 . . . October 1995
 Michigan Today welcomes readers' letters, but cannot publish or acknowledge all of them. Letters may be edited for space, clarity or taste.
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Wordsworth Reciter Revisited
THE JUNE issue carried a letter from Josephine Work Balassone ’32 asking for the name of a professor who read Wordsworth beautifully in 1931–1932. The professor she remembers so fondly—as do I—was almost certainly Bennett Weaver, whose course in the Romantic poets was deservedly popular. In my experience, he read Wordsworth as no one else ever has. In the summer of 1931 I was enrolled in that course. On August 1, without warning, Culver Military Academy canceled my teaching contract. The Depression was upon us; there were no cadets for me to teach! To whom did I turn for advice and counsel? Professor Weaver.
Through his good offices, the University lent me the tuition for the second semester of the 1931–1932 academic year. I enrolled in two courses under Prof. Clarence Dewitt Thorpe (his The Mind of John Keats (Oxford University Press, 1926, is still a recognized authority); ultimately, Thorpe offered me a teaching position at the University School (long since gone), but the Michigan Legislature, in that ominous spring, cut one million dollars from their appropriation for the University and Michigan State at Lansing. My job was swept away.
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L. Knowles Cooke ’32 MA
Villanova, Pennsylvania |
I THINK the wonderful teacher of Wordsworth and the other Romantic poets was almost certainly Bennett Weaver, unforgettable by any students who had the luck to get into his jam-packed classes in the early 1930s. (C.D. Thorpe was an outstanding Keats scholar). Weaver was also brilliant on Robert Browning.
And you were fortunate if you could get into the enormously popular Shakespeare lectures by Oscar James Campbell. In June 1935, Louise Bredvold became head of the English Department, Campbell went to Columbia, and Howard Mumford Jones to MIT and Harvard. It was the end of an era, in the depths of the Great Depression.
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Eugene S. Brewer Jr. ’35
Owosso, Michigan |
A Worthy Guide to Food
I ENJOYED reading about Michigan’s strong suit in food critics, but you forgot one, Helen Worth ’35, who went on from Michigan to write five cookbooks, including the classic Cooking Without Recipes (Harper & Row, 1965, Bobbs-Merrill, paper). She has taught food and wine appreciation, and continues to teach gourmet cooking and culinary fine points through her Helen Worth Cooking School.
Helen now lives in Charlottesville, Virginia, where she moved as a newlywed in 1980 with her husband, Arthur Gladstone, a macrophotographer who specializes in insects; she writes verse to accompany his photographs. They have presented their show “Small Secrets” at the US National Arboretum and the American Museum of Natural History.
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Susan Tyler Hitchcock ’71, ’72 MA
Covesville, Virginia |
| Ed. Note: Worth is still giving classes that earned her school the title “the Radcliffe of cooking schools” in New York. Her books have been adjudged classics by no less than the late U-M alumna M.F.K. Fisher. |
The Point of a Painting
ABOUT ACZEL’S Holocaust painting: I am no art critic, and I would never claim that from my vantage point as a non-Jewish American citizen, I am able to fully comprehend the horror of the Holocaust. But I feel that Barbara Forman Aronson (June, “Letters”) was missing the point when she said that because Aczel’s painting portrayed Hitler in an exalted position, it would be considered an affront to every Jew. I thought that the classical, romanticized depiction of Hitler and his exalted position in the painting was precisely what gave it power and made it speak to today as well as the past.
A painting depicting Hitler as a disgusting demonic figure, huddling in the depths of dark forces, makes us feel better because it is not hard to recognize and reject evil with an ugly face. “I would never follow such an evil leader,” we can say with assurance. It lets us off easily.
The fact that millions of Jews were degraded, tortured and slaughtered to truly unbelievable extremes, is indeed terrifying. But what is even more terrifying to me is that a fascist, genocidal, murderous egomaniac could have been seen by so many, for so long, as the savior of a nation and culture. This is the horror that the exalted, romanticized Hitler in Aczel’s painting tells.
The painting made me feel quite ill, even panicky. It made me ask myself, “Would I have seen through him? Do I see through the leaders of my own time, with all of their rhetoric?” Will we learn that “getting a good person in power” is not the solution, nor is “having a jerk in power” the essential problem, but, rather, that people in power are there because they speak to what we ask them to? I believe that our only real safeguard against large-scale atrocity is in vigorous standards of human rights and decency that we individually and consistently live by, starting right now, and pass down to our children primarily by the way we live.
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Vera Goodenough Dyck ’89
Chalfont, Pennsylvania |
| Ed. Note: Bara Zetter’s search for information about the painter Aczel continues. As we were going to press, Zetter ‘91, ‘93 MA, was investigating a claim by a Canadian that he is the painter who reportedly died of TB in Germany after the liberation of Auschwitz. Zetter’s research in Hungary did not significantly add to what we reported in our March issue. |
Jam Handy and Prof. Trueblood
LETTERS IN the last two issues refer to Prof. Thomas Trueblood, who taught public speaking and also served as coach of the Michigan golf team, as well. Having been on the golf team of 1926, ’27and ’28, I thought I could add a little bit of humor about that very fine gentleman.
As golf coach he could add very little about the mechanics of the game. But he added one piece of advice which was very helpful when followed, and which he drilled into us at every practice session. It was: “Up and out in two, boys.” As any golfer would know, it meant, when hitting a short approach shot, get it close enough to the pin to make the next putt.
Now for the humorous part of that admonition. We had played Purdue in Lafayette on a Thursday and were to play Illinois on Friday. The Professor was to call us at 4:30 a.m. to catch a 5:30 train for Urbana. Well, he got confused on our room number and awakened a man who called the front desk and told the night clerk that there must be some nut calling at 4:30 a.m. and shouting, “Up and out in two boys!” We did make the train, anyway.
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Ralph M. Cole ’28
Indianapolis |
PROFESSOR Trueblood’s role in “The Suspension of Jam Handy” reminded me of another student whose life he influenced. Trueblood was president of the National Association of Elocutionists when they met in June 1899 for their annual convention at Chatauqua Institute, New York. Trueblood chose as orator of the convention Charles Casper Simons ’98, who coached the debate team for Trueblood and was enrolled in the law department. Simons had won first honors in a speech contest with his oration on “John Brown.” Trueblood asked his student to deliver his tribute to the fiery abolitionist at the conference.
The choice of topic might have been considered inappropriate, because there were Southern elocutionists at the convention. The introduction was delivered without much reaction; but when Simons intoned, “The South had slain the man, but the spirit which animated him was beyond the reach of earthly power,” the Southerners were distressed. He went on to proclaim that John Brown “taught the South that a new era had begun, that not by persuasion, threat or rant, but by force was slavery to be exterminated.” The Southern members of the association walked out of the amphitheater in angry protest.
Neither Trueblood’s career nor Simon’s future was adversely affected by this incident at Chatauqua. Simons got his law degree in 1900 and began his practice in Detroit. He was elected to the Michigan State Senate in 1903 at the age of 26. In 1923, he was appointed US District Court Judge for Detroit. He was named to the Court of Appeals at Cincinnati in 1932 and became Chief Justice in 1952. He remained on the bench until 1959, when at the age of 83, he retired. He died in 1964.
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Nels Juleus
Meadville, Pennsylvania |
A LETTER in the June issue referred to Prof. Thomas Trueblood and a class he seemingly conducted long before I got to Ann Arbor (1929–1934). When I was Golf Team Captain in ’33 (the year ahead of Johnny Fisher—you hurt my pride by adding a year to Johnny’s reign), Truby, as he was referred to when out of earshot, was still a most active and attentive coach. But the only club or clubs I recall seeing him handle in those days, was a Left-Handed Putter!
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A. H. Jolly Jr.
San Diego |
A Sad Business
I WAS quite saddened by your June article and issue about “Michigan Means Business,” which is true, but it also conversely implies that the University is not really about learning and mutual understanding, but about corporate spin-offs for the military-industrial complex.
Such research in America as lasers always holds an ulterior motive—a profit/gain motive; the route to human betterment is not so direct in America. In our present economy, any new ideas improving humanity are first funneled through lucrative military R & D budgets and the vast autonomous military-industrial-university complex. This is unfortunate, besides being wasteful and paranoid in content.
Though I understand the reason for your writing of this issue, which is more PR about U of M than insightful analysis about the social and political implications of laser research, I shudder to think what this kind of journalism will do to our younger generations inundated by talk of guns, violence and joining the army in warfare because of no employment.
It is generally an unspoken truth in military circles, especially during the past ignoble Cold War, that universities and their research centers work for the Pentagon by virtue of the enormous financial grants and subsidies they receive from the government. You were somewhat candid about this in your articles, but you failed to make the connections and future ramifications of such an untenable relationship.
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Anatoli Ilyashov ’72 MA
Los Angeles
Aprés nous, le deluge |
OF ALL the deluge of U-M publications we receive (spouse, myself and two kids), I most enjoy Michigan Today, and especially two sections, U-M Books, which has led me to some real gems I would certainly have otherwise missed, and “Letters,” the best of all. I have three questions for your astute readers:
(1) Has any record been kept of how many times M’s brilliant lawyers have successfully blocked the Engin’ Arch? I realize it isn’t much of an accomplishment, the engineers being zero competition and all, but the statistics over the last 100 years would be interesting.
(2) Did anyone from the class of ’51–52 Dent. ever graduate? I recall a bunch from the Romeo area who I’m sure never made it. If they weren’t expelled, they should have been.
(3) In my early days at Ann Arbor, an indulgent prof took me on a tour of the closed-off 3rd floor of Romance Languages, the old Civil War Hospital. He loved that ghastly old tomb. I remain astounded, even to this day, to have seen some gorgeous, ornate, inlaid lacquer objects, mostly furniture, obviously Chinese in origin.
He said these were gifts from the Chinese to the presidents of U-M (Angell) and of the U of Kansas, for their role in the settlement of the Boxer Rebellion, in which the US and China established a perpetual scholarship fund in lieu of the huge “reparations” the other countries were demanding. Wonder what ever happened to the fund, and to the furniture?
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Thomas G. Caley
Metamora, Michigan |
Statistics Prove U-M Role
YOUR ARTICLE “U-M Recalls WW II” reminded me that while eating in Okinawa with a group of eight junior officers including myself, we spoke of our universities, and it actually was the case that seven of us were Michigan graduates, so we chose to draw the conclusion that 87.5 percent of our forces were Michigan graduates!
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George Adomian ’44
Athens, Georgia |
Willow Run Neighborhood
EIGHTEEN HUNDRED veterans and their families lived in Willow Run Village in 1946–47. Some 600 single veterans lived in bachelor quarters separate from our “courts.” The war was over, the Depression ended, rank was no longer a factor, and we were all ready to re-start our lives.
As non-residents of Michigan we had no choice but to live 11 miles and 30 minutes by University bus from the campus. The tiny apartments were heated by a coal stove, cooking was done on the same stove; water was heated by the same miserable monster. Coal was delivered, except during the infamous coal strike, to a box 10 feet from our door. Ice was delivered to fill the ice box.
Under the aegis of the Dean of Students, Anna Rankin Harris and I worked to organize activities for the wives of those veterans who spent long days on the campus. Our proudest success was the Cooperative Nursery School which we organized with advice from the University co-op school in Ann Arbor. We sponsored a bridge club, an art class, a music listening group, dances and potluck suppers.
Three years after leaving Willow Run, my husband died, and my son and I returned to finish my own MA. Despite the easy availability of concerts, plays, foreign films, Audubon lectures, great library and bookstores, it was a bleaker experience. I would not want to repeat Willow Run at any age, but I’d love to see the sense of common interest and community recreated.
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Phyllis (Graham) Pooley Stigall ’52
Scarborough, New York |
Sighing Language
LIZ DALTON’s article on the Language Across the Curriculum program (June ’95) should cause modern language students to heave a sigh of relief. I was “internationalized” many years ago while working and studying in Europe. Unfortunately, my French diploma from a Swiss university made me a misfit when I returned to the US to find teaching jobs pared to the bone. One “second language” was not sufficient. My career path may have been better served with courses in international law, trade or Russian.
Hopefully, the LAC program soon will include interdisciplinary courses in French. My struggle with language and literature continues as I begin a thesis on the tribulations of three 18th-century French women novelists. |
Margery A. Crumpacker
New York City
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