October 10, 1998Bill Hochman, professor emeritus of history, addressed a crowd of well-wishers at his retirement reception during Homecoming. The audience gathered to hear Hochman reminisce on his 43 years at Colorado College.
I am privileged, fortunate to be standing before you today, looking back at all those years. How good it is to see you again. This event is entitled "Bill Hochman Remembers." I remember a bewildering rush of images, events, ideas, faces - your faces. I remember too much; I remember too little of all those rich and rewarding years at Colorado College.
I arrived at Colorado College almost by accident, the way most important things in life come about. I had come to Colorado Springs in 1952 to write history for the Air Defense Command, which had its headquarters here. In the Spring of 1955, I finished my doctoral dissertation at Columbia and was teaching American history at night for what was then called the University of Colorado Extension, now UCCS.
One day in the middle of that spring semester, Colorado College President William Gill told the Dean of the College to pack his things and get out. He installed Lew Worner in the Dean's office. That night at dinner, my phone rang and Lew's slow Missouri voice asked if I could take over all his classes at Colorado College the next day. It was March 13, 1955.
Lew Worner was one of Colorado College's most popular professors. I will never forget the look of sullen resentment on his students' faces when he introduced me to them and left the room. Some of those students are sitting here today. I was already teaching two American history courses at night for the University of Colorado. Lew turned over his four courses to me. I nearly died that spring, but I fell in love with Colorado College.
One of the courses Lew Worner bequeathed to me was Freedom and Authority, the pioneering interdisciplinary course that he, Glenn Gray of the philosophy department and George McCue of the English department had established five years before. Lew handed me a pile of books for Freedom and Authority and disappeared into the Dean's office without telling me much about the course. In those days, the class met around a long table in the wood-paneled library of Hayes House, on the corner of Cascade Avenue and Cache La Poudre Street, where Packard Hall now stands. The first day, I went around the room and asked each person what the course was about. Some legendary characters sat in that class - Melon Cruthirds, Mid Gammell, Van Skilling, Judy Avery, Debbie Brewster, Rich Hayes, Tom Pankau, John Watts, and others. Some are here today.
I had just finished my doctoral degree at Columbia, yet I was what might be called "university ignorant," that is, I knew a lot about a very few things. My real education began in Freedom and Authority, but I needed help. The next fall, I asked Glenn Gray and George McCue to have lunch on Tuesdays to talk about the book we were discussing in Freedom and Authority that week. After a while, other faculty joined us; Doug Freed of the psychology department was the first. Those Freedom and Authority lunches have continued for more than forty years. Every Tuesday, a group of disputatious faculty still have lunch in the little Exile dining room in Bemis Hall to discuss an article, a book, or a film. We did that this week.
I have been at Colorado College during five presidencies (Gill, Benezet, Worner, Riley and Mohrman - that's a lot of presidents) and seven deans (Worner, Curran, Drake, Bradley, Brooks, Finley and Fuller - that's a lot of deans). Gill was my first president. He had been a Major General in the Second World War (after the war, a number of generals were invited to be leaders of colleges and universities - Dwight Eisenhower at Columbia is the most famous example. I remember Gill as a courtly, erect man, a bit uncertain about his relationship with faculty eggheads. At the end of his last faculty meeting in May, 1955, Gill told about crouching behind a bulldozer on a South Pacific beach when a Japanese machine gunner started to spray bullets. He said to the young soldier operating the bulldozer: "Son, if you lower the blade, we can get down behind it and be safe from that gun." The soldier replied: "General, you're not as dumb as I thought." Those were President Gill's last formal words to the Colorado College faculty.
The Formative or Foundational Age of the modern College began when Lew Worner became dean and Louis Benezet became president. Weeds were actually growing on the campus when Benezet arrived to take charge in the summer of 1955. Benezet articulated a vision of excellence. He was adroit in dealing with external affairs, with alumni, foundations, and the local community. I used to think that if Albert Einstein had dropped in for a chat, Benezet would have found it possible to make a few useful points about the theory of relativity. Benezet brought vital outside support to the College - new buildings blossomed on the campus (one of the first was Rastall Center, now Worner Center), life-nourishing gifts came from alumni, businessmen and friends.
Lew Worner was responsible for internal affairs, for revitalizing the academic program. One of his greatest talents was recruiting new faculty members. He involved himself in the hiring process in every department. He had a way of making candidates feel something important was happening or about to happen at this college, that a career teaching at a small liberal arts college, even a lesser-known college, promised excitement, satisfaction and reward. A host of new faculty came - Will Wright, Dick Beidleman, Bob Brown, Don Jenkins, Bentley Gilbert, Paul Bernard, Eli Boderman, Doug Freed, Glenn Brooks, Pete Peterson, Jane Cauvel, and others. They made a good team, Benezet and Worner, President Outside and Dean Inside.
It was a heady time to be a faculty member at Colorado College. Everything seemed to be in motion all the time. Lights burned late on the second floor of Cutler Hall, where the Dean's Office was located. Walking across the campus and seeing those lights induced twinges of nervous excitement - "What exactly was going on up there now?" Lew Worner imbued the new young faculty with his energy and sense of purpose. We thought ourselves to be Young Turks then - independent, confident, sometimes brash. We worked hard and played hard. Lew had appointed us, but we were not his creatures; sometimes we disagreed with him. Yet he was our leader, not by dint of high college office, but by the force of his character, ability and example. He stood astride the creative fault line of the deanship; between faculty and administration. Louis Benezet was the administrator, we were faculty members. Lew was of the faculty and also of the administration, a unique and precarious straddle of tremendous potential for shaping the quality and future of the College.
Many of the institutions and practices of that old time disappeared over the years. In those days, students had to deal with a complex of college requirements, including Western Civilization and Freshman English. They took four or five courses simultaneously, often three on Monday, Wednesday and Friday, and two others on Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday. They had Saturday classes, and morning classes at eight o'clock. Saturday morning at eight was a gruesome time. I sometimes taught Western Civ then; the faces of the students (your faces) were awful to look at. That is when I used to quote Marcus Aurelius, Stoic philosopher and Emperor of Rome: "Is man made to stay in a warm bed on a cold morning, or is he made for better things?" I never listened for an answer. Men had to take ROTC for two years. They were not a very military looking group when they drilled on Washburne Field or slouched along in the Armed Forces Day Parade on Tejon Street. Freshmen wore caps, called beanies, at the peril of having their heads shaved on the front steps of Palmer Hall. The women had dorm hours. Rule violators had to deal with Sally Payne Morgan or Christine Moon, Deans of Women, or Juan Reid, Dean of Men. Students went to see Dr Roger Whitney at the infirmary on the north side of San Rafael Street. They ate "mystery meat" in the College dining rooms; they said grace before dining, on Wednesday nights they dressed for dinner and were served at candle-lit tables, sometimes with faculty guests.
They put on Varsity Shows in the theatre in Perkins Hall under the direction of Chief Woodson Tyree, and they participated in Song Fests in the Chapel. They bought books in the bookstore on the second floor of Lennox House from Mary Vickerman and Betty Phelps. They received grades on forms filled out with pen and ink by the Registrars, Ruth Scoggin and Blanche Hahne, in the basement of Cutler Hall. They drank beer at the Kachina Lounge ("anyone for the K," was a familiar cry on Friday afternoons), and watched strip teasers at the Navaho Hogan or the House of Oscar on North Nevada Avenue. When they had parties, faculty chaperones were present (doesn't the word "chaperons" has an unreal sound to it today?). At fraternity parties, the chaperones were usually relegated to a designated room with the House Mother for the night - I used to think those House Moms were carefully selected for dim eyesight and fuzzy hearing. The night before football games, they went to pep rallies with huge bonfires. At the games they watched the Bengals and the Tiger Club perform, listened to the CC Band led by Music Professor Earl Juhas, and sang the Colorado College fight song:
When Colorado C-men fall in line
We're going to win that game another time
For old CC I yell, I yell, I yell,
and for our colors black and gold
I yell, I yell, I yell
At Homecoming, they decorated houses and built floats with thousands of pieces of crepe paper, and admired the beauty of campus queens.
Those hallowed practices and institutions seem quaint now. I am sure mystery meat of uncertain origin is still consumed, but the dining rooms are now cafeterias, there is no table service, and nobody gets dressed up. Of course, there are no dormitory hours; in fact the sexes are mixed in the dormitories. There is no football band, no Tiger Club, there are no house decs and floats, no pep rallies. Social life is less decorous; there are no campus queens, no Christmas formals with faculty chaperons. There isn't much ballroom dancing; now the music is ear-splitting and I am not sure what the dancers are doing; they certainly do not waltz.
Many college landmarks of those days are no longer standing. Gone are Hayes House on the corner of Cascade and Cache La Poudre, Coburn Library, and Perkins Hall, where the campus theatre was located. Gone is Hagerman Hall, the dilapidated men's dormitory, which I was warned never to walk past at night. Gone are South, East and West Halls, the temporary classroom structures built during the Second World War. Gone are the old fraternity houses decorated with posters of pneumatic ladies and "borrowed" street signs, semi fire traps where robust men lived in constant peril of being burned alive.
Gone are most of the faculty member who were here in those early days, many of you remember them - Joe Leech in Math, Bob Stabler and Billy Penland in Biology, Fred Sondermann in Political Science, Ken Curran in Economics, Paul Boucher in Physics, Tom Brandt in German, Chief Tyree in Speech and Theatre, Darnell Rucker and Glenn Gray in Philosophy, Otis Barnes in Chemistry, John Jordan in Education, Richard Pearl in Geology, Albert Seay in Music, Lewis Knapp, Frank Krutzke, George McCue and Amanda Ellis in English. Others have retired and are no longer teaching. I once had a debate with Amanda Ellis in Shove Chapel on the topic: "Resolved that Women Have Been An Evil Influence in History" - I took the affirmative side; Can you imagine doing that today, even in fun?
The customs, the landscape, the faces of Colorado College have been transformed, yet the College is recognizably the same institution it was forty-three years ago when I first came here. In the classrooms, we continue to discuss those eternal questions at the heart of liberal education - questions of taste and judgement, of values and standards, truth and error, war and peace. We search after definitions of the cultivated, compassionate person appropriate for our time. Most important of all, the College continues to be a college-in-ferment, ever seeking new ways to fulfill its vital educational mission.
The enduring heritage from that Formative Age in the College's history, the Age of Lew Worner and Louis Benezet, was commitment to change and the search for excellence. We did not embrace change for change's sake. Lew was actually a conservative, in the tradition of Edmund Burke and John Adams, who had great respect and understanding for the past, and also a vision of the future. Our relatively small size and independent status gave us a special opportunity, indeed an obligation, to be educational leaders. We sought new ways to realize the hallowed goals of the liberal arts tradition. I sometimes thought we were seeking to fulfill, in a modest way, Thomas Jefferson's famous dictum - "Earth belongs to the living, not to the dead." Any process of change involves controversy, a continuous dialectic between what exists and what might be. The conflicts over curriculum, courses and campus life were sometimes tense, even acrimonious, yet they released a fruitful creative energy.
I quickly learned there were two kinds of department chairmen at the College. Some chairmen resented the boisterous new faculty (always spreading their seed on the ground, one cynical chairman said), perhaps threatened by the atmosphere of change. Other established chairmen delighted in the energy and innovations of young colleagues - Ken Curran, Chairman of the Economics Department, Doug Mertz, Chairman of Political Science, and Frank Krutzke of the English Department were of that stripe. Mertz was always talking with gleaming eyes about what Fred Sondermann, David Finley, Glenn Brooks and Tim Fuller, the young stars of his department, were up to. I decided then if ever I attained the exalted status of department chairman, that was the kind I hoped I would be.
Lew Worner was at his masterful best, working behind the scenes, attending departmental and division meetings, buttonholing faculty. He practiced what party politicians know: the key to success is quiet preparation prior to public voting. One of the early controversies involved the inauguration of a new academic calendar in which the first semester ended before Christmas, not after a short lame-duck session of classes following the holiday. This and other innovations were debated with spirit on the floor of the Faculty Meeting and had significant consequences.
The new calendar opened the way to the week-long Colorado College Symposium in the week before the beginning of classes in the second semester. The Symposium was surely one of the most innovative institutions in the College's history. Those were wonderful weeks of lectures, panel discussions, films, and arts performances. Every evening, students and faculty jammed together around beer kegs to argue about the events of the day with the distinguished visitors. Some of you remember the Symposiums on Contemporary Arts, on Humor, on World War II, and the Symposium on Violence, which featured among other things a production of a new version of Euripides The Bacchae in Armstrong Hall during which the performers were sometimes totally naked. That provoked a stir in the town. Eli Boderman organized the first symposia, Fred Sondermann ran them for a number of years, and then Eli took over again.
A particularly controversial change of those formative years of the modern College was the abolition of compulsory Chapel Services. Students had traditionally been required to attend Chapel each Tuesday morning at 11 o'clock. The Chapel was a chaotic scene on those Tuesday mornings - letters were written, card games were played, lovers exchanged affection. Very few speakers could tame that fractious audience. One of the few who did was the Nobel Prize winning physicist, Linus Pauling, who spoke about the new field of molecular medicine, a preview of the startling understandings that were to come in biology, genetics and medicine. In 1956, the Faculty voted for a voluntary Chapel program, but only after spirited argument. That step was important in the development of an open and free intellectual community.
Of course, I remember with unusual clarity the issues in which I was particularly involved. Some of us had the idea of placing the top students in each freshman class in a special section of history and two smaller sections of English. Neale Reinitz and Tom Ross were the English teachers, and I was the designated hitter for the history course. Frank Krutzke, a graduate of the Swarthmore Honors Program, was our mentor. It seemed a fruitful idea, but it was not easily brought about. Some faculty members thought it a coup by smart-aleck Young Turks to set up an elite curriculum for able students and themselves (which in a way it was). Lew Worner's constant, quiet encouragement and support were critical. We called it the Selected Student Program.
Some of the College's famous graduates passed through the Selected Student program - Jack Berryhill, Chuck Buxton, Ray Jones, Gary Knight, Donna Haraway Jim Heckman, Phil LeCuyer, Tom Wolf, Terry Winograd, and many others. I had a spasm of nervous anticipation going into class with that crew each morning - a room full of students all brighter than I. I used to say I taught them everything I knew every day. I experimented in that class with the previously neglected history of science. Joe Leech of the math department used to torment me with a simple challenge. How much time do you spend in Western Civ on Napoleon, he asked. A couple of weeks, I replied. How much time do you spend on Isaac Newton. Usually about ten minutes, I said. Then he hit me with the knockout punch: "Who do you think was more important in shaping the modern world?" Well I tried. Every afternoon I went to Olin Hall for help from real scientists, but was a day ahead of the class at the most. Class sessions were embellished by talks on music by Albert Seay and Carlton Gamer, and on art by Jim Trissel and other artists. Once Jacob Bronowski, the famed cultural historian, came to the campus and talked to the Selected Students about creativity.
One day a striking young man visited my office, a Grinnell graduate and Rhodes Scholar. He was interested in the possibility of teaching history at the College. Fortunately, Lew Worner was in his office, and I took my impressive visitor over to meet him. Lew saw at once this was someone we had to have. That was how George Drake came to Colorado College, the start of his illustrious career as Professor and Dean here, and then as President of Grinnell College. He took my place as teacher of the history section in the Selected Student Program.
The Selected Student Program was part of the College's move toward academic excellence. Forty years ago, Colorado College had the reputation for being a party school, popular with skiers, and patronized by preppies from the East who could not get into Ivy League colleges. There was some truth to that stereotype. But we always had able students here. The difference is that in those old days, we had a number of students who really did not have the ability to do work at a good college. In the 1960s, the quality of the student body dramatically improved. After that, students failed only because they did not do the work, not because they could not.
One of Lew's techniques of leadership was to enlist critics to undertake reforms (Lincoln and Franklin D. Roosevelt did that too). Gilbert Johns of the psychology department was a vocal critic of the Summer Session. Lew made Gilbert Dean of Summer Session. I had been an outspoken critic of the shallowness of teacher education programs. In the 1960s, many of our students were interested in careers of service to community, state and nation. A number aspired to be teachers, but they had no wish to pass through the traditional education methodology courses that were widely regarded as lacking intellectual substance and rigor. One day, Lew Worner took me to lunch at the Broadmoor Golf Club, and while I was munching on a delicious pork chop, he suddenly said: "I want you to be chairman of our Teacher Education Program." I nearly choked, I had never had an education course, but I came to see it was an offer I could not refuse - a put up or shut up proposition.
The education department was then a little teachers' college within the College. Changing our program was a painful and controversial process. One of the most radical aspects of the new plan was to do away with the education major. Henceforth, students who wanted to be teachers majored in an academic discipline, or in a new Liberal Arts for Elementary Teachers Program. I persuaded college faculty members from a variety of disciplines to teach courses for prospective teachers on a regular schedule. Thus, Glenn Gray of our philosophy department taught "The Philosophy of Education," Van Shaw of sociology taught "The Sociology of Education," Lou Geiger of the history department taught "The History of Education." Members of a number of departments went into the schools to observe what our student teachers were doing. The point was to develop a program suitable for a liberal arts college, that drew on the unique strengths of liberal education.
The pressing issues of those days were not all academic. We understood how the tenor of campus culture affected academic life. Forty, thirty years ago, the younger faculty had close associations with the students, and were involved in campus social life as shapers and participants. The hallowed institution of Senior Sneak day was a high point each year for the faculty. Many of you remember that each May the seniors abducted faculty members to join them at a secret rendezvous, often in the mountains. Sometimes the seniors were a bit too creative in devising modes of abduction. Once, a real policeman in full uniform burst into my Western Civilization class, and presented a warrant for my arrest ("Professor, come with me," he said), while my freshman students sat mute and terrified. Once they took the faculty on a hazardous ride to the Black Forest in thinly-tired animal cages borrowed from the Cheyenne Mountain Zoo. Once they put the faculty in the sunken garden that was at the east end of the Library. David Finley, then in his first year, made the mistake of trying to resist, and fell or was thrown off the wall into the sunken garden. He landed upside down on the back of his head and neck. I thought that was the end of his career if not of him. But it was worth those indignities to spend glorious days outdoors drinking beer, telling limericks (usually indecent) and singing songs with the soon-departing seniors ("That was nice little song, sing us another one do").
The Senior Sneak Day tradition ended after a beautiful sun-drenched day of beer and song at the Paradise Ranch near Woodland Park. At the end of the day, I drove a group of seniors down Ute Pass, including Ray Jones, Tom Wolf and Mary Sterrett Anderson. Neale Reinitz was in the car too (Neale and I were usually among the very last to leave Senior Sneaks). A green sports car shot past at high speed. When we came around a turn (I think of it every time I pass that spot), we saw the little car upside down on the side of the road with a girl's legs sticking out. The driver, art department sculptor Herman Snyder, was dead underneath, his chest crushed by the steering wheel. The girl, Susan Allison '67, had a broken back. We held a special Commencement Ceremony for her in a room at St Francis Hospital, complete with the president, Marshals and a small choir. Susan Allison recovered, but that was the last Senior Sneak Day in the old style.
Faculty and students often joined together in political activities. The 1960s campus was not an ivory tower, the world pressed on us. One faculty meeting was scheduled just at the time President Kennedy spoke to the nation about Soviet missiles in Cuba. A television was set up in the the WES room in the old Rastall Center (where the faculty then met), and we sat taut and silent, thinking of nuclear Armageddon. At noon one terrible day, I was in my office in Palmer Hall when I heard that Kennedy had been shot. I left at once to go home; students were running in all directions on the campus, but there were no sounds. After Walter Cronkite announced the President was dead, I wondered if I could force myself back to my 1:15 class, but knew I had to go. The classroom (Palmer 223, the room where I taught for many years) was jammed with my students, and a mass of others as well. They were bewildered, many were weeping. At first, I did not think any words would come out of my mouth. Finally we began to talk, and by the end of the hour we had comforted each other somewhat, insofar as it is possible to be comforted at such a time.
One of the events that stirred the campus in the early 1960s was the report Harris Sherman '64 and Myles Hopper '65 gave in Perkins Hall Theatre about an anti-Vietnam War rally they attended in Washington as delegates of the College. Their trip began the era of greater student involvement in public affairs. After the little girls were killed in the church bombing in Alabama, a large contingent of faculty and students marched from the campus to City Hall and stood silently on the steps, enduring taunts from some passers by. When I came here, Black speakers or visitors to the College were not accepted in hotels and most motels; they usually stayed in faculty homes. I was once bombarded with hate calls after I gave a speech about the Supreme Court and desegregation. Once Ray Jones was turned away from the College Barber Shop on Tejon street just south of the College. Faculty and student protests soon forced a change in that practice. In 1968, many of our students were involved in the bitter political campaigns. I was on the Credentials Committee at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago that year. Before one local meeting, I had some Eugene McCarthy materials to prepare and asked Janet Robinson '70 if she and a few of her friends could help staple them. When I returned from lunch, a mob of students filled the street in front of Cutler Hall, where my office was located, eager to staple.
Students and faculty joined in many anti-Vietnam War demonstrations. Jim Martin and Dean Metcalf, both '69, made a report to the students about a remarkable summer trip they made to Vietnam. Once the students blockaded the intersection of Nevada Avenue and Uintah Street to protest Nixon's blockade of Haiphong Harbor; they disbanded when riot police arrived. The students held a flagpole rally in support of Lew Worner after he made a strong statement in defense of academic freedom following the tumultuous Symposium on Violence in 1969. That may have been one of the only pro-administration demonstrations in the nation in those days. It was common in the early sixties, in the optimistic period of the Civil Rights movement and campus opposition to the Vietnam War, to end faculty-student parties (there were many faculty-student parties in the 60's) by linking arms and singing "We Shall Overcome." Later, when the War dragged on and the Black Power movement emerged, the songs were sadder and less hopeful.
One moving moment came on the day the Gulf War began. A dense crowd filled Shove Chapel listening to somber speeches from faculty and administrators. The Beast God War had suddenly intruded on the peaceful, joyful routines of campus life. The students sat silently, unbelieving, many were weeping.