Although I lived in Minburn (Dallas County) for 17 years and Rippey (Greene County) for one year, I have no relatives there. Because my Grandfather Spencer Smith had been the founder of Waukee (Dallas County), my parents are buried there along with my Grandmother Smith. My name is already on the tombstone. The cemetery faces out toward a typical field of corn.
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Only once have I returned to the University of Northern Iowa at Cedar Falls, where I received my B. A. in English. The high point was seeing the tall campanile, the musical device I used to play twice a day @ 25¢ /hour for students rushing to 9 a.m. classes and returning from them at 5 p.m. (Peeling potatoes for two years at The Commons cafeteria paid 25¢/hour, also, but 3 hours work per day was enough to pay for all my meals.) I also enjoyed conversing with my old piano prof, Russell Baum, he with the greatly magnified spectacles on his nose and he who admired my ability to play by ear and to transpose from one key to another but who must certainly have known that the A's he gave were no indication that he thought I'd ever become a match for Horowitz. Profs whom I admired but are no longer alive: John Cowley (English prof who turned me on to the English romantics, particularly Coleridge), Brock Fagan (perhaps my favorite prof of all time, whose teaching techniques I have always tried to imitate, who was marvelously self-critical, who was the first to mention Emerson's religious unorthodoxy, who kept the newspapers filled with his activist and complaining letters to the editor, etc.), Martin L. Grant (biology prof who gave me the lowest grade I received, a C, although his wife, it turns out, was the really inspiring one of the two), James Hearst (Robert Frost's friend, who from his wheelchair spent hours adding comments about poetry submissions I made, a practice I was to follow when I began teaching writing), Malcolm Price (the college prexy; as a reporter for The College Eye I had his beat, but what resulted was his interviewing me about campus doings rather than my finding out much from him; his daughter Nancy I sorta liked, and she has become a published novelist), Willard Reninger (the inspiring grouch who really was able to get the best out of everyone), and Carl Wirth (my landlord for a time, my aural theory teacher, my inspiration for wanting to become a composer). As for student friends from college: Lowell Ransom (son of my Rippey school superintendent never really kept in touch, although I regularly wrote his mother up to the time of her death); Bill Scheldrup, who has kept in touch just recently; and Mary Womboldt, the beauty queen most assumed I would marry but who, instead, married a football jock who, I understand, did her wrong and she made her way being a successful realtor. Even psych teacher Richard L. Beard foresaw that the two of us would not have made a happy pair!
My main friend now is Betty Jean Gottschalk, wife of Harold ("Hap"). Hap and I went through all 12 years of school together and, inasmuch as he was one year older, I always thought of him as a good model. Betty, a year younger, is my candidate for being the typical Iowa mother, and she is the daughter of my revered DeMolay leader, "Dad" Payton.
Another chap, Robert Shirley, went through all 12 years of school with Hap and me. The three of us, in fact, played basketball in 8th grade against baseball great Bob Feller . My classmate Bob Shirley, who got his MBA from Harvard, his Ph. D. from the University of Utah, is now a retired professor of business at Oregon State University at Corvallis. Several times a year, we meet and attend Broadway plays and other sites together. In February 2001, I surprised him after we saw Andrée deShields starring in "The Full Monty." I took him backstage to meet deShields (a friend of my buddy Gilbert Price), and both of us were nonplussed at finding him reading Shakespeare (for he teaches a course at NYU). He likes off-Broadway plays, which is fine with me because they're mostly all nearby.
Ironically, although I live in New York City, I long have been a member of the Des Moines Unitarian Church, a congregation I started supporting while back in college when Grant Butler was its leader. In fact, I composed a somewhat atonal song, "The Pantheist's Hymn," which their organist and choir performed during World War II and which my parents were proud to hear. I have remained on the mailing list of the Cedar Falls UU Society, which had as its origin the Humanist Club I formed with sponsors John Cowley and Martin L. Grant. Although I have also been a member in Connecticut of the Stamford and Westport societies, and in New York of the Community Church and the Nassau Society, I am presently a member only of the 4th Universalist Society and also the Ethical Culture Society of New York.
Alan Levin has been a major resource. We met when I returned to the University of Northern Iowa for a 50th reunion, and he kindly took me to see the local Unitarian society, members of whom included faculty widows of two of my favorite profs: Helen Cowley (whose husband was my professor of 19th Century English Literature); and Dorothy Grant (whose husband was my biology professor). Cowley and Grant had volunteered to be faculty sponsors for the Humanist Club I founded, and later they were instrumental in starting the Unitarian fellowship. What Alan has done is to provide local humanists, Ethical Culturists, and other liberals with Web facilities. This is an invaluable service, and he now has extended his services to Taslima Nasrin and others. In short, Alan is an inspiring humanist activist. A pity for Iowa that he is leaving soon, to accompany his wife, Dr. Jane Wong, to Georgia.