 . . . Summer 1997
In her senior year, Emily Wolcott kept her family informed about her experiences during a year when her reach surely exceeded her grasp. Illness kept her from finishing the 1903 fall semester and plagued her through the following spring.
She had come back to Ann Arbor in later September from summer at home and in New York to "quite a nice little room" on the third floor of a "Jewish, very cleanly kept house" on what was then Thompson Court, since obliterated by West Quadrangle.
Planning to finish work on a degree that would provide the breadth and "pedagogy" needed for high school teaching, Wolcott signed up for courses in calculus and psychology besides the seminar she had been looking forward to all summer, Fred Newton Scott's "Interpretations of Literature and Art," in which papers were to be written and read by every class member-hers on Keat's "Ode to a Grecian Urn."
To spell herself, Emily took a two-hour course in forestry that required little outside work. On Oct. 18 she described it as "such a rest and a change":
The room looks and smells like a great fresh wood box-slabs and sections of wood lying all around, and a beautiful odor of cedar, etc. The lecturer is a stunted woodsy sort of person, with almost all of his face except his eyes and cheekbones covered with a fine black beard-he also has a foreign accent. It is all peaceful, mild and wholesome information, about the yellow pine and ... the shipworm that eats timbers, and about European peasants that pick up seeds in the forest. My mathematics is going along finely ... . The psychology is very interesting and I shall have beautiful tales to tell about experiments in sensation. I am not progressing very fast with Keats.
"It is very incapacitating to be so anxious to do well," She wrote on Oct. 25, with the Keats paper "stiff and labored" in its first draft: "The spirit of Keats is mixed up with my food and sleep, and problems in calculus-and always labeled Nov. 5 [when] it will be nicely done-and I shall be standing up reading it. I have written a great deal that is either sublime or maudlin."
On Nov. 1 she declared: "I am going to 'bolt' my classes and have it out with Keats."
In a long letter on Nov. 8, she said not a word about what happened on the preceding Thursday when Professor Scott and the class discussed her paper, except that afterwards she had felt the need of sleep and fresh air. Her hope for respite after finishing the Keats assignment was dashed by what she thought on Nov. 15 was "a beautiful cold." She saw a doctor "to lose as little time as possible," and spent two days in bed, cared for by housemates downstairs. She resolved "to get an excuse from Mrs. [Myra] Jordan [the Women's Dean], for all afternoon classes for as long as need be and come home and sleep." But she was still "under the weather" when she went home for Thanksgiving. Not until Jan. 29, as the first semester ended, was she able to return to Ann Arbor. She herself described her trouble as "a sort of depression and inability to tackle anything."
Dr. Herdman told Wolcott not to take more than 10 hours of course work, one hour short of the required number for graduation in June. "So," she said, "I went and told old fat Dean [Richard] Hudson, who is always so technical and persnickety, and he hunted up my record, and with his own hand reduced my required 11 hours to 9. It was only giving me the two hours credit he ought to have given me last fall. I shall not call him Old Huddy or Pink-Whiskered Dick (his regular names) any more--he has been dreadfully sick ... and it has made him merciful."
Wolcott made up work that she had missed, some by examination and signed up for five hours of "snap" and four of "medium" courses that included pre-Shakespearean drama and analytical geometry. She also had her senior photograph made for the yearbook, the Michiganensian.
On Feb. 23 she told her family that she was feeling better. She had been doing a lot of walking, skating and visiting, balancing all the out-door and informal exercise with "genuine resting" in a darkened room. She survived some bad Ann Arbor weather when February ended with a thunderstorm and rain, "and a foot and a half of ice and snow in the streets, together with the walls of it along each side of all the walks began to loosen up and flow along or stand like lakes and canals in all the paths. They never do anything about it, so we go splashing around, ankle-deep in ice water until the thaw is over. They sold 300 pair of rubber boots on State Street alone [on February 28]."
In the midst of the cold, wet weather, "poor little Mrs. Pitkin," the landlady, was on the verge of pneumonia, so ill that her roomers thought she was going to die. Emily sized up the situation, betraying no signs of inner uncertainty:
I have always said it was only by a special arrangement of the Lord's that the landladies of Ann Arbor, especially the small frail ones, didn't die of pneumonia, hovering over their faint expiring registers as they do, in their cold rooms; ... they would a great deal rather die so than take the precious coke they had paid $5 a ton for, & throw it in the furnace and have it burnt up & destroyed, even though the room rents are for that purpose & are quite adequate.
Mrs. Pitkin lived.
They don't have any fancy things--such as Saratoga chips and meat balls in grease and covered with bright pink sauce, which was one of the star lunches at the other place--all of which I abhorred. There are comparatively few girls; the boys mostly wear sweaters and attend law school; when the waiter is slow a whole table full will give a beautiful bell ringers performance on their glasses with their knives.
But by March 10, regretting that she "had done very little at her lessons," Emily had a spell of the "downs," bearing out Dr. Herdman's prediction that there would be regression as well as progress as she recovered. Two weeks later she was full of ambition. Thus she went from "worthless seasons" of health to favorable ones and back again. Drawing an analogy from her country background, she said it was a case of "some years we have apples and some years we don't." Dr. Herdman reassured her that her condition was "remedial," and treated her every day for a while in May with "electricity."
"I am as nervous as a witch-cat," she wrote on May 31, "but I expect I can graduate--it depends somewhat on examinations." She persisted and graduated. Her mother, Fannie Wolcott Cutler, came to Ann Arbor for the ceremonies on June 23. Immediately upon their return to Tallmadge, Emily packed her trunk for a summer in England with friends, the gift of her sister, a designer for Tiffany's. On Sept. 6, rested and well again, she began teaching English and mathematics at Rayen High School in Youngstown, Ohio. Three years later she moved to New York to teach and be near her sister. She died there in 1953.
Emily Wolcott's response to the 1924 Michigan Alumnae Council survey (on file in the Michigan Historical Collections) indicates that she did postgraduate work at Columbia University but earned no other degrees. She must have felt them unnecessary.
Edgar L. McCormick '50 PhD of Kent, Ohio, is a professor emeritus of English at Kent State University. He thanks Elizabeth A. Yeargin of Cuyahoga Falls, Ohio, Georgia Haugh of the U-M Clements Library, and Karen L. Jania of the U-M Bentley Historical Library for assisting him in this series on Emily Wolcott's two years at Michigan.
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This is the last in our series based on the letters of Emily Wolcott '04, who enrolled in September 1902 and wrote home to her mother and sisters in Tallmadge, Ohio, almost weekly. (Our 
Every morning, she studied calculus "with the engineers because they have better instruction than the 'Lits.'" There were 28 in the class, four of them women. After giving instructions at the board, Prof. Alexander Ziwet walked through the room, helping the students with problems, answering questions "you are almost afraid to ask." Wolcott liked his method: "This way you get just what you want of him, addressed to yourself alone ... but woe to them who do not know their algebra!"
After getting settled in a quiet room at 429 Hamilton Place, Wolcott looked for a new doctor (the previous one in Ann Arbor was "one of these jollying, cheer-up, nothing-the-matter-with-you kind of people"), and found William James Herdman, MD, LLD, who had a private practice as well as being on the Medical School staff as professor of diseases of the mind. He had been recommended to her as a "splendid general practitioner with a leaning to nerves." Herdman diagnosed inflammation of her nervous system and prescribed "a lot of outdoor exercise, rest and some study," and also massages, medicine and soon afterwards, "electricity treatments."
Wolcott was greatly satisfied with the boarding house she moved to soon after her last semester began. She was lucky to have a place at a table of five women, a child and one man, Wilkie Collins, who, she thought, "could easily be a descendant of the original if invention and dramatic & descriptive powers are any sign." "Good rare steak" was available every morning, and "good rare roast beef" every night.