al 1972 Fred[eric] Rothchild [Music Professor, 1968-1978] was the best faculty friend and one of the three best teachers I had at Reed. (The other two were Richard [Hutton] Jones [History Professor, 1941-1986] and Bob [Robert J.] Palladino [Art Professor,1969-1984], with John [S.] Strawn [History Professor, 1970-1977] so close I probably should have said four best.) I'd taken piano lessons since I was eight years old, and I thought I was pretty good. Early in my freshman year I dared to argue with Fred about how to play something. He jumped up, shook his chair over his head, and yelled "Dammit, I'm going to teach you to play the piano if it kills you and me both!" Back home for Christmas that year, I played something I'd been working on with Fred for my uncle, a better musician than I ever was, and he said, "You've been working with a real teacher, haven't you?" It took a while, but I finally realized that Fred didn't bother getting upset with you if he didn't think you were worth the investment. 2008-04-19T00:00:00-07:00 ealadner@comcast.net false Eric fred-rothchild-scares-the-bejesus-out-of-me 11139 Ladner AMER 452127 pu 2009-05-06T16:49:09-07:00 1968 al 1973 Lloyd [J.] Reynolds [Art Professor, 1929-1969] retired from teaching full time at Reed in 1968. I know because I was a freshwoman there in 1969 and I just missed him. I went to visit him, though, with my parents, who both had him as a teacher and had remained fast friends. He was old and sad because he was a recent widower, but still with a twinkle and sage advice about not reading half the stuff I’d been handed at the Admissions Office—just figure out what you want to do and go do it, advice I am still having trouble following today! I also remember a graduation speech he gave about grass growing up through the sidewalk cracks, the beauty and the hope in that. Calligraphy and Reed are still synonymous in my mind. [Excerpted from a February 16, 1998, post to the Reed Alumni Webconference.] 2009-09-21T22:00:13-07:00 reedstories@live.com false Roseamber lloyd-reynolds-sage-advice 11372 Sumner pu 2009-09-30T23:32:38-07:00 1969 al At Reed, whenever I left my dorm room I was sure to run into somebody I knew. One fine day in the spring of 1968, I ran into my humanities conference leader Natalie Jacobs [Humanities Department, 1967-1968] outside of Eliot Hall. In her hand she was carrying one of those Oxford Univ Press tomes with a hard dark blue cover, authored by some English scholar with three initials before his last name. Natalie was letting off steam by taking a walk because she had just finished this book on the polity in Thucydides--it was about 500 or 600 pages long. Anyway, she was really feeling energized and released because she had finished reading this volume. For me, this was such an intimate encounter because it was such a frank display of what the really substantive activity at Reed was: reading. Natalie was glad that she was done with this work, cover to cover; that was exactly what I would feel whenever I finished reading something heavy and long: relieved and released. For me, that was what Reed was: a kind of theater of reading, where reading was the central, weighty matter--the basis of everything. Reading the Iliad before my first semester gave me a kind of ideal reading experience: not too fast and not too slow, forward moving but necessitating recapitulations here and there. I will always be grateful to Homer, who gave me this very lovely adagio/adagietto text, not prestissimo like Melville's Bartleby or Ginsberg's Kaddish and not molto molto largo like Plato's Republic, of which Natalie Jacobs said to us in her Hum 110 conference: "if you are reading more than 5 pages an hour you are not reading it." And I found that to be horribly, horribly true. 2009-04-24T14:55:44-07:00 carlwiener@earthlink.net true Carl natalie-jacobs 11240 Wiener LIT pu 2009-05-06T16:45:55-07:00 1968 al 1964, the summer of my freshman year, Mr. Ulman had an outdoor summer theatre in the amphitheatre. We did Antigone and he recruited some male faculty members - Herr Panny and I don't remember who else - to add some maturity to our Greek chorus. The chorus wore terry cloth robes and some of the best acting going on was when they stood and were stoical while the mosquitoes settled on their bare arms. Imagine the Canyon at twilight on a summer evening. The mosquitoes were vicious. So in between their appearances the chorus would disappear behind a small plywood Greek temple, and the dignified male faculty would hike up their robes and spray anything accessible with OFF. There was the show out front, but I imagine somebody sitting across the Canyon would have seen a pretty interesting backstage version too. 2007-04-26T00:00:00-07:00 alumni@reed.edu false Cricket summer-theater-in-the-amphitheatre 11061 Parmalee pu 2009-05-06T16:51:24-07:00 1962 al I came to Reed as a math major. Like many in my cohort, I'd taken calculus in high school. Math 200 was the place for us. It assumed we knew everything that was taught in freshman math, only part of which was calculus. Those of us who had made our way through the ubiquitous Thomas's "Calculus" the year before weren't used to the notation. In addition, Professor Burrowes Hunt's [Mathematics Department, 1955-1977] notation on Wednesday didn't follow much from what he'd put on the board on Monday. During the third day of uninterrupted lecture, I raised my hand and said, "Professor Hunt, can you explain...? There was a huge outrush of air from my classmates, followed by looks of relief. Someone had finally had the balls to ask what the hell was going on! Things got better after that. 2009-04-23T11:55:43-07:00 john.hardee@uspto.gov true Randy the-day-i-raised-my-hand-in-math 11236 Hardee CHEM 330318 pu 2009-05-06T16:38:13-07:00 1974