TO: “HAROLD” – FROM: JANET CARPENTER
Dear Harold: January 16, 1953
Your letter reached me several days ago, but I couldn’t answer it immediately – I didn’t know what to say. It wasn’t a complete surprise to me, for I had heard a rumor. It was in a letter from Dean Weyer.
The mere suggestion just about bowled me over. As if my students hadn’t done enough in giving me, first, the gorgeous silk Doctor’s gown, and then the car! But, Harold, I’m afraid to come. The trip wouldn’t bother me, Pullman or plane. I’m still a first-class traveler. Indeed, I’m still quite an energetic old lady. You can get Ruth Stein to corroborate that. I’ll be eighty-two in June and I plan definitely on living another ten years. Heaven permitting. A good many of my ancestors lived up into their 90’s! But crowds of people lay me low. I’d be afraid of the excitement. Also – I don’t believe you have any idea what a sentimental person I am. Hastings College is dear to me as the apple of my eye, engraven on my heart. I was a student there under its first president, Doctor Ringland. That struggling little college saved my intellectual life. My father settled in Hastings in ’84, just before what had been a tremendous real estate boom suffered a paralyzing collapse. Along with a considerable fraction of the population, we found ourselves as poor as poverty. If that poor little college hadn’t been there, I could never have had a college education, for I was at that time a promising candidate for T.B., and I could never have worked my way through the State University.
Perhaps you don’t see what all this has to do with my present decision. I doubt that there’s another person who feels toward Hastings College as I feel. Five years as a student there, and forty years as a teacher – it is a record. I don’t believe I could endure to go into that southwest classroom on the first floor of McCormick. I knew it so well, both as student and as teacher. And the house on University Avenue. We built it and we lived there twenty years. I loved it – the house and the yard and the two big elms. I always hoped that it might sometime be the President’s house.
I love New England – it’s a beautiful country. My forbears had lived here since 1638, and I always hoped that I could come back here to live after I stopped teaching. But I love the Middle West, too, especially Nebraska and Kansas. You know I taught ten years in Kansas. I am glad that my father moved West. I still think it is a far more wholesome part of the country to grow up in than either coast. And I’m proud as punch that we have a President from Kansas. And I’m not a bit ashamed of Nebraska’s contribution to national political life.
I’d dearly love to see all my old boys and girls. I had such a good time with my classes. I loved teaching up to the very last minute.
It’s too bad to bother you with this long explanation, but I felt that I had to. You may share the letter, if you care to, with anyone who was interested in this matter of my proposed visit. It is a tribute beyond my deserving.
I wish you’d all come East – not all at once! – and come to see me.
Sometime your teacher,
And always your friend,
JANET L. CARPENTER