Feature: MSU Voice Library
A LIFETIME’S WORK
One of MSU’s most valuable assets is its Voice Library, which will soon place its historical jewels in digital form on the web.
It's all about luck. Without rejecting Tom Brokaw's flattering characterization of Americans of my age as 'The Greatest Generation,' let me suggest that lots of us consider ourselves to be “The Luckiest Generation,” because so much of our private good fortune came to us automatically, with very little effort on our part. I was born on June 6, 1926. While a couple dozen friends were at my folks’ home celebrating my 18th birthday and our imminent graduation from high school, boys just a year or two older were storming the beaches at Normandy. The high school seniors at my house were all headed into the service in what turned out to be America's last popular war and we would report for active duty within a week or two, unaware that the fighting in Europe would end in less than a year and the war in the Pacific a couple of months after that and that most of us would spend our service time out of harm's way.
When the bomb fell on Hiroshima I was still in the Navy V-l2 program at Princeton University, “my fourth semester in the Navy.” By the time I boarded my ship nobody was firing at anybody in anger. What many of us received was a great deal of unearned praise, a free college education, and a front seat at the unfolding of the American Century. My own education cost neither me nor my parents a penny. A combination of officers' training, the GI Bill®, and a teaching fellowship led me comfortably, in 1953, just nine years out of high school, to Michigan State College, carrying with me a Ph.D., a wife and two kids, three years' college teaching experience, and enough money to put down on a three bedroom house just a five minute walk from John Hannah's burgeoning campus.
The house next door was occupied by Bill McCann, '35, who had captained the MSC baseball team and who was at age 40 a voracious reader, and eclectic writer, a great thinker, a fabulous wit, and one of the world's most generous human beings. I was immediately welcomed into his home where I met intellectual giants of all persuasions, from the conservative Russ Kirk to the liberal Russ Nye, with many positions in-between, and it was in that heady atmosphere that I decided that Michigan State was where I would like to stay and, with luck, grow up.
Those were the halcyon days when President Hannah was seeking to give his college, still not a university, the best undergraduate program in the Big Ten, which it had just entered. To accomplish this in the arts he created among other things the Dept. of Humanities, and would create some years later Justin Morrill College. Some alumni might recall Humanities as almost everybody's favorite course. It was certainly a joy to teach.
In its 35 years of existence only about five dozen lucky professors participated in it, and I got to be one of them, teaching alongside brilliant and dedicated scholars to students who adored the adventure. It's gone now and so is Justin Morrill, the residential college in the arts which paralleled Lyman Briggs in science and James Madison in the social sciences. Dean Gordon Rohman encouraged his faculty to create courses in areas that fascinated them. I was able to teach the Academic Novel and Jazz History and other of my passions. When I developed a seminar on The Nature of Comedy I sought help from the leading expert on the sound of humor, G. Robert Vincent, who had recently donated his private collection of recordings to the University Libraries, and who had known the great American comedians from Van and Schenk to Red Skelton.
Bob loved his private library, and he guarded it as a recluse guards irreplaceable treasure. He did not care to make many friends at Michigan State, but, as luck would have, he and I became very close, and we wound up doing a series called 'Spin Back the Years' on the Mutual Broadcasting System, exploiting Bob's wit and the endless depths of the voice library which now bears his name. We had too much in common to ever be the Odd Couple. We both loved learning, sport, and politics, and we had both grown up around the fringes of show business.
In my first year on campus, WKAR-TV started up in business on UHF Channel 60, and Larry McKuhn told me that if I would host a series called 'You Wanted to Know,' we would kick off the Fall of 1954 with 'Literature Unbound,' my Great Books panel show in which guests from two different disciplines would meet to discuss two books on the same subject approached from two different viewpoints, so that each professor was an expert on one and a learner of the other. We paired the Koran with the Bhagavad Gita, a biography of Lenin with Darkness at Noon; we compared the popular artists Toulouse Lautrec and Bix Beiderbecke. In 10 weeks, I got to talk with 20 of the best professors on campus, and I learned enough about television that in the following year I taught five simultaneous sections of Communication Skills, and led the band and did comedy on an Arthur Godfrey knockoff called the Country House Matinee on Channel 6.
My career in commercial television brings the concept of luck to a higher level. I didn't even own an instrument when I heard that Howard Finch was interviewing for a mid afternoon variety show aimed at mid-Michigan housewives. Typically musicians in this part of the world support themselves with day jobs which occupy their afternoons. As chance would have it, Teddy Birchfield, a bona fide guitar virtuoso, worked nights setting type at the State Journal, Tommy Crittenden, an extraordinary bassist, was unemployed, and I taught a morning schedule at MSU. I bought a clarinet, auditioned, got the job, and for a year played on live television any request shouted from the audience or 'phoned in, and backed up performers who burst into song in any key at any tempo. I was actually getting paid to take music lessons from the best in the business under combat conditions. I later did a little comedy, and by year's end every housewife in Lansing knew my name.
I told Elayne that the jazz career was temporary, and that we shouldn't count on the extra income. So we threw every penny into our land contract, and we paid off our house in three and a half years. Four years later we moved into our 'New' home (which we've now occupied for 40 years); the old home paid off the new one five years later, while we were on sabbatical at Cambridge University. By this time I had joined the local jazz community and many years later, when the University Club wanted period music for a Roaring Twenties party, I was able to gather together a group of faculty friends for the first performance of the Geriatric Six Plus One, the dixieland band that went on to serenade football tailgaters from Boston to Honolulu for over a quarter of a century, and to produce records, tapes, CDs, and television shows.
To find individuals with all that talent and a willingness to share it with local charities was an almost unbelievable piece of luck. Einstein said that the world was divided into those who find nothing to be miraculous and those who find everything to be miraculous. My experience puts me in the second category. The colleagues in the classroom and in the Geriatric Six, the students in the Honors College (who met every Sunday in my home for two years with various faculty friends to discuss the Great Books), and the marvelous worldwide communities of oral historians and voice collectors who volunteered to give MSU its magnificent voice library are not only believers in miracles, but they themselves qualify as miracles. Or at very least as fantastic bits of good luck.