Bob Sheldon

My friend Bob Sheldon: somebody gunned him down during the first weeks of the Persian Gulf War on this date, February 21, 1991, in Chapel Hill, North Carolina. Shot him in the head and left him for dead after closing time for Internationalist Books, the enterprise he'd created from scratch. As far as I know, the case is still unsolved.

Bob had recently spoken out against the war just as he'd spoken out against Vietnam and when he died, he must have been barely in his forties, younger than I am now. He was visible and vocal, providing rare dissent to the Gulf War on TV. His killing was as senseless as today's Iraq War, as the disappearance of Turkish feminist blogger Istanbulwitchy, as the vicious hooligan attack on Ash (Deviant Anamoly) in Australia, as insane as the assassination of Hrant Dink for simply writing about the Armenian Genocide in Turkey.

I first met Bob when he was working at UNC as a sort of medic-nurse in 1981 -- he treated me, an undergraduate, for a nasty case of poison ivy, bandaging my arms like a burn victim. I was reading an article about the Sandinistas in Nicaragua and he struck up a conversation. Not long afterwards I checked out his new bookstore on Henderson Street, and when he set up shop on Rosemary Street not far from where I worked maybe a couple of years later, I began working at Internationalist Books, too. We had a lot of pithy conversations over the years, and he was one of the few people I knew to provide moral support for a sit-in protesting American involvement with the Contras in the time of Reagan.

Internationalist Books and Community Center lives on at a third location, right on Franklin Street. Much more to write about Bob Sheldon and Internationalist Books, but today is his remembrance day.



Today's Rune: The Self.

Ash Wednesday. Bob Sheldon, RIP.