"If I've heard from one person I've heard from eighty-seven," Vice Chancellor Royster Hedgepeth told us on Homecoming Weekend, "that Doris Abramson's convocation speech should be reprinted in the magazine." Delivered during the ceremony in which she and five other alumni and friends received the Chancellor's Medal [see "Around the Pond," page 7, and class notes], the speech should be imagined in the rich and resonant tones of which this professor emerita of theater is a past master.
When Jim Leheny called from the chancellor's
office to ask me to be today's speaker, he suggested that I "dip
into the reservoir of my memories." He may not have known
how deep that reservoir is. The first recollection I'm going
to share with you is one from nearly seventy years ago. The occasion?
My father took me to work with him one spring day in 1930. (No,
it was not Take Our Daughters To Work Day. Long before such an
event.) I'll never know what prompted him. I only know that it
is the most vivid memory I have of my father, who died in an
auto accident a few months later. Unless Dutchy Barnard '28 is
here, no one in this audience will remember him. He was the first
janitor of Memorial Hall. A veteran of World War I, he had been
at that job for about ten years. On this bright day, he took
me to his building. I held his hand as we walked from our home
on Fearing Street. Memorial Hall was a special place indeed:
There was a bowling alley in the basement. I like to think he
rolled a ball to show me what it meant a bowling alley.
And there was a barber shop. The barber, Nap (Napolean Mercier)
lifted me up, and I could smell the sweet smell of was
it witch hazel? And my father showed me his mops and brooms,
the closet where they were kept, and the floors that were his
to keep clean. Then perhaps because he was called away,
or perhaps as part of his plan for the day he parked me
across the way by Drill Hall, where Mrs. Hicks was teaching a
class outdoors. (Drill Hall was a wooden building that stood
approximately where the south wing of Bartlett is now; it was
used principally by the ROTC.) On this day, Mrs. Hicks was teaching
calisthenics on the lawn to young women/coeds in gym bloomers.
I remember that I was put on a folding chair and told to be quiet.
In the self-creating fiction of memoir, I may sometime write
how the chair felt, what I wore, whether or not my stockinged
legs were stretched forward or one was tucked under me where
I sat. For now: I sat on a folding chair. I hope I was quiet.
I'll bet I was enthralled.
My father collected me and, before taking
me home, took me to Flint Lab for ice cream. They made it there
then and for some time to come. In the 50s, when I taught a speech
class on the top floor of that building, I passed a room that
had ice-cream-making machines in it. Wonder if they're still
there.
But before I go on to other buildings and memories they evoke,
let's buckle back to Memorial Hall. Long the student social center,
this building was a gift of alumni to the college, following
World War I. George E. "Red" Emery '24 headed the Associate
Alumni of Mass. State College when I was a student and was in
that office for many years. I couldn't begin to count the alumni
activities now, let alone name the movers and shakers in those
busy offices these days. When I was a student at Mass. State,
in the 40s, we had dances upstairs. When I first started teaching
at UMass in 1953, faculty meetings were held there. I don't mean
Faculty Senate meetings the entire faculty could fit into
that room. I remember late afternoon meetings with the sun pouring
in through those tall west windows.
And let us not forget The Massachusetts Review,
now about to celebrate its fortieth volume; the MR office was
in the basement of Mem Hall for thirty-five years. I was a theater
editor for much of that time. When I pull out names from the
past, I come up with Barney Troy '31, Leone Stein '75G, John
Hicks, Bob Tucker and most important to all of us and to
the magazine Sid Kaplan. I remember spirited meetings in
that cramped room that resembled nothing so much as a set for
the movie Front Page. One name that appears on the earliest and
on the most recent masthead is Jules Chametzky. Yes, he is still
an editor-in-chief, along with Mel Heath '74G, '86G, and Paul
Jenkins. The MR office is no longer in Mem Hall, having recently
moved, sensibly if reluctantly, to South College. I have no doubt
that ghosts were left behind. Listen for the sound of an old
Underwood or a banging screen door. (What other office ever had
a screen door?)
It was Frank Prentice Rand who used to say in an orientation
lecture to incoming freshmen: "There are ghosts on this
campus." (The older I get the more I believe in them.) FPR
he was a character English "prof," head
of the English department, later liberal arts dean. There may
be some here today who remember his Shakespeare classes. (I've
moved on to Old Chapel in my recollections of places and persons.)
He gave daily quizzes, asking such questions as: "How many
times are flowers mentioned in Act II of As You Like It?"
I suppose it made us read the plays but with an eye trained
peculiarly to details. As he gathered up the papers, he sang
a hymn: "Bringing in the sheaves, bringing in the sheaves"
My first office was in the Old Chapel basement, a kind of broom closet, with scarcely room for a desk and two chairs. The Old Chapel classrooms were lovely and light, and there were wonderful oak columns to lean on while lecturing. I remember an English history class that I had in that building, with Professor McKimmie. In his later years, he could lean on one of those columns as he lectured in a way that allowed him to fall asleep mid-sentence. We loved him so much that we busied ourselves with reading or with writing letters home until he awoke and continued his lecture. We used to say that he picked up right where he'd left off.
Across the way was Goodell Library now
Goodell Building. The librarian in my student days was Basil
Wood. He didn't just sit in an office marked Librarian. He regularly
walked through the library and gently (not always so gently)
tapped legs to get feet off tables and chairs, offered bits of
paper for gum to be spat out in and thrown into a proffered wastebasket.
We were there to read, to take notes; he was there to see that
we did so with decorum. I wonder: Does Basil Wood's ghost visit
offices in Goodell Building? Or has it found its way to the Du
Bois Library? I vote for the latter. If you see a boy (I've decided
that I'm old enough to call students boys and girls) if
you see a boy self-consciously take his sneakered foot off a
table at the library, you'll know Basil Wood's ghost is paying
a call.
South College has many memories for me. Everything
has gone on in South College at one time or another. Deans, drama,
whole departments have resided there. Someone should be writing
a history of that building alone. I want to tell you about one
special woman who had an office there for years: Mildred Pierpont.
There is, as you know, a low-rise dorm named for her. There's
her name, along with other names improbably attached to those
dorms: Coolidge and Thoreau and James. Mildred Pierpont. She
ran the schedule office from a tiny room in South College. She
was there when I was a student had been since 1921
and was there when I started teaching in 1953. German professor
Fritz Ellert '30 said she was "a saint with the face of
a clown." I'll just say that she had red hair she probably
tried to tame, but the bun at the nape of her neck was always
awry and a pencil stuck there was all that seemed to keep
it in its place. She was patient and friendly with students and
faculty alike. I remember going to tell her that a classroom
I'd been given in which to teach speech to twenty students had
room for only fifteen. She unrolled a chart, studied the buildings
and their seating capacities, and made a decision on the spot.
I was moved from a room in, say, Flint Lab to one in French Hall.
Oh, yes we taught everywhere then. And Mildred Pierpont
kept track of it all. I wonder how many computers and their operators
have taken her place? And her ghost? Must it be at the low-rise
dorm that bears her name? I think not. She may take a turn at
a Whitmore keyboard now and then. On one of those days when,
quite by chance (it seems), things go right.
I just mentioned teaching classes everywhere. We had offices everywhere too. When I was in the English department, I was in Old Chapel. When speech became an independent department (four of us: Arthur Niedeck, Henry Pierce, Tony Zaitz and me), our first office was in the basement of this building, Stockbridge Hall. We shared space with the agronomy department! (I remember wondering if we had to talk dirty.) One of my favorite offices was in the old Math Building. Was that building ever named for anyone? It was a wooden building on the east side of campus, near French Hall as I recall. I remember in spring the smell of lilac bushes outside the second-floor office I shared with Vera Sickels. Our fire escape was a rope that hung in the corner of the office. We were given instructions for its use, but there was never a fire drill.
One more building: the one we're in at this
moment, Stockbridge Hall. Bowker Auditorium such a fine
theater space has been particularly important to me over
the years. As a student, in 1948, I stood on this stage as St.
Joan, in a production of Maxwell Anderson's Joan of Lorraine.
I took it as a great compliment when my then-professor Fritz
Ellert came backstage afterwards in tears. When I got to know
him later, I realized what a sentimental man he was and easily
moved to tears. This is the stage on which Esther Terry '74G
directed her Black Theater productions. I'm so glad grateful
that I was in the audience, particularly for her productions
of Theodore Ward's Our Lan' and William Branch's In Splendid
Error. My first productions were here, too. In 1964, I directed
Romulus by Friedrich Duerrenmatt (translated by Gore Vidal).
In the title role was a student named Larry Wilker '65, '67G,
a business major attracted to theater. He went on to earn an
M.F.A. in theater (here) and a Ph.D. in theater (University of
Illinois). Currently he is president of the Kennedy Center in
Washington, D.C. For that, of course, he needs both his business
and his theater training.
I have rather neglected the east side of campus. Sorry. I have vivid memories of botany classes with Dr. Torrey, who separated males from females (maybe he said boys from girls, but I doubt it) in his classroom. Then he addressed his lectures to the males; we females listened in. And he was worth listening to. I remember Dr. Woodside, zoology; Dr. Gordon, geology. That was in my student days. When I was teaching in the late 50s, early 60s each spring I had a call from the School of Nursing. (No, it couldn't have been "school"; it must have been a division then.) Anyway, I was asked, in my capacity as a speech teacher, to train the nurses who were graduating to speak a kind of pledge that they said in unison at graduation ceremonies. We took it seriously, the nurses and I; I arranged them according to dark and light voices, helped them to project, to speak clearly. Wonder if anyone engages in this kind of collaboration these days. (Notice that I don't send a ghost to coach the nurses: I'm not ready to go.)
Seriously, I'm pleased to have had this chance
to celebrate the University of Massachusetts, a place that has
meant so much to me for so long. (You now have some sense of
how long.) I've been retired since 1987. My students are beginning
to retire now. (Oh, well I retired one year before one
of my favorite professors did Leonta Horrigan '36.) My
last office was in the Fine Arts Center; if I ever haunt it,
it will be to find a way to open some windows. So my classes
are being taught thank you, Harley Erdman; thank you, Julie
Nelson. My office has been enjoyed by professors making their
own history. Dick Trousdell was there for a time; I'm pleased
that Penny Remsen is there now. It must be so all over campus.
There is a continuity of persons and places. The university seems
to be in good hands. Bless it bless you all.
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As a university student in her native Cairo in the early 1970s,
says Ashour, she'd found no one who considered writers in the
African diaspora worthy of study. But in 1973, a joyfully-cultivated
friendship with Shirley Graham Du Bois world traveler,
litterateur, and widow of W.E.B. led Ashour to UMass. Madame
Du Bois, as the école-educated Ashour still calls her
late liaison to Amherst, was living in Cairo at the time, and
pointed the young Egyptian toward the then-infant Afro-American
Studies department here.
Why the interest in African-American literature in Africa
in the last decade or so? Because, said Ashour on a visit to
UMass last March, works on oppression and the overcoming of oppression
speak deeply to readers in the Arab world. Ashour found a receptive audience at her alma mater, where
graduate students from several departments and many of UMass's
Palestinian students turned out to hear her lecture, entitled
"Eyewitness, Scribe and Storyteller: My Experience as a
Novelist." For Ashour is now a creative writer as well as
a scholar; a decade after her sojourn in Prince House, she turned
to historical fiction. Her trilogy Granada, Mariama, and Al-Rahil
(The Departure), which deals with the 1492 expulsion of Arabs
from Spain, was named as Best Book of the Year by the General
Egyptian Book Organization in 1994, and won first prize in the
first Arab Women's Book Fair two years later. "The exceptional alertness to time and place, and the
need to record, are characteristics common to the writers of
my generation," Ashour said at UMass. Egypt's turbulent
history during her lifetime the British occupation, the
struggle for the Suez Canal, and war with Israel have left
Ashour with a compulsion to understand the past. "Writing
is a retrieval of a human will negated," she said. |
Having
absorbed the English canon from Beowulf to Virginia Woolf, Radwa Ashour
might have deemed her literary education complete. The young scholar
saw gaps, however, where the African-American writers should have been.
"She said,
'the best department in the United States is at UMass,' says Ashour,
remembering how Du Bois returned from a visit to Massachusetts with
an application and a scholarship for her protegé. 
A fire starts
without a match. A leaf falls and shatters like a china plate. A dozen
rapt schoolchildren watching nature behave in these implausible ways
might well believe in magic. But the man in charge is no Merlin. His
is the realm of science, where the apparently inexplicable is always
firmly tethered to reality.
The presentation
is geared for third- to fifth-graders, says Racicot, "Because they
can understand the science, but they still have a little belief in magic
left." The biggest crowd-pleaser is a demonstration of how chemicals
can change color during a reaction. Racicot holds up a glass of a pale
yellowish liquid that looks like ginger ale. He divides his audience
in half. One group, he tells them, loves ginger ale, but the other half
will drink only grape soda. Either side can turn the drink into their
favorite soda if they call out its name loud enough. Whose magic is
stronger? 
Now a field attorney
for the National Labor Relations Board in Boston, Rachael Splaine arrived
at UMass as a scrappy, teenage athlete in the fall of 1989. She had
just won a national championship with the all-star New England schoolgirls
lacrosse squad, and was the lone freshman to receive a women's lacrosse
scholarship here that year. But after her first season at UMass the
program was axed along with volleyball and tennis because
of budget cuts, and she was left without a team in the sport she loved
and had played throughout her youth.
Impressed by
the law's capacity to create change, Rachael plunged herself into the
field. After graduating with majors in Afro-American studies and education,
she studied law at Northeastern and Georgetown. "I realized the
power of the law," she says now with the self-confidence of a young
attorney. "That whole experience definitely motivated me to pursue
law as a career."
You're sprinting
up the beach after a 1.5k swim through open water, peeling off your
wetsuit and your goggles as you go. You find your bike in the transition
area and stuff your sandy feet into shoes clipped to the pedals. You
scorch onto the course and jockey for position.
When Baker began
swimming in her hometown of East Longmeadow at the age of seven, her
mother, Marilyn, gave her a notebook and pencil to record her times.
"She had to tell me that lower numbers were better," Sarah
recalls. In high school Sarah was a strong athlete she played
field hockey, swam, and ran track and cross country but not a
stellar one. 