Richard M. Berthold's Page

Richard Berthold was born in 1946, placing him on the cutting edge of the boomer generation and stretching his youth from Beaver Cleaver to Eldritch Cleaver. He consequently experienced personally the last truly great age of American history and far and away the greatest period of American popular music. He attended Stanford and Cornell, the latter training him to be a professional classical historian and eradicating his youthful creativity. But Stanford gave him the piece of paper that got him into Cornell, which gave him the piece of paper that got him a job that was far better than working for a living. In 1972 he began a 31 year career at the “University” of New Mexico, a third rate institution, where he pretended to work and they pretended to pay him. His strong suit was undergraduate lecturing, for which he was awarded the university’s highest teaching award. His weak suit was maintaining the appropriate stuffed-shirt attitude beloved by his colleagues and realizing that teaching undergraduates was far less important than writing tedious scholarly works. As the acknowledged wise-ass of the university he earned the opprobrium of the administration and much of the faculty, and despite having some 20,000 students go through his courses he was consequently denied emeritus status upon retirement. He authored Rhodes in the Hellenistic Age, a scholarly tome that remains the standard work on the subject twenty-five years later and is about to be proudly translated into Greek by grateful Rhodians. He has just published Dare To Struggle. The History and Society of the Greeks, written for the general public; it is the best and most readable Greek history ever. During these years he took gaggles of students to Greece on several occasions and did some traveling on his own, most notably a couple of hikes in the Himalayas and a tour of the Palestinian Government General maintained by the Greater Israeli Reich. He had his fifteen minutes of fame on 9/11. And not that it really matters, but his interests are history, science fiction, cats, science, classical music, beer, single malt scotch and drugs and rock ‘n’ roll (the sex has become too much of a hassle).