Emerson College - Emersonian Yearbook (Boston, MA)

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IN DEDICATION . . . As hundreds of his students over the years have known, John Coffee is a remarkable man. A superb public speaker who captures the imagination of his audience, he is in the best Emerson tradition. Curiosity is an essential for the historian and this John Coffee had from his youth onward. When growing up in Washington, D.C., where his father was a Congressman, he explored the city by riding every streetcar line. Since then he has made it a habit to know well the cities in which he has lived. A graduate of Yale University, he was greatly influenced by his education at Harvard Divinity School. On summer vacation in 1953, he resolved never again to be overweight (which he then was), and created a regimen of excercise and diet toward that end. Today he still does his calisthenics and he swims several times a week. His reputation for being outspoken was born at Harvard, where the student newspaper he edited was so controversial that it was suppressed. John Coffee has been an ordained Unitarian Universalist minister since 1954. He is now minister emeritus of The First Church in Roxbury, but is still active in his denomination. His students have often remarked that he’s like no minister they’ve ever met. It is true that there is nothing sanctimonious about Rev. Coffee. He is in touch with today’s world. In his private life, John Coffee finds his inspiration in solitude. Sometimes he rese mbles Sherlock Holmes, “who loathed every form of society with his whole Bohemian soul.” His passion is the collecting and cataloguing of transportation tokens. Editor of The Fare Box since 1949, he is also the author of a massive U.S. and Canadian token catalogue, which he intends to revise extensively. Rev. Coffee has visited every contiguous state in the Union searching for tokens and their histories. He has never been in an airplane, but each summer he takes the train to visit his parents in Tacoma, Washington. This preference to travel by train means his journeys are sometimes arduous, but always thrilling. He has been an invaluable faculty member at Emerson College since 1970, serving as an advisor to student groups, as a member of influential committees and recently as author of A Century of Eloquence: The History of Emerson College. Few professors can match John Coffee’s power as a speaker. His command of English is profound, yet he is easily understood. He is patient with questioners and always accedes to requests to “slow down.” His humor, which is often sardonic, gives a character of warmth, openness and expressiveness to his classes. He loves teaching and his students know it. It has been said, “No class with Rev. Coffee is ever dull.” This is probably because he speaks about those things which interest him and the interest is contagious. Coffee courses are fascinating. Many students elect to take courses with him beyond their “required” history courses. That, in itself, says much about him. One reason for Rev. Coffee’s popularity with students is that he makes historical events relevant to modern life and he encourages students to write papers that relate their topics to their lives. Once when I was proctoring an exam for Rev. Coffee, a girl came up to me to say, with conside rable feeling, how much she enjoyed the course. “I could never stand history courses. The teachers were always talking about people who were dead and buried. “But Rev. Coffee made the people real. They got up out of the dust and came alive and walked around the room.” Nothing, I think, better captures John Coffee’s genius than those words. — Richard Wentworth, ’79 Author with John M. Coffee of A Century of Eloquence: The History of Emerson College

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