t remember her, except that she was the girl who once brought her mother to class and introduced the older woman to him after the session.

By that fall, however, Piper, a se nior with an inquisitive mind, was frequenting the faculty offices in the communications building, hanging around, as some students were wont to do, talking to her professors between and after classes. That was how Daly and Piper struck up a conversation. From that moment on, she was a frequent presence in the beige-walled and cluttered faculty offi ces and conference room. Later, many would remember her, for Piper Rountree was the kind of young woman who made an impression. She had a quick mind and she was beautiful, with a petite, lithe, athletic body,

shoulder-length dark brown

hair, and intelligent dark eyes.

Years later Daly would recall how he mentioned to Piper one afternoon that he and Professor Jablin had an event planned for the coming day. She asked to go along. He agreed. When the day arrived, Daly was busy and needed to cancel. With no way to reach Piper, he called Fred. “We’re supposed to meet this student, Piper Rountree, in the parking lot,” he told him. “I can’t make it, but why don’t you go ahead and go with her?”