Reader Responses to Beloved

Vartan was a very cool guy, as friendly and appealing as everyone says. I won a lottery and got to have lunch with him, then occasionally made him cold-brew coffee and left it with his secretary before anyone knew what cold brew was. That got me another lunch at some point. When my brother heard that I was coming to school at Brown, he said he liked it because it was the only major university with a president whose name sounded like the heavy of a grade B sci-fi movie

Like many others in the Brown community, I was saddened about Vartan Gregorian’s untimely passing. He came to Brown when I was a junior/senior. Aware of his Iranian-Armenian background, a group of us met with him for nearly an hour about various subjects. When the topic of growing up in Iran came up, he mentioned his fond memories of reading Sherlock Holmes in Farsi. So on my first trip back home years later, I bought him a complete copy and mailed it to his Brown office, not expecting a reply. Instead, a month later, I received a handwritten and personally signed note acknowledging its receipt and how it had rekindled a lot of those good memories and made him very happy. Bear hugs aside, he was indeed very personable and interacted with us students as if we were his own kids. He will be missed.