Nick Salvatore

Nick Salvatore, 82, of Ithaca, New York, died on Saturday, November 29th after a period of declining health. He passed away peacefully, listening to music he loved and comforted by the presence of his family. He will always be remembered for his sharp wit, gregarious personality, and generous mentoring of students and scholars.

His wife, Ann Sullivan, daughters Gabriella Salvatore and Nora Salvatore (Eric Jenes), and grandsons Joseph Bullock and Oscar Jenes survive him, as do his brother Michael Salvatore (Rose Murphy), cousin Paul Salvatore (Pamela), and numerous nieces, nephews, grand-nieces and grand nephews.

Nick’s sense of self was deeply shaped by Brooklyn, New York, where he was born on November 14th, 1943, the son of Nicholas and Katherine (McManus) Salvatore. His father died suddenly in January 1945, leaving his wife with two boys and another on the way. Nick often talked with great admiration about his mom, Kay, who raised her three boys with commitment, perseverance, and faith. Nick was and remained a true son of Brooklyn. He attended the St. Savior’s parochial school and Brooklyn Prep High School, served as an altar boy, played stickball on city streets, and cheered on his beloved Brooklyn Dodgers. He never forgave the O’Malley family for moving “dem Bums” to Los Angeles.

Following his graduation from high school, Nick spent a year as a seminarian at Saint Andrew-On-Hudson, a Jesuit novitiate in Hyde Park, New York, a period he valued as one of the most important in his life. There he asked and started to answer the question, “Who am I?”, a central one that would run through his life, his parenting, and his work in biography. Answering that question drove Nick to return to Brooklyn in 1962, moving away from the Catholicism of his youth and beginning what would be a lifelong professional and personal study of the matter of faith. He attended Fordham University, dropped out, and began working as a trucker’s helper for the Railway Express Agency, becoming a member of Local 808 of the Teamsters Union. Simultaneously, Nick became active in the Civil Rights and Vietnam Anti-War movements, working in communities to organize against a system he had come to understand as unjust and inhumane.

Nick completed his undergraduate degree at Hunter College in the Bronx and in the fall of 1968 left New York for California to study American history at The University of California, Berkeley. He flourished there under the mentorship of Leon Litwak, writing a dissertation on Eugene V. Debs that he later expanded into his acclaimed, award-winning biography, Eugene V. Debs: Citizen and Socialist. Nick’s scholarship, fostered at Berkeley, centered on how ordinary people – workers, activists, preachers – shaped American democracy and culture, examined individual religious commitments and their relationship to political life and the development of social consciousness, and returned again and again to racial issues as the central prism through which to gauge the meaning of American democracy. Later, as he explored these topics, he would integrate the “music of the times” into his classroom. Picture Nick with a “boom box” traipsing across campus to fill his students’ ears with the rhythms of faith, culture, and community.

Of course, his years at Berkeley were not only a time of study. Nick relished life in California, taking part in spirited student vs. faculty softball games, deepening his lifelong love of music at the Keystone Club, and cheering on the Oakland A’s at the Colosseum, always seated in the concrete bleachers just behind Reggie Jackson. And at Berkeley, Nick fell in love with and married Ann Sullivan, his devoted wife of 51 years. Nick and Ann were wonderful hosts who often held dinner parties at their house on Shafter Avenue in Oakland marked by vibrant conversation and laughter. Back then Nick served his famous lasagna soaked with the sauce he had learned to make from his father’s family - always using the banged up sauce pot given to him by his Aunt Phyl which he has since gifted to his niece, Tess. Legacy was important to Nick.

In 1976, Nick and Ann left Berkeley for Worcester, Massachusetts where Nick taught history at the College of the Holy Cross. He quickly earned a reputation as a demanding, impassioned, charismatic lecturer who shared his fascination, critique, and love for the American experience with his students. Nick was a devoted teacher with high standards and expectations. His job, he said, was not only to teach history, but to help his students learn to think. His mentorship and teaching, rigorous yet humane, are often cited as pivotal by his former students, many of whom he stayed in touch with long after they left his classroom through his thoughtful letters and emails.

In 1981, Nick joined the faculty at the New York State School of Industrial Relations at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, where he taught and conducted his scholarship until his retirement in 2017. Nick loved the ILR School and Cornell. He remained forever grateful for the colleagues and students he met there. Even after decades at Cornell, he would shake his head at the joy he found in teaching and the intellectual stimulation and support he received to pursue his research. “They pay me to do this?!” he often exclaimed.

At Cornell, he wrote three books, the Debs biography, which won the Bancroft Award, We All Got History, the Memory Books of Amos Weber and Singing in a Strange Land: C.L. Franklin, the Black Church and the Transformation of America. All remain in print. He also was a visiting lecturer at universities in Turin, Italy and Paris, France, spent a year at the Yale Divinity School while working on the Franklin biography, edited three additional books and published numerous articles and reviews. He accomplished all this while successfully battling several illnesses, including stage four throat cancer and heart disease.

After retiring in 2017 as the Maurice and Hinda Neufeld Founders Emeritus Professor of Industrial and Labor Relations, Nick continued to write. However, there was more opportunity to travel with Ann and to spend time with the truly remarkable, rich network of people he deeply cared for. He loved watching his grandsons, nieces, nephews, grand nieces and nephews grow up, hosting friends for dinner (Ann now cooked of course), and, always, listening to music. In recent years, Alzheimer’s disease made Nick’s world smaller. Still, he never stopped delighting in his family or celebrating good news about an old friend. He remained a wonderful listener, no trouble was a burden; he persevered in his lifelong journey to answer the question “Who am I?” and continued to find a transcendent joy in music until the very end of his life.

Nick loved life and never took its magic for granted. He watched in astonishment when Aretha Franklin sang Amazing Grace at a book party for the Franklin book in Detroit. He and Ann hiked mountains in Colorado, New Mexico and the Adirondacks. They stood in awe watching the sun rise over Angkor Wat and later as it set over the Pacific in Costa Rica. Nick loved art and museums and could sit in front of a Caravaggio for hours.

You can honor Nick’s memory by reading a good book, or writing an old friend simply because they crossed your mind, no matter how long it’s been since you’ve been in touch. He would love you to listen to Dylan, Aretha, Springsteen, or whatever music makes your heart full, or to take a walk in a beautiful place. You can also donate to the scholarships named in his honor that support students at Cornell, the Nick Salvatore Scholarship in the New York State School of Industrial Relations at Cornell (contact Jennifer Dean (jds13@cornell.edu) or the Professor Nicholas Salvatore Honorary Scholarship (contact cornell_fund@cornell.edu).

Nick’s family thanks the dedicated staff at Bridges of Ithaca who cared for Nick for the last six months of his life. We will remain forever grateful for the affection and love they gave him.

A memorial celebration of Nick’s life will be held in spring 2026.