Salinas Junior College - La Reata Yearbook (Salinas, CA)

Page 79 text:

Russell Lowell ' s house while he was our minister to England. In California there is Dane Coolidge, who married one of my oldest and best friends ; and too there was L. Frank Baum, the immortal author of the OZ books, which are now delighting their second generation of young readers. There is our very own John Steinbeck, distinguished graduate of the Salinas schools, of whom I am very proud to say I knew him when ; he honored me by bringing for criticism some of his unpublished stories, when I was teaching in the night school. I could go on, but I end where I began, with my own family: with my husband, who was one of the finest and best known Latin teachers in the East, and who not only taught his fortunate students their Latin, but gave them a vision of a scholarly rectitude and intellectual integrity, so that even now hardly a week goes by in which some one in the family does not hear from a former pupil who still loves and gratefully honors his memory; and with my son, Rolfe Humphries, teacher, critic, and poet, author of EUROPA, a volume of verse, and co-author of AND SPAIN SINGS, as well as translator of many lyrics in that book. With a Guggen- heim Fellowship which he has just been awarded, he expects to have two or three books ready for publication by next year. Through him I have also come to know some of the modern writers, among others Genevieve Taggard and Sara Bard Field. Do I myself ever feel the urge to write? Yes, sometimes; there are many things that need to be said. My autobiography? Well, no; I rather feel that my friend, Vida Scudder, who published her own life last year, ON JOURNEY, has practically covered the salient points of mine also, for, aside from purely personal experiences, our major interests have been much the same: the Angelican Church, College Settlements, the Labor movement. Christian Socialism, teaching, and books, especially the great medieval literature of France, England and Italy. Even the names she mentions of friends ring bells in my own memory. So there is no need for my autobiography. But I may write on educational topics, although it is a rather forlorn hope to attempt any improvement in our present degen- erate and unscholarly condition. I fear the demon of modern pedagogy has its tentacles too firmly imbedded in the poor reHc. But at least I shall be on the side of the angels and in such distinguished company as President Hutchins of Chicago University in trying to bring back sanity and sound scholarship as the basis of a college education. There is always plenty to do; and again my life is like Miss Scudder ' s, for at home when I retire there await me a garden and some cats! And don ' t forget that I have seen and touched Emerson!