The longest-serving instructor in Ashland’s lifelong learning program kept teaching until the end
By Jim Coleman for Ashland News
Marc Ratner, a brilliant, popular instructor who taught more classes and more students than anyone else in more than 20 years with Ashland’s OLLI at SOU program, died at home in Ashland on April 22 at the age of 97.
Ratner worked a long career as a university professor in the United States and overseas before retiring in the 1990s. His ensuing career as a volunteer instructor in Ashland would exceed two decades. Ratner taught for so long with OLLI that it’s hard to get a firm count, but it’s estimated he may have taught 60 OLLI at SOU classes over the years.
He devoted most of his classes to literature, such as the plays of Euripides, Melville’s “Moby-Dick” or the short stories of Franz Kafka. Ratner also taught courses on cinema, including classes on documentaries and on films from Romania, Scandinavia and Poland. He taught his last cinema class, on Italian film, in the most recent winter session.
“The important thing about Marc was he loved teaching,” said his friend George Rice of Ashland. And many students loved his classes. “He had a lot of people who took his classes repeatedly,” Rice said.
He taught a class during every OLLI term in his years with the program, Rice said — except for one term when a change in procedures led Ratner, to his great distress, to miss a deadline for submitting his course proposal. Otherwise, Ratner continued teaching into the last weeks of his life.
Marc Leonard Ratner was born Jan. 19, 1926, in New York City to Ukrainian immigrants Abraham and Nadine (Blumberg) Ratner. His father was a pharmacist and pharmacy owner. Raised on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, Marc Ratner graduated from Bronx High School of Science in 1944 and served in the Army Air Corps from 1944 to 1946.
He earned a B.A. from Fordham University in 1950, an M.A. from the University of Pennsylvania in 1951 and Ph.D. from New York University in 1957.
He became a professor of English and American literature with a particular interest in American writers of the mid-20th century. Ratner taught at Fairleigh Dickinson University; the University of Colorado at Boulder, the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, and California State University Hayward (now Cal State East Bay), from which he retired in 1992.
His studies and teaching took him around the world. Ratner was a Fulbright Scholar in Frankfurt am Main, West Germany, in 1963 and in what was then Czechoslovakia in 1971. He was director of the Atlantic Studies Program of the University of Massachusetts in Freiburg, Germany, in 1966. He taught on Fulbright grants in Brazil and Romania and also taught in Argentina, England and Paraguay.
Ratner met Margaret Patrick at Fordham and they married in 1951. With their shared interest in theater, music, foreign films, travel and literature, they made the most of living in New York City in the 1950s. They had three children: Shelagh Ratner (now of Santa Monica, California), Nicolas Ratner and Megan Ratner, both of New York City.
His daughter Megan noted, “He was an avid birder, an exceptional chess player, and all his life loved players associated with the New York jazz scene.”
In the 1960s and ‘70s the family lived abroad for several years, traveling extensively in Europe and South America, Megan said.
Eventually, the marriage ended in divorce.
Ratner married Marjorie Locklear in 1980 and she also survives him, as do his stepdaughter Sherry Locklear Lewis, stepson Robert Locklear, four step-grandchildren and three step-great-grandchildren.
Ruth Sloan, a volunteer with OLLI at SOU, said Ratner began teaching at OLLI in 2002 and he continued term after term until this April.
On April 6 he taught the first session of his spring-session class on the literature of Don DeLillo but he took ill and was unable to continue with the scheduled sessions. He wanted to do one more class meeting, said his stepdaughter, but instead, several of his students visited him at his home after he entered hospice care. He died at home.
“He may have taught as many as 60 courses” in his time with OLLI, Sloan said. “Many students were impressed by his knowledge, teaching skills and charm, and have offered moving tributes, the earliest of which were read to him in his final days.”
“He lived a full life right up until the end, then he died in his sleep,” said his stepdaughter Sherry Lewis. “What more can you ask?”
Ratner’s home was part of an Ashland garden tour at one point. He moved several years ago from Greenmeadows Way in Ashland to the Mountain Meadows retirement community. At Mountain Meadows, Lewis said, he was known to write plays that friends would perform. In 2012 he published a book, “Crossings,” about his travels.
Lewis said she plans to hold a celebration of his life at Mountain Meadows in the near future.
Ratner’s friend Rice said that whenever he took one of his OLLI courses he’d recognize a coterie of 15 or so regulars who took class after class with the teacher. The writers he covered ranged from Homer and Sophocles in ancient Greece to modern-day American authors. Ratner brought a deep, wide-ranging knowledge, a charming speaking style and a sense of history to the classroom.
“Marc was able to take from all of the great works of literature” and show that through the ages mankind dealt with problems that were universal, affecting people of every era, Rice said. “When you took Marc’s class you were taking Marc’s history of the world.”
Ashland resident Jim Coleman is a retired journalist with decades of experience, most at the Los Angeles Times following some years at the Las Vegas Sun. He now helps as a volunteer copy editor for Ashland.news.
