Our Profs

Larry Gould
President

I don't recall what occasioned his comment, but I remember hearing Larry Gould's complaining that students no longer invited him to tea in their dorm rooms on Sundays, as he said they used to do in years gone by. I passed this on to my roommates, Andy Ellwein and Bob Jacobsen, and suggested that we issue such an invitation. After some eye rolling they agreed, though with trepidation. What would we talk about, we all wondered?

We took the plunge, and off went the meticulously worded invitation via campus mail. The great man responded with alacrity: "I'd be delighted." NOW what?!

It was our junior year, and Andy, Jake, and I had a triple on third Severance. As dorm rooms went, we thought it pretty nice. We set about getting everything together for the big day: a tea pot, cups and saucers, a few eats, and napkins.

There was a knock on the door and in he walked. It was as if Zeus had come down from Olympus, but I doubt that even Zeus was possessed of such regal bearing or of such a voice. That voice! Demosthenes couldn't have carried Larry's suitcase.

What happened next is dim in my memory, though I do recall we sat there mute, transfixed, mesmerized, as the grand man held forth in a monologue (or maybe it was a soliloquy) about God knows what. The whole thing went on for about a half-hour and then he was gone.

A few floor mates then knocked on our door. "What the hell did you talk about?" they asked. "We've forgotten," we replied.

Bob Fliegel (8-3-05)

Owen "Whitey" Jenkins
English

Everybody has a Whitey Jenkins story. I sure do!

Some of you remember how he used to love to shout, "How do you like your martinis, DRY?" when I was nodding off in his 8 AM class.

A few years ago his son, a lawyer in Colorado, asked me for some help on a medmal case. When I found out who he was, he gave me his father's email address. After a pleasant first exchange I reminded the professor what he used to yell at me, and I went on to tell him that, in spite of my uninspired performance in his class, I became an avid reader and even learned how to write scientific articles. Moreover that I had bumbled my way to a couple of professional degrees and remembered his class and his comments fondly. He never wrote back. I guess by that time he had figured out who I was and was too incredulous or too disgusted to write me again, or maybe he was about to depart the premises by that time. I'll never know.

To this day, when someone scratches his/her head at the spelling of my somewhat unusual last name, I tell them, "it's DRY, like the martini." They never forget my name. Wouldn't Whitey be proud to know that his sarcasm and wit proved so useful!

Larry Dry (8-4-05)

B.J. Raz
Freshman Physics

I was pretty intimidated as a freshman anyway—an 8:00 with Raz was more initiation to college than I had anticipated. Nevertheless in hindsight there was a certain amount of humor in that class. BJ, if I remember correctly, had come from the Argonne Laboratories and had in someway been associated with nuclear physics—atomic bomb maybe—I don’t know for sure. Anyway, he fervently believed it was his moral responsibility to pass on his great knowledge to mere freshmen, many of whom were not sure why they had signed up for physics in the first place.

Despite the fact that he was monumentally smart, he never could get the lecture experiments to work. This was particularly true of those involving electricity. He’d fumble around connecting and disconnecting wires and just could not get it quite correct. Fortunately for Raz, Brian Harris sat in the front row and was sort of a genius in his own right about electricity. Sooner or later Brian would come to the desk, rearrange the connections, and in a twinkling the experiment worked perfectly. This never seemed to phase Raz, and of course the class was mightily amused. Brian aced that course; I did not.

Raz had some other attributes which always made the class interesting. First, his wife cut his hair—with a bowl—literally The results looked very similar to Larry of the Three Stooges or, one could have imagined, the Mad Professor. In my estimation it was some of each. Since it was an 8:00 class, Raz’ dress appearance was also of amusement. We used to have bets on how many of his shirt buttons would be buttoned. He’d always get at least the top three so he could “tie” his tie, but that too was problematic. The result was that the buttons just above the belt were not buttoned, giving him the look of one of those fat tummied, button popping, characters out of a Dickens novel. He looked like the perfect caricature of the absent minded physics professor.

Raz had a peculiar marking system on all papers and tests. He used only three marks as I recall: excellent, a check mark, and “see me.” The first two were to be desired. The “see me” either meant you were so far off that immediate remedial assistance was required or that he did not understand how you arrived at some answer. I saw a lot of Raz.

David McKercher (8-3-05)

Victor & Lucille Pinkham
Katie Boyd
History
Frau Hammer
German
Warren Beson, Mel Taube, Willard Tuomi
Nellie Nelson & Jack Thurnblad
Coaches

I was a history major, so most of my memories focus on that department. You may or may not recall that Victor Pinkham, an Anglican minister (I believe), and husband of department head Lucille Pinkham, was an assistant or associate in that department. He was a short, round, kindly and good-natured man who was probably in his late sixties or early seventies then. When he lectured he liked to sit on the corner of the raised desk provided for the professors in most of the Laird Hall lecture rooms. Facing his audience, he would boost himself up on that corner and let his dangling legs work back and forth, which provided somewhat of a distraction to us. On the days when Victor forgot to zip his fly (there were several of these), his fly would open and shut with each raising and lowering of his stubby legs. Not much was revealed - who knows how much there was to reveal - but the memory of that fly opening and closing every two or three seconds and everyone in class aware of it and Victor, presumably unaware, is still very, very humorous.

Another wonderful member of that department was Katherine ("Katie") Boyd; her emotional lectures on Heloise and Abelard were just classics. She actually shed tears and used a delicate handkerchief at points during her lecture on that subject. Frau Hammer in the German Department reacted the same when she got on the subject of Schiller and the "Ode to Joy" (Freude, schoene Gotterfunken, tocther aus Elysium). Those two and Victor, and the coaches (Beson, Mel Taube, Willard Tuomi, Nellie Nelson, Jack Thurnblad) all enriched my life, as did the Carleton experience in general; I feel fortunate to have had that experience.

John Lundsten (8-20-05)

Willard Tuomi

Starting with our sophomore year, Willard Tuomi became Varsity Swim Coach and I was Freshman Swim Coach. (Coaching and waiting tables in the Tea Room were part of Carleton's work-study program for me.)

Willard, who was an assistant football coach, knew next to nothing about swimming, except how to use a stop watch. The Freshman team worked out the hour before the Varsity in the old pool under the gym. Willard would always come down and copy the work-out that I had posted for Freshman and just write "Varsity" at the top.

The whole team knew of this routine, but Willard, a man of few words, would just say, "Stick to this workout and you will have a respectable performance."

Katie Boyd

Working in the Tea Room gave me a chance to get to know some of the faculty who were "regulars". One Spring Sunday noon, as we were about to close, Professor Boyd came in to eat. All the waiters hated it when someone came in near closing time because one of us would have to work late--and faculty members didn't tip.

Her reason for her late arrival was that she did not know Minnesota had started Daylight Saving Time that morning. She said she was glad she found out on Sunday and didn't miss her first class on Monday.

Roger Holthaus (8-22-05)