By Taylor Sisk
Staff Writer
It was heads. Or was it tails? Life can be that random.
For Jacques Morin, it was exactly that – a coin toss – that brought him to Chapel Hill, which is where he met Jamie Bishop. Bishop, 35, a former Carrboro resident and UNC IT technician, was one of the 32 people shot and killed by Cho Seung-hui at Virginia Tech last week.
Morin is associate director at the UNC Office of Arts and Sciences Information Services (OASIS),
in charge of academic computing and educational technology. Some years ago, while working oversees, he was tasked to come to the States to look at classroom designs.
“The gentleman I was working with,†Morin recalls, “said, ‘Do you want to go to the west coast or the east coast?’ And I said, ‘Flip a coin.’ He flipped a coin, and I got North Carolina.
“I came here, and I went to NC State, Duke and UNC, and that’s when I met Jamie.â€
A few months later, Morin elected to relocate to Chapel Hill, and for quite a long time, he says, Bishop was the only person here he knew.
“He reminded me of the guy,†Morin remembers, “that comes up to the new kid in school who’s sitting by himself at lunchtime with his lunch tray, and he would come over and sit down with you because he knew that you were by yourself and you didn’t know anyone.
“Jamie treated me that way for months, because he knew that I didn’t know anything about North Carolina, didn’t know anybody here.
“And that’s what he was like. He would strike up a conversation with nearly anyone.â€
Jamie Bishop was born in Pine Mountain, Georgia – a town of barely a thousand residents, 15 miles from the Alabama border – the son of science fiction writer Michael Bishop and Jeri, a school counselor.
Though a lifelong artist and student of the arts, he earned degrees in German from the University of Georgia.
He traveled to Germany, where he studied early and ancient history and archaeology at Universitat Kiel as a Fulbright Scholar. He later returned to Germany, teaching English, working as a freelance translator, collecting survey data for his master’s thesis on “German Youth Language†and, according to his blog, “drinking large quantities of wheat beer.â€
He met his wife, Stefanie Hofer, while there. Hofer came to UNC to work toward her Ph.D. in Germanic languages and literatures and Bishop took a job at OASIS as an academic technology liaison.
He also served as web designer for several academic departments and received an IT Award from the university in 2002 for excellence in information technology. In August 2005, the couple moved to Blacksburg, where Hofer, having completed her studies, had accepted a position as assistant professor of German in the foreign languages and literature department at Virginia
Tech. Bishop was teaching German at the university.
An eclectic community
Bishop was an illustrator, a photographer and a builder of things. But his greatest skill seems to have been in building community. Morin remembers Sunday brunches at Weaver Street with Bishop and their wives. There were evening gatherings – like those not uncommon in college towns everywhere– of people from all corners, thrown together for a time by work and studies, finding common ground. Morin talks of the eclectic nature of any gathering of Bishop’s friends.
“Jamie’s friends,†he says, “were artists and computer geeks – though I don’t really like that word – IT professionals, I guess, is a better term – and people from all walks of life. “He just had this mix of friends. And a lot of them are married, and, for whatever reason, the women started knitting together and left their male counterparts with nothing to do.†And so the guys would “watch really, really horrible movies – and they were picked because they were so bad – while the women knitted together … and complained about everything from politics to religion and everything in between.
“It was fun,†says Morin.
Known here as “Stitch ‘n’ Bitch†gatherings, the tradition was then carried to Blacksburg, though apparently slightly modified, as Bishop announced last year in his online journal, memory39, “This coming Thursday, June 29, the first weekly meeting of the newly-formed Blacksburg Kitch ‘n Bitch will come to order!â€
Known for a lifetime
It wasn’t a coin toss that led Jamie Bishop to the classroom in which his life ended. Still, it seems that perhaps it’s the random circumstances of his death that now most trouble those who knew him, those who speak of him, those who have responded to his last blog entry at memory39, and those who’ve managed to look past the ad nauseum hours of media coverage in the days since that indecipherable, tragic morning at Virginia Tech to recognize and remember that the story of Jamie Bishop isn’t one of heroic death but of a life heroically lived.
This past weekend, Jacques Morin attended a private memorial for Jamie Bishop in Blacksburg, “and there were a couple of people there he had just met – one in particular who he had just met a couple, three months ago. And after listening to this person speak, you’d have thought these guys had known each other for a lifetime. And the guy was just torn apart by Jamie’s murder.
And he’d only known him for about two and a half months.â€
Morin says he continues to struggle with an image of the last moments in that classroom in Blacksburg.
“It’s hard to think about anything but what happened last week. But I know that will pass.†He pauses, and adds, “Yes.â€