"To Heck With Nostalgia" (autobiography)

So much in here to think about and use...

I would have laughed at anyone who said that one day I'd be a professor emeritus, shuffling along Main Street muttering old lectures. I hated school. I'd dropped out of high school twice, flunked out once and backed into college by playing football at Tilton Junior College. (8)

The paratroops had not prepared me for classes in which names such as Aristotle brought understanding nods from other students, but I was allowed to study writing--a rare opportunity then--although writing and American lit courses couldn't count for major credit. (8-9)

Today I worry that UNH has become a school to educate the children of the middle--or upper-middle class--but it wasn't then. Most of our parents hadn't been to college or high school. Most of us, like myself, were desperate to get into the middle class. (9)

I arrived in January 1946 and had my last classes in January 1948. (9)

The impact of his professors: Daggett, Bingham, Towle, Hennessey, Rideout and others loved to argue (9).

...Carroll Towle, puffing away on his corncob pipe in his tiny office at the end of Murkland corridor, would take what I wrote--and me--seriously. (9)

The student/faculty committees of the late 60's and early 70's were echoes of the ones on which I served in the 40's. Half a dozen of us, faculty and students, met with President Stoke and started the Humanities Program, which continues today. (9)

Idealism was in. (9)

I had come to UNH by accident, a soldier assigned to be tested, looking for girls. I had returned as a veteran wanting a membership card in the middle class. (9)

I was astonished by the call--and not told the ridiculous reason for it. I had never thought of myself as a person who would become a teacher. In fact, Dr. Bingham had asked me to stay on and teach twelve courses a year for $900 after I was graduated, and I had been insulted. Not by the money but by his not realizing I was a writer, not a teacher. (9-10)

...held an estimated 43,000 student conferences (10)

My teachers in Durham had taught me to respect and listen to the individual student, to delight in diversity, to be myself and reveal my feelings as well as my opinions honestly as well as whatever learning I had accumulated. (10)

But sitting in my own conferences with young writers I felt the ghost of Carroll Towle and heard his chuckle at a word--or line--that delighted. He was an enthusiast. No apology. And so am I. (10)

...but I am still learning with Daggett, Bingham, Towle, Rideout, Hennessey... (10)