William R. Hunt leaves behind a shelf full of readable history books.

And a great deal more.

Hunt, 93, died last week. “He lived a great full life and was surrounded by family to the end,” said his son Alex, an English professor at West Texas A&M University.

“Bill Hunt was a historian and author of some 15 books. He loved opera, travel, and hiking in the great outdoors. He was a loving husband, father and grandfather. He was fond of taking shortcuts and finding the bakery with the best cinnamon rolls. In his last years, he emphasized the importance of art and music and espoused principles of kindness and empathy,” his family said.

No one had a bigger influence on my twin brother’s development as an author and historian than Hunt, the most inspiring teacher, counselor and writer that Terrence had in his life.

I got to know Hunt through my brother and once took a course from Hunt, which he co-taught with Claus Naske, another giant of the history department who was a mentor and friend to my brother.

I wasn’t a very good college student, as my brother liked to remind me, and I quit going to the Hunt-Naske course on the history and literature of polar exploration because I had become addicted to work on the student newspaper at UAF, where I spent my waking hours. Showing mercy, the historians honored me with an incomplete, and never let me forget it.

The mark of true friendship with Hunt was that he would write a funny fake obituary about you.

Honored this way by Hunt, Terrence replied in kind, writing that “Billy Ray Hunt” was the 13th of 12 children and “the only person who ever lived in the Lone Star State who refused to remember either the Alamo or the words to “Deep in the Heart of Texas.’”

Terrence is not here to pay his respects to Hunt, as he died two years ago, but he once took the time to focus his thoughts on how Hunt had shaped the entire course of his life.

What follows is part of a tribute that Terrence wrote while visiting Hunt in Fort Collins, Colorado:

I was 21 years old when I first took a class from Bill in 1974; his first mass market book “North of 53,” a lively history of the Alaska gold rushes had just come out that year from Macmillan Publishers and it changed my life.

I had decided that I had wanted to write about something and in the midst of the craziness of the Trans-Alaska Pipeline Construction boom, which I mostly found revolting and depressing, the story of the gold rush seemed to be the best way to understand what we were living through in Fairbanks in those years.

Bill is by far the most brilliant and eccentric person I have ever encountered in a lifetime of hanging around my three favorite places: used bookstores, libraries and halls of higher education. (I also love coffee shops, but those are a more recent phenomenon.)

Bill changed the trajectory of my entire life. If it had not been for my fortunate encounter with him and his charming partner Irmi more than forty years ago, when I was an undergraduate at the University of Alaska, I have no idea what I would have done.

Probably I would have ended up living in someone’s rat-infested basement in Tacoma, lost and aimless, like the last gas station hot dog spinning round and round behind the counter. (The truth is that once on sabbatical I did live cheerfully for three months in Mike Allen and Mary Hanneman’s basement in Tacoma; the revolving hot dog part is what is called creative non-fiction.)

University campuses are usually rich with stuffed shirts and hot air balloons, insecure wind-bags quick to pretend they’ve read every book ever published, desperate to prove they know it all—and more—or at least more than you do—but Bill was a refreshing contrast. Modest and funny, with an amazing bibliography in his head, he was hard working and unpretentious, able to laugh at himself and his foibles, eager to bend or break the silly written and unwritten rules that so often dictate academic norms.

By normal standards I suppose Bill was not the ideal teacher; eccentricity was his typical orbit. He seldom if ever had any lecture notes to work with, a bad situation for a quiet, reticent person, not comfortable talking in public. Many students found him a bit too odd. On occasion he might come to class with a written annotated bibliography or list of books to talk about, or have borrowed notes from a colleague. Using borrowed notes is like borrowing someone else’s keys in the hope they might fit your apartment; usually they do not work.

Lectures could be uncomfortable. As he was not accustomed to making it up on his feet, he would hem and haw, wishing time would run fast forward, watching the clock like a terrorist waiting for a bomb to go off. Having guest speakers was his forte. There were times when he forgot to show up for class—I might be making that part up—or in those days before VHS and DVD would put on a 16 mm film and slip away to parts unknown.

Anyway I liked him right away.

He respected good writing. He never disparaged ‘mere journalism’ as so many jealous academics are prone to do. The fact that my twin brother Dermot was learning to become a damn good reporter, and that I knew first hand how hard it was to be a ‘mere journalist,’ made it easy for me to learn that fundamental lesson: good history had to be well written, or it wasn’t any good. He approached history and biography as branches of literature, and this at a time when many historians were still hung up on history as simply a scientific enterprise.

I wanted to be a writer and I was looking for something to write about, so history became my chosen vocation and avocation thanks to him.

Along with his long time partner in crime, Claus-M. Naske, Hunt and Naske made a powerful impression on me. There was a TV show on at the time called “Alias Smith and Jones” about two western outlaws; how they learned of this show I am not sure since the Hunt family did not own a TV set in those days, but it was an apt model. Bill was the brains and Claus the muscle of the operation, and they collaborated on a wide variety of enterprises,

But together they steered me to thinking that I could make my living “playing history.” (Playing history was what my three-year-old son Henry called it when he was young and I was at my typewriter; “Daddy please don’t play history any more!”)

The first class I took from him was the history and literature of polar exploration—a class which I eventually would teach twenty years later. (This was the Hunt-Naske class my brother failed to complete.)

From Bill, I learned not to be intimidated by the pomposity of poseurs who could not stop bragging about their rigorous intellectual pedigrees. I learned the simple truth that knowing and loving the literature was what was important in being a writer and a scholar.
—Terrence Cole