"Is Prof. Jan Van (sic) Brunvand dead?" a newsgroupie inquires over the Internet, further fanning a rumor that's been floating around cyberspace for weeks.
Alive and well and living in Salt Lake City, Jan Harold Brunvand mischievously replies: "Report true: This comes from the other side. I still have Internet access, and the fly fishing is great."Like so many of the urban legends that Brunvand himself has documented over the years, the mythical report of his death is probably based on a distortion of a factual though much less dramatic event.
After 30 years of teaching at the University of Utah, America's foremost expert on urban legends is retiring at the end of this quarter to concentrate on writing projects, traveling, skiing and fly fishing, all on this side of eternity.
For the U., though, it means the loss of perhaps its most famous professor. According to Larry Weist, director of the U.'s news and information services, no other faculty member receives as many requests for interviews from journalists here and abroad.
In addition to his popular books and a syndicated column that reached millions of readers, Brunvand has been featured in numerous magazines - including a full-length article in the Smithsonian magazine and a recent assessment in the New Yorker - is frequently quoted by broadcast commentators and has appeared on numerous television interview and entertainment programs, including five times on the David Letterman Show.
He was even credited with settling a potentially litigious dispute over a movie screenplay in 1992, for which he was rewarded with coveted tickets to that year's Academy Awards program.
Most recently, he edited a just-published encyclopedia of American folklore and corroborated on a folklore "comic book." His other works includes "The Study of American Folklore," a widely used textbook now in its fourth edition, and the mass market books "The Baby Train," "Curses! Broiled Again," "The Mexican Pet," "The Choking Doberman" and "The Vanishing Hitchhiker."
Upstairs in his Avenues home, Brunvand has two file cabinets stuffed with more than 500 new tales and urban legends along with hundreds of variants, enough to fill several more books. And readers send him more stories every day.
To get to them all and accomplish all his other goals, however, he feels he has to cut back somewhere. At age 63, he decided it was time to leave the classroom.
"I've found that it's during my time off (from teaching) that I'm the most productive," he said. "Will I missing teaching? At the moment, it doesn't seem like it, though I admit it does keep you young."
He said he has especially enjoyed watching previously uninterested terested students get "hooked" on folklore.
"A lot of students just pick folklore out of the catalog to fill an elective requirement but they inevitably become fascinated by the subject," Brunvand said.
He got hooked on it as an undergraduate studying journalism and English at Michigan State University, where he was encouraged by renowned folklorist Richard M. Dorson. After getting his doctorate in folklore at Indiana University, Brunvand accepted a faculty position at the University of Idaho. In 1966, he took a job at the U.
There, he began gathering modern urban tales, which he used as examples in his classes. After he was asked to prepare a paper on the subject for a lecture in Arizona, Brunvand began considering publishing his work.
"It was too `popular' to be a scholarly paper, so I sent it to "Psychology Today," he said, recalling his astonishment when it was accepted. That article was followed by publication of "The Vanishing Hitchhiker," interviews and international fame.
"I have enjoyed some of the notoriety but it does get grueling at times," he said.
As a young student, he was awarded a Fulbright scholarship to study in his ancestral homeland of Norway. It was on that occasion that he proposed to his wife, Judith, saying, "I couldn't bear to leave her behind."
They will be together in retirement as well, with Judith retiring as a library specialist at the U.'s Marriott Library on the same day as her husband. However, two of their four children will carry on the Brunvand name in the U. phone directory: Amy as an assistant librarian at the Marriott Library, and Erik as an assistant professor in computer science.
Brunvand said he was thrilled this, his final, quarter to see Erik sitting in on one of his folklore classes.
Folklore, Brunvand explains, is the traditional part of culture, including oral traditions, ballads, customs and materials. Urban legends are a new offshoot of American folklore. They are modern tales set in a contemporary urban environment involving plausible stories that are told and retold as if true.
Many of the stories travel extensively, evolving along the way, and sometimes disappear and resurface over time. For example, Brunvand last week was contacted by a hotel operator and a journalist from Las Vegas regarding rumors of a guest found lying in an icy bath in a hotel room with his kidneys removed.
According to Brunvand, the story is a variation of a tale making the rounds about five years involving thieves who steal a kidney from a living "donor" for an ailing, wealthy recipient.
Brunvand said of all the urban legends he's investigated, only a couple could be traced to an actual event. If there is any truth to them, its in the circumstances or the lesson they teach, he said.
Take the case of the "biscuit bullet," which appeared one hot summer, during which random crime, especially drive-by shootings, seemed to be on everybody's mind:
A woman is found slumped over in her car in a supermarket parking lot. She is holding the back of her head and moaning that she's been shot, that her brain is exposed. Finally, someone stops to help and discovers that the woman was actually hit with dough when a tube of biscuits exploded in the heat.
Though widely circulated and believed, the story had all the tell-tale signs of an urban legend, Brunvand said. Mostly, it lacked detail, including names and places. And it was usually attributed to what Brunvand calls the FOF, or "friend of a friend."
Urban legends, Brunvand says, can recommend a course of action - as fables once did - entertain, warn, frighten or impart a moral lesson. Young people seem to enjoy passing along "scary but true" stories.
He has found that in other parts of the world, American urban legends are disseminated as true with the ambiguous opening remark, "In America they . . . "