I skim those entries, looking for the unusual. Like this in the September 2011 issue from a classmate in France:

I’m now preparing for my next show in the famous Théatre des Deux Anes in Paris, well known for its shows of chansonniers for ages. I do not sing, but under the name of Jean du Frout, I write fables which are told by various actors, including myself, and after the fable, a piano improvises on well-known themes related directly or humorously to the fable. Now you can laugh, as have done many spectators of the show in the past three years…We have a house in Brittany where we spend about ten days a month. ‘Frout’ means a tiny stream. I wanted a name related to the famous 18th-century French fabulist, Jean de La Fontaine, but with all due respect, the fountain had to be much smaller. This explains Frout.

Or this:

[We] traveled to the Ecuadorian mountains and rain forest in January, had three sessions with a shaman, and spent five days at an ecolodge and learning from the Achuar people, among other highlights. In May [we] did a week of bareboat sailing in Canouan and the Grenadines on a 40-foot Moorings monohull, and that has become [our] new favorite sailing destination! Two weeks later [we] were in Lima, Peru, producing a 2½-day workshop for 36 young indigenous leaders from 11 countries across Latin America and 11 participants from Peru, sponsored by Chirapaq, a Peru-based indigenous empowerment organization.

And I got a write-up in the class of 1968′s notes:

How many of us get a chance to start a new career at 67? The irrepressible Steve Cotler has just published a children’s book, and he’s zooming around, entertaining and educating kids in schools and libraries from coast to coast. His middle-grades novel, Cheesie Mack Is Not a Genius or Anything, the first in a series from Random House, is narrated by the (also) irrepressible Ronald “Cheesie” Mack, an 11-year-old from Gloucester, MA. Adventurous, outrageous, smart, curious, and funny, Cheesie sounds a lot like someone we knew in Section D (third row, center section, if I recall correctly). Appropriate for ages 8-12, Steve’s book is getting rave reviews and is in bookstores and available electronically. The second in Steve’s series, Cheesie Mack Is Cool in a Duel, comes out in June. For a copy autographed by the author, or to arrange an author event at your grandkid’s school, contact Steve.

During the past decade, Steve has also reconnected with the Summer Science Program he attended when he was 16. SSP is a summer residence program in which gifted high-school students complete challenging, hands-on research projects in celestial mechanics. Steve writes: “In 1997, I found a magic bean from SSP’s beanstalk deep in my memories and gave a talk to the future scientists at the 39th annual summer session about connecting creativity to technology. I resolved to rejuvenate and expand what had become one of the longest-lived but terminally tired science enrichment programs in the world. Replanting the magic bean, I became chmn. of an alumni-operated nonprofit that took over SSP, expanded to two campuses, built an endowment, and reconnected with its 2,000-plus alumni. I suspect my work at SSP will live and thrive long after I don’t.”

SSP summer programs are now located on two campuses: New Mexico Institute of Mining and Technology in Socorro and Westmont College in Santa Barbara, CA. SSP appears to be a fairly high-powered operation; the 72 students enrolled in SSP 2011 were selected from 1,054 applicants and will come from 22 states and 14 countries overseas. Our politicians talk about job creation, but think for a moment about what that means in today’s international economy. More than half of the tech startups in this country over the last two decades, including a number of very successful companies, have been created by young tech graduates from overseas. Tech rules, and it’s just beginning. If we were as smart as the overseas kids at SSP, we’d be offering them and their families citizenship instead of making them leave as soon as their student visas expired. Ditto the overseas tech grads at our top universities, whom we expel on graduation. The ship is leaving the dock. We need to get aboard before we get left behind.

We’re not all Wall Streeters!

©2012 Steve Cotler's Irrepressibly True Tales. All Rights Reserved.

HBS women -- 1963

One thing hasn’t changed, however: business managers are still viewed as grasping, self-interested, and greedy. Think Madoff, AIG, Enron, almost all the Wall Street firms, and Name-A-Bank. Few think that businessmen would honestly affirm, “My purpose is to serve the greater good.”

Yet this year, a couple of Harvard MBA students decided to do something about their image—to say “My purpose is to serve the greater good”—and to get others to say the same. They created an oath with a goal of getting 100 Harvard MBAs to sign on.

They greatly exceeded that goal; nearly 500, over half of the class, took the pledge.

The MBA Oath:

As a manager, my purpose is to serve the greater good by bringing people and resources together to create value that no single individual can create alone. Therefore I will seek a course that enhances the value my enterprise can create for society over the long term. I recognize my decisions can have far-reaching consequences that affect the well-being of individuals inside and outside my enterprise, today and in the future. As I reconcile the interests of different constituencies, I will face choices that are not easy for me and others.

Therefore I promise:

• I will act with utmost integrity and pursue my work in an ethical manner.
• I will safeguard the interests of my shareholders, co-workers, customers and the society in which we operate.
• I will manage my enterprise in good faith, guarding against decisions and behavior that advance my own narrow ambitions but harm the enterprise and the societies it serves.
• I will understand and uphold, both in letter and in spirit, the laws and contracts governing my own conduct and that of my enterprise.
• I will take responsibility for my actions, and I will represent the performance and risks of my enterprise accurately and honestly.
• I will develop both myself and other managers under my supervision so that the profession continues to grow and contribute to the well-being of society.
• I will strive to create sustainable economic, social, and environmental prosperity worldwide.
• I will be accountable to my peers and they will be accountable to me for living by this oath.

This oath I make freely, and upon my honor.

Word spread, and students at other business school students opened chapters and signed the oath. In June, BusinessWeek wrote about the phenomenon, “Harvard’s MBA Oath Goes Viral.”

Doctors take the Hippocratic Oath. It is ceremonial, but the license required before the practice of medicine is real and essential. Business management requires no such license. Will taking the MBA Oath make a difference? I suspect not…unless teeth appear.

But what if Harvard and other business schools decided that ethical behavior was not only a subject to study, but also a requirement for their MBA degree, with taking this Oath mandatory? In that case, if any MBAs were subsequently guilty (as ascertained by a non-judicial, university-run tribunal) of breaking their oaths, their MBA degrees would be revoked.

Would it matter to Madoffs, Lays, and the like? Probably not, but it could create a different climate within the graduate schools, one that might have a positive influence on all but the most venal.

What a dreamer I am.

©2012 Steve Cotler's Irrepressibly True Tales. All Rights Reserved.

It was 1967. I was a first-year graduate student living in Peabody Terrace, the married students’ housing, a walking bridge across the river from Harvard Business School. These were tall, narrow buildings, four units to a floor, all sharing a long narrow balcony that looked east over the Charles River toward Boston. We had the uppermost balcony, a twentieth-floor apartment. When the weather was warm, all four apartments might be open to the balcony, on which rested only two heavy chairs, the frequent strong winds making predictable patio furniture a hazard to ground dwellers.

Treswick lived two apartments away and often walked the parapets, pacing the railing, three feet down on one side, 200 on the other. One evening, our door to the balcony open, I stepped from the bedroom into the living room and found Treswick aprowl. Words of encouragement accompanied by mild gestures toward the open door did not inspire him to exit. Raised tones and more challenging approaches only served to anger the feline. He stood his ground, offering hisses as counterpoint. Rapid wieldings of a long-handled broom and several high-octaved unintelligibilities finally convinced him; Treswick backed out, expressing discontent and disaffection toward me, my wife, and our unborn children.

My wife Jane worked as a school nurse, often coming home before I did. Her previous and long-standing fear of non-cuddly felines was now in foment. I came in late one afternoon not long after the aforesaid interloping to find the bathroom door locked. Jane was in the tub. She had come home, leaped when she found Treswick in the living room again, and escaped to the the bathroom, where she had been closeted for two hours. The cat had exited, how long before I could not know. Jane was pruney; I was pissed. I trotted over to the owners’ apartment, explained the invasion, and suggested an accommodation. Each of us would look to see if the other’s exterior door was open. If so, the examiner would keep his closed. With such an arrangement, I explained, Treswick would patrol only when our living quarters were closed to him, and we would enjoy the air only when Treswick was locked in.

A few nights later, balmy weather prompted me to check the door status as I retired. Treswick’s was shut. I opened ours to the night air.

Jane, in her first trimester with our first child, had already gone to bed and was nearly asleep when I joined her. Our bedroom, small, concrete-walled, and spare, had one window that opened to the building side opposite the balcony, providing a welcome cross-breeze on this warm night. Twenty floors up, there was little ambient street light; the room was lit by starlight only. The moon, which began this evening on the balcony, east, was a building away. I fell asleep.

Sometime later in slumber, I turned from my left side onto my back, Jane to my right, and awoke with the realization that Treswick had come in our balcony door and settled down on the pillow between us, his fur brushing my cheek. Reptilian brain suddenly firing, my heartbeat leaped from ahhh-sleep to lion-on-the-veldt. But my body did not move. Even slogging through the sodden clod of partial consciousness, I knew that to startle Treswick was injudicious. But what to do? I am right-handed, and my right arm was beneath the beast. I am near-sighted, and the room, dimly lit by the toenail moon now in the west, was entirely undefined.

Lying on my back, cat near my right ear, I constructed a plan. I would slowly extract my left arm from the covers, carefully reach across my chest without translating that motion to the bed, pillow, or feline, grab Treswick with one sure snatch, and fling him back across my body hard against the concrete wall which stood only two feet from the edge of the bed. It was not a great plan, but it was all I had. If he awoke while I was cocking my arm… If I mishandled the grab and left him startled on the bed… If I muffed the fling and only angered him… the night murk would be claws, blood, and blinded eyes.

It was dark. I was desperate. I had one chance.

I slowly extricated my arm from the covers. The cat didn’t move.

I began moving my arm toward Treswick. I was just past halfway when I felt my wife begin to turn. The roll began at her hips; one moment more and Jane would turn her head, either discovering the cat or upsetting it. Either way I would have to strike immediately and with all the force I could muster..

The events that followed must have taken place in a blur of milliseconds, but even today those steps are clear, discrete memories.

The impulse to reach and snatch formed in my brain and began its electrochemical transit to my arm. My vision, heightened in the moment by adrenaline and necessity, focused on the back and neck of the cat. But my wife’s head turned, and in that sliver of time before my muscles fired, I realized that the darkness of fur that appeared as Treswick was actually Jane’s head. Motion and mind froze.

I had nearly grabbed my pregnant wife’s head and flung it against the wall.

I was the man who mistook his wife for a cat.

It was years before I told her.

©2012 Steve Cotler's Irrepressibly True Tales. All Rights Reserved.

You’ve got to be taught to be afraid
Of people whose eyes are oddly made
And people whose skin is a different shade
You’ve got to be carefully taught

The converse is also true: you have to be carefully taught to be color-blind. Witness this exchange between one of my daughters and her almost-four-year-old son:

Mother: Do you remember when we were in the grocery store and you asked me why some people have darker skin than we do?

Child: Yes. And some people have lighter skin!

Mother: Yes! Do you remember that I told you that is because it is important to have variety…to have all sorts of different people, because if we were all the same life would be boring?

Child: Yes! And some people have red hair. Like Jonah at school.

Mother: Yes. Well, a long time ago—well, long ago in your life—there were people in the United States and around the world who didn’t like all that variety. They thought that people with different skin color shouldn’t be treated as nicely as they were.

Child: That’s terrible, Mommy.

Mother: Yes, it was terrible. But there were a lot of people who knew that variety was a very good thing. And there was a man named Martin Luther King, Jr., who talked to the people of the United States about how important it is to have variety and to share the United States with everyone, no matter how light or dark their skin is. He was a very good man.

Child: Where is the King man now?

Mother: Well, buddy, Martin Luther King is no longer alive.

Child: He’s DEAD? Oh nooooooo…

Mother: Yes he is, bud, but we have a holiday every year to celebrate his life and all the good things he did.

Child: That’s good. But I’m sad he’s dead, Mommy.

Mother: Me too, buddy.

Child: When will *I* be dead?

Mother: Not for a very very long time.

Child: That’s good!

Mother: Yes, yes it is! I like having you around.

Diversity.

Tolerance.

It took more than two centuries, but at last we have variety in the White House.

*     *     *     *     *

(Full disclosure:  I sang the part of Luther Billis in South Pacific at Harvard in 1965.  The Harvard Crimson panned the play, but I got a good notice. The review is online.)

©2012 Steve Cotler's Irrepressibly True Tales. All Rights Reserved.

In 1968, Commander Edward Whitehead came to Harvard Business School to give a talk on the continuing importance—in the face of computers and other rapidly advancing technologies—of people in industry. (A similar, and rather drier talk he gave in 1955 is here.)

Perhaps the first CEO to become his company’s advertising spokesman, Commander Whitehead  (1908-1978), a World War II veteran of the South Pacific campaign in His Majesty’s Navy, was the President of Schweppes (USA) and General Manager (Overseas). He was drafted into advertising service by Madison Avenue pioneer David Ogilvy who decided to personalize the company’s ad campaign and use the Commander as its focus.

“People,” Ogilvy told Whitehead, “are more interested in individual personalities than in corporations.”

Commander Whitehead spoke about his role as a public personality:

People are curious to know more about this odd Englishman who combines the offices of President and model. Who is he? What is he really like? How did all this come about? How does he keep the situation from getting out of hand? Does he retain a sense of humour about the whole thing, and is he able to laugh at himself? Can he continue to advance his Company’s affairs without taking flagrant commercial advantage of all these opportunities? How does he fill this wildly un-British role that he has been called upon to play?

After an hour at HBS, Commander Whitehead, in a manner as quintessentially British as his advertising persona, took questions from the MBA students.  All but one are lost to memory.

“Does Schweppes Tonic Water really contain quinine (KWAI-nine), and could you drink it as a cure for malaria?” asked one wag.

Commander Whitehead answered without pause, “Indeed, Schweppes Tonic Water does contain quinine (kweh-NEEN), and one could drink it as a palliative for malaria.  However, should one adopt such a course of treatment one would surely expire from renal collapse, for the daily dosage, I regret, would be approximately 30 cases.”

I do not know if the Commander’s math is correct.

©2012 Steve Cotler's Irrepressibly True Tales. All Rights Reserved.

In the newsroom of The Harvard Crimson, I was taught that journalism demanded impartiality and a near-religious adherence to accuracy and truth. We put out the college paper six days a week, and every published story was pasted into the “Comment Book” where other Crimson editors (“Crimeds”) were encouraged to challenge every sentence for grammar, syntax, style, but most of all…for misstatement, ambiguity, prejudice, unattributed opinion, and just plain error. It was merciless, but it created a newsroom culture that educated and guided generations of excellent journalists: David Halberstam, Hendrik Hertzberg, Anthony Lewis, J. Anthony Lukas, Frank Rich, Steven V. Roberts, and scores of others.

One would assume that all reputable news organizations would adopt the same code of conduct.

Not CBS.

On July 22, CBS Evening News aired an interview of John McCain conducted by Katie Couric. Among her questions to McCain was, “Senator Obama says…there might have been increased security even without the surge. What’s your response to that?”

Watch McCain’s response in the video below. CBS edited out his actual reply and inserted an answer he gave to a completely different query.

Is it just coincidence that the answer CBS excised was factually incorrect? CBS News Senior Vice President Paul Friedman cleared it all up:

“The report was edited under extreme time constraints and one piece of tape was put in the wrong order. Fortunately, this did not in any way distort what Senator McCain was saying.”

Was there distortion? Definitely. Friedman is trying to put lipstick on a pig.

CBS VP Paul Friedman

McCain’s actual answer was to accuse Obama of “a false depiction of what actually happened. Colonel MacFarland was contacted by one of the major Sunni sheiks. Because of the surge we were able to go out and protect that sheik and others. And it began the Anbar awakening. I mean, that’s just a matter of history.”

But CBS showed viewers McCain saying, “Senator Obama has indicated by his failure to acknowledge the success of the surge that he would rather lose a war than lose a campaign.”

McCain’s actual answer was not “just a matter of history.” He got the history wrong. The Anbar Awakening occurred in 2006, months before the surge began in March 2007. It appears that CBS, cognizant of McCain’s recent gaffe about trouble on the “Iraq-Pakistan border” (which doesn’t exist), decided to distort the truth…and clean up his latest miscue.

Irrespective of the validity McCain’s calendrical pronouncement, CBS has arrogated to itself the right to judge what the public should hear and see. We all know that editing takes place; we do not know what gets left out. Reportage by omission. One hopes it is done without “distorting” the truth. But to create an answer in place of a different answer is nothing less than a lie.

CBS should be ashamed. In Japan, this would warrant seppuku.

©2012 Steve Cotler's Irrepressibly True Tales. All Rights Reserved.

The first month at Harvard had been manageable, although I had previously read few things more dense than a textbook. The next couple of weeks crosscut my footing with assignments in Aristotle and Piaget, and I began to teeter. I anesthetized my anxiety about insufficient studying by playing contract bridge, and on this particular night I was trolling the halls, searching for a fourth.

I had met and spoken to the chaps in Pennypacker 25 more than once, but they were exotics. They had “prepped” at Exeter, of which I knew little, but since arriving in Cambridge I had been encouraged to understand that it was one of the finest schools in the nation. I hadn’t prepped at all. I had attended Hueneme High School, notable only for its bizarre (why-KNEE-me) pronunciation. Accordingly, I assumed that Henry, Woodrow, Tom, and George were substantially more educated than I.

Woodrow rapidly became a sophomore and left the freshman dorm.

Tom drank himself into increasingly less intelligent stupors..

Henry was friendly, smiled abundantly, and appeared to study frequently.

George W. S. Trow (ca. 1974)

I knocked, entered at George’s call, and invited him to play. He was alone in the room, sitting at his desk, staring at his fingernails or perhaps nothing.

“When are you starting?” he asked brightly.

“Right now,” I responded hopefully.

“Well, if you can wait about 40 minutes, I’d love to play. But I’ve got an English paper due tomorrow.”

There was nothing in his typewriter and nothing on his desk top.

“What’s the assignment?” I asked.

“Chekhov’s The Three Sisters, but it’s only supposed to be five pages, so if you can wait….” He rolled a blank sheet around the platen of his Smith Corona.

Brer Bear, Brer Fox, and Brer Rabbit(t)

“I need some inspiration. Give me a phrase, any phrase, something to help me get started.”

A imp inside me emerged and clapped his hands gleefully. “Neon green lights,” I said without a particle of conscious thought. It was a brilliant riposte. George’s commanding superiority had been met by my own splendid and unpredictable nonsense. I glanced, watching for George to acknowledge my unreturnable cross-court point. A small smile lifted his eyes.

“Perfect,” he said and then began typing furiously.

I dropped my hand from the doorknob and walked slowly and with great curiosity toward his desk. His fingers clacked the keys, the carriage jinked left and left relentlessly, and the bell rang. I looked over his shoulder and read in disbelief:

“In Anton Chekhov’s The Three Sisters, the past, the present, and the future come together like the neon greenness of the not-too-distant dawn.”

At that instant I was both lifted and dropped. I was in the presence of genius, and if expected to compete, I would certainly pale. I slumped and quietly left the room.

Sitting in depression on my bed 40 minutes later, I had come up with no better plan to improve my life. Contract bridge still seemed to be the short-term solution…and I was still one hand short.

I knocked on George’s door, heard the typewriter, and entered just far enough to lean on the jamb.

“Almost done,” he said without turning his head. Four typed pages were spread out on his bed, and he was three-fourths of the way down the fifth page. George’s typing stopped. I waited respectfully.

“I’m stuck,” he muttered. “I need a late-19th Century Russian critic. Someone famous in a small, but influential circle.”

He was thinking out loud, not really asking me anything. He stared at the paper. Finally I spoke. “How about Tudrus Zlutchin?” I asked, spotting a final, desperate opportunity to regain some dignity.

“Who was he?” George asked with some interest.

The hook was in. I set it. “From Nizhni Novogorod. Born circa 1835. Died 1905. His circle was undoubtedly small, but in my estimation, undoubtedly influential. And according to what has been told to me, he was very much a critic. He was my father’s father’s father.”

“Perfect,” George said and jumped back onto the keys. I walked quickly and looked over his shoulder.

He had typed:

“As Tudrus Zlutchin, obscure 19th Century Russian critic once wrote: ‘We are more products of our environment than we are of our parents.’”

George whipped the page out of the typewriter, stood, stretched, and sealed my fate, “Let’s play bridge.”

George’s paper got an “A.”

I remember him fondly and with some awe undiminished by years of very little contact. He was arch and worked at The New Yorker. But during that freshman dorm stint, before our different backgrounds separated us, he gave me what was undoubtedly meant as a compliment: “You are one of the only people who did not go to prep school that I would consider a friend.”

©2012 Steve Cotler's Irrepressibly True Tales. All Rights Reserved.

---- Prof. Joshua Whatmough ---- © 1955 G. Paul Bishop

This morning, rising with formless, benignant wonderings about my future and vague remembrances of my long-ago youth, I surprised myself with an abrupt focus on Prof. Joshua Whatmough (“WUTT-moe”).

I googled and found a perfect description of his terrifying and exhilarating classroom (in 1947) put up on a webpage by one of Whatmough’s former students, William Harris, Professor Emeritus, Middlebury College. Prof. Harris’ recollections lit up a room I hadn’t been in for many years.

In 1962, I, a Harvard sophomore on the way to a chemistry degree, inexplicably and cavalierly signed up for Linguistics 120 (Comparative and Historical Indo-European Languages). On the first day of class, nervous about prerequisites, I queried Prof. Whatmough about my obvious deficiencies. High school German had enabled me to satisfy Harvard’s foreign language requirement with a barely passing mark, but I had only intellectual passion–no background–in linguistics. Whatmough smiled, assured me that there were no prerequisites to enrolling and that I’d be fine in this introductory course, and directed me to a seat with a tilt of his head. He then described Ling 120 to the class: a broad overview of Indo-European languages, with attention to the philological development of language families, focus on cognates as an analytical tool, no assigned reading, no hour exam, no mid-term, no paper…just a final exam. It was rumored this was to be his last year of teaching, so the class was more than twice as large as in past years. I looked around as Whatmough began chalking the board. About 25 students, all older than I, were leaning into his lecture, taking notes, so I put my head down and did the same.

On the second day of class, Whatmough looked out over the class and asked, “A bronze helmet was found near Negau in Steiermark in 1811. What was its significance to the study of Old Germanic?”

Detail of the so-called 'Helmet B'

It was, to me, a startling and unanswerable question: This was not a course in archaeology, and with no assigned reading or prerequisites, Prof. W could not expect anyone to know the answer.

Three hands went up.

Whatmough looked at his seating chart. “Herr Bollinger?” (Whatmough would often address students with an honorific or salutation from the language he was then dealing with.)

Herr Bollinger answered crisply, as if he had just dug the helmet up, “An inscription on the artifact, the so-called Helmet B, is thought by some to be the earliest example of Old Germanic.”

“Indeed,” Whatmough agreed. “And what is that inscription? Fräulein Carelli?”

“That depends, sir, upon which source you read.” Seeing Whatmough nod, Fräulein Carelli continued, the several sources obviously within her ken, “Mommsen transliterated it as… but Pauli believed that it was….” Carelli’s Old Germanic sounded convincing to me.

“Very good,” Whatmough acknowledged. “And how was this translated?”

“That again,” continued Carelli, “depends upon whom one reads.” She then offered two or three erudite translations that were so complete that Whatmough pursed his lips in appreciation and moved on to another subject.

It was at this point that I realized that I was in trouble. After class I asked Prof. Whatmough about my lack of preparation for what now seemed to be a very demanding course. I cited Helmet B as an example. He noted that Herr Bollinger and Fräulein Carelli were grad students in linguistics and were expected to know these things, and that these digressions were interesting, but not critical to doing well in Comparative and Historical Indo-European Languages. “You’ll be fine,” he said.

So I persevered.

After a couple of weeks, Whatmough’s pedagogical pattern was evident: he’d wobble into the room with his green book bag over a shoulder, his cheeks reddened and white hair fluffed by Cambridge weather, open his binder, glance at his notes, and ask a question. Often he would select someone at random. The questions were easy to answer because he ended each lecture with an emphatic pronouncement, and these introductory questions always directly referenced that previous conclusion.

Somewhere in early November, slogging through slush to get to Longfellow Hall, I arrived just a bit late and plopped down in my seat just as Prof. Whatmough asked his start-the-class question: “Mr. Cotler, what is the relationship between Illyrian and Albanian?”

I had neglected to look at my notes since the previous class, and in those few moments between the end of his query and my response, my life as a student of linguistics flashed before my eyes. I remembered that Prof. Whatmough had become dramatically agitated while discussing theories about a direct connection between Illyrian and Albanian and had finished up the previous hour with a fierce glaring, “I call them Illyriomaniacs!” His passion was unforgettable, but I had no memory of which side he’d been on. Could I clear my throat while casually opening my notebook and glancing at the last lecture? There was no time. I swallowed, lifted my eyes to meet his, flipped a mental coin, and stated loudly and clearly, “There is a direct linguistic relationship between Illyrian and Albanian.”

I was wrong. Stunningly wrong.

Whatmough’s mouth widened almost imperceptibly. The room was silent. It was as if I had slapped the old man.

The rest of the semester is a shadowy memory. I went to every class, took thorough (and, to my later review, incomprehensible) notes, and prepared for the final exam by reading papers written by Prof. Whatmough on topics that seemed relevant. I shortchanged my other courses.

Old Church Slavonic

The three-hour final exam was remarkably similar to the 1947-48 Comparative Philology 140 exam that Prof Harris cites in his “A Requiem for Philology” essay.

I distinctly remember that my exam began identically: “Answer question 1 and not more than three others.”

I could not even read question 1, which included words written in a character set that I had never seen before. I brightened a bit at question 2, which asked for a discussion of “matters of linguistic interest” regarding the comparison of the words for numbers in several different languages. I had memorized the words for one to ten in eight satem (the Sanskrit family) and centum (the Latin family) languages, including Gothic, Old Church Slavonic, and Lithuanian. That question took me 30 minutes to answer (not particularly well). I had two-and-one-half hours left. But the remainder of the test was incomprehensible. In silence, and overseen by vigilant proctors, I gnashed, cursed, and pitied myself for the hubris that drove me to take this course.

Fifteen minutes later, I took the path of pathos. I opened my nearly blank blue book and inscribed a note to Prof. Whatmough on the inside cover. Mercifully, I cannot recall my text, but it was a pitiable cry based upon the unjustifiable contention that Whatmough’s assurance that I’d be able to handle Ling 120 had led me to what was sure to be a failing grade. I begged for leniency.

Several weeks later, I was stunned to receive a C+. Only later did I learn that Whatmough, made soft by his last year of teaching, had given A’s to those who did the work, B’s to those who didn’t, and a C+ to the young lad who flunked.

Had I known this going in, I’d have listened better (and taken fewer incomprehensible notes) and would now remember more of the old man’s stories. He was a terrific teacher, a unique store of intellectual anecdote and opinion, and a charming homunculus.

Aleut winter house

I remember him saying on the last day that he intended to begin his retirement by going to the Yukon where he would learn Aleut. He was fluent in 8-22 languages depending on how he defined “fluent.”

“I have been told, however, that to travel effectively in those territories I shall be required to ride a donkey, and according to my sources, such transportation will undoubtedly result in my demise. I am convinced, however, that, given my indomitable spirit and fortitude, it will be the donkey that will die, not I.”

And with that, Prof. Joshua Whatmough smiled, walked out of my life, and fixed himself forever in my memory.

Many thanks to Prof. Harris for shining a light on this poignant reminiscence.

*     *     *     *     *

On September 1, 2009, this post was featured in Language Log, one of my favorite blogs.

©2012 Steve Cotler's Irrepressibly True Tales. All Rights Reserved.