TEACHING AS THE MAIN ATTRACTION AT THE TRUE GRITRODEO
Howard Roberts Lamar was my adviser in graduate school. Without the true grit he brought to bear on that role, I truly do not know what would have become of me.
As this opening statement indicates, with this episode of “Not My First Rodeo,” I am taking a break from the somber topics that prevail in the news. The very serious troubles of our time show no signs of going away, and I will return to them soon.
But not this time.
My chosen topic today is the joyful generational transition in which mentors and their proteges are privileged to participate. Among the many miraculous aspects of mentoring, the most miraculous is its power to create generational chains of relationships, chains that do not break under the strongest pull of time, or of death.
Rather than simply invoking the chains forged by mentoring, this essay shows one of those chains in action. It comes in three connected parts. I am the author of the first part, and my protégé Alice Baumgartner, with whom I had the great privilege of team-teaching in the Spring of 2018, is the author of the second part. And then there is a short third part, for which we team up.
Part One:
The Breathtaking Good Fortune of the Person Formerly Known as Patty Nelson
By Patty Limerick
Mattie Ross to Rooster Cogburn:
They tell me you’re a man with true grit.
When I was in graduate school, I set up camp for a spell at the fork in the road between success and failure. Throughout my time in residence at this juncture of persistence and defeat, Howard Lamar held steady in his role as the coach, guide, and mentor who made it possible for me, at long last, to get moving and to become a historian of the American West.
The great novelist Charles Portis gave the phrase true grit the standing of a star player in the American vocabulary. To many, it may sound like a term archetypally associated with the American West. But Portis’s home was Arkansas, which is usually not the first state to come to mind when we think “Western.”
Whatever the state of origin, anyone who was going to take on a tour of duty as my graduate school adviser was going to need a level of stamina, durability, and determination more often associated with mythic Greek heroes than with Yale history professors.
But Howard Lamar was from Alabama, which is apparently the true grit capital of the world.
As an entering graduate student at Yale in 1972, I was something to see. Overalls were my clothing of preference, and the distinctiveness of my attire only started there. Before I left California for the Northeast, a friend had presented me with an unusual item she had embroidered: a Pegasus/seahorse hybrid on a patch of material that I sewed onto the front of a pair of overalls. Many professors and graduate students at Yale invested their time in gazing on this colorful creature with puzzlement, though I do not recall anyone ever asking me what it meant or why I wore it so consistently. It is just as well that no one asked, since I still do not know the answer.
And then there was the improbable productivity of my tear ducts. I arrived at Yale weeping like a faucet. It was my particular gift to cry whenever anyone said anything nice to me, an unbreakable habit which left hundreds of people apologizing to me for what had actually been very gracious remarks.
Choosing to attend a hippie college had not done a thing to ameliorate this situation. In four years at UC Santa Cruz, even the paltry improvements I’d made in emotional control soon disappeared. Whenever I wept in the redwoods, people back then would sigh with envy and say, “Oh, how I wish I had your honesty in showing your feelings.”
That’s not what they said at Yale.
And yet, with the true grit of an Alabamian, Howard Lamar took all this in stride: the overalls, the prominent display of embroidered mythic creatures of a mysterious taxonomy, and cascades of tears, especially when complimented. He never wavered in his role as my coach, guide, and mentor, though his wonderful wife Shirley must have a heard a tale or two in the evenings, after a particularly strenuous session of coaching, guiding, and mentoring.
A distinguished and admired Western historian who also served as Yale’s acting president, Howard Lamar could not have mustered a moment of pomposity and pretension on a bet. He rarely missed the gatherings of our extremely informal Yale Corral of International Westerners, a gathering of undergraduates, graduate students, and professors where the usual boundaries and borders of status gave up and called it a night a few minutes into the evening. We held our monthly potluck dinners in various homes and apartments, often with a sparse supply of chairs. It made me very happy, and still makes me very happy, that Howard Lamar sat comfortably on the floor with us. This set a precedent that I have taken as a license to sit on the floor with my students whenever that opportunity has presented itself, without any foolish notion that this choice of comfortable seating would erode my authority. He and Shirley also invited sizable groups of students to their house for dinner, a tradition I have been honored to follow with the Center of the American West. (These dinners are under a temporary pandemic suspension, but they will resume as soon as they are again permissible, and I will once again sit on the floor with students who do seem to stand up a little more easily than I do.)
But now we make a sudden shift of venue in this narrative, from the warmth of students and faculty all chatting away at festive dinners, to the chill of a stern committee meeting.
Often unnoticed, there is essential hilarity in the very idea of requiring someone to write a prospectus describing a project that she has not finished and has, in fact, barely started. Maybe it was that intrinsic hilarity that got me off on the wrong foot. I wrote what I thought was a lively and engaging prospectus and presented it to my three designated advisers, including Howard Lamar. Perhaps pulled off course by my eccentric writing style, these three advisers reviewed it and passed it on to the program-wide faculty committee.
The onset of woe was both immediate and lasting.
The committee rejected the prospectus, declaring that it was too humorously and casually written, and demanded that I comply with custom and convey a solemn recognition of the serious issues that rest on responsible scholars.
I collapsed.
I put heart and soul into brooding and dreading. Months passed.
Howard Lamar did everything he could to be kind and encouraging, and that, of course, only made me cry.
And then came his moment of true grit in full operating mode.
He told me he could not get me any more teaching jobs unless I had an approved prospectus. He did not soften this statement, and he did not give the slightest indication that he would do anything but stick to it.
And then he made a statement that few who know this extremely gracious, gentle, and good-natured man would ever imagine him saying.
“If you will rewrite that prospectus and do what the committee told you to do,” he said, “and if they try to reject it again, there will be blood in my eye.”
Since this is no longer a familiar saying, I will borrow a helpful clarification from a commentator on a website. The phrase, “blood in your eye,” means that “people can see the anger in your eyes.”
The magic combination—of flatly informing me of the peril that I was in, and then flatly informing me of the peril that the committee members would be in, should they indulge in another round of enthusiasm for rejecting my prospectus—released me from paralysis. I rewrote the prospectus, an achievement that I would not offer as an inspiration to the young, since this accomplishment was made possible in part by the true grit contained in a bottle of Wild Turkey.
The committee signed off, and while no one could say that I raced on to the completion of the dissertation, there is no question that my failure to write an accepted prospectus would have brought my academic career to a full stop.
At this point, there is no avoiding a recitation of the Golden Rule.
Because Howard Roberts Lamar reliably brought true grit into action in mentoring me, I have been able to do onto others as he did onto me.
This permits me to introduce Alice Baumgartner, a gifted young scholar who went to Yale after Howard Lamar’s retirement, but who was the recipient of his kindness, transmitted from him to me to her. In 2017-2018, the Center of the American West was very fortunate to serve as her home institution during her last year in graduate school. During this visit, I had the great privilege of working with Alice as my team-teacher in the Center’s introductory course on the American West.
Part Two:
How a Greenhorn from the East Learned the Ropes in the West
By Alice Baumgartner
Last spring, I experienced my very own “onset of woe.”
For a full year, I had invested nearly every waking hour in revising my dissertation into a book. I knew that the manuscript needed more work, but I still bravely put an early draft into the hands of an accomplished older historian. When he wrote back, declaring his “frustration” over what impressed him as “the compressed and hard-to-follow ways” of my style of expression, I was crushed. If books receive “Advance Praise” before being published, my manuscript was receiving something more along the lines of “Advance Denigration.”
This did not stir up much of a thirst for more commentaries.
But I seemed to have set myself up for more suffering. I had agreed to share the manuscript with the Center of the American West Book Club, which meets every month over breakfast at Le Peep in Boulder. I had spent a very formative year at the Center while finishing my dissertation, and so I knew that the members of the Book Club were sharp enough to note flaws, but also kind enough to deliver criticism with grace.
This recognition did nothing to relieve my feelings of dread.
Expecting more evidence that all my work over the past year had made the manuscript worse, I looked forward to breakfast as I would have looked forward to an intense dental procedure, without benefit of novocaine. The waiter would deliver omelets, and the group would deliver bad news.
Patty, as it turned out, knew a thing or two about what to do when graduate students descend into “brooding and dreading.” She started the discussion by talking about what she liked about the manuscript. As others made comments, she suggested solutions to every piece of constructive criticism that the group raised.
When the discussion was over and it was evident that I had survived, Patty handed me a thick green folder with a printout of the manuscript. When I opened the folder, I saw that she had placed detailed comments in the margins of just about every page. Many of the comments pointed out where the narrative or the argument needed clarification. But a number of them were check marks [code for “point worth noting”] or exclamation points [code for “who would have thought!”] or “Ha!” [signifying appreciative merriment, not scorn].
For the first time since I circulated the draft, I started to think that some parts of the manuscript were all right.
Still, the way forward was not at all clear. I felt hogtied by the number and variety of suggestions I had received from various readers. One person recommended that I reorganize the book so that it started in the middle of the action. Another recommended expanding the book into three volumes, otherwise I wouldn’t be able to do the topic justice.
I didn’t know how to fix the problems. I didn’t even know whether it was possible to fix them.
And I was under contract to turn the manuscript into my editor in two months. In the competitive world of academic publishing, having a contract should have been a source of joy. At this point, the joy did not always prevail.
A week or two after the Book Club discussion, Patty invited me over to her house to discuss my revisions. In the next hour, as I now recognize, Patty drew directly on the reservoir of kindness she had drawn on in Howard Lamar’s company, repurposing it for my benefit. I sat on her couch, petting her very nice cat Yofi (academic folklore indicates that Howard Lamar had a very nice, also very pettable dog named Scannon), and tearfully explaining that I did not know how to revise the manuscript. I did not even know whether it was even possible to revise it.
Patty suggested that I start at the beginning: rewrite the introduction so that it would forecast the power and originality of the chapters that would follow it. She knew (and even despair could not force me to disagree) that my research would give energy and interest to those chapters, if they only had an introduction to announce their arrival.
Worse, she gave me a deadline.
In a week, we would meet for dinner at a Boulder restaurant with a cuisine that went way beyond lattes and omelets, and we would go over the reworked and revitalized version of my introduction, and she and I would leave the restaurant with a sense of accomplishment.
And we did.
In the tradition of Howard Lamar, Patty had coaxed and cajoled me, like an expert driver working with a recalcitrant mule, into making progress again.
A beneficiary myself, I have also watched others benefit from the patience and grit that Patty picked up from Howard Lamar. During my year at the Center, she and I co-taught a course on the American West. In the back row, a number of young people expertly performed the part of “disengaged students,” slouching, not taking notes, episodically surrendering to a yearning for their forbidden phones.
This attitude was not going to work in Center of the American West 2001.
The course had four writing assignments. Three required revisions. All of them required taking notes in class.
Figuring out how to navigate at a public university with a wide range of motivation among its students, I thought that we would be wise to take delight in the work of the high-achieving students, but to direct our efforts at the “motivated middle”—the students who were not performing at a high level, but who had arrived in the course with an interest in the subject and with a ready-to-be-unleashed desire to achieve. There was little—well, really, there was nothing—to recommend any effort to engage the denizens of the back row. First, it would not work. Second, it would take time away from the other students, who might actually be in our reach.
But Patty wanted to experiment.
The students revised their first papers. When some of those ostensible “second drafts” showed no signs of change, much less improvement, we did not hand them back. Instead, we gave these students a letter, explaining that they would have to come to the Center of the American West offices to pick up their papers so that we could discuss with them how they would improve their performance in the course. These conversations did not produce transformations on the spot. But several rewrites down the road, a significant number of the papers showed improvements that registered close to miraculous.
Patty often brought a rubber chicken to class, and when students held back on participation, she would chuck it into the audience, and whoever caught it had to speak. When we dealt with students who filled up pages with words and sentences that seemed aimed at no imaginable reader, she encouraged them to write their papers as letters, starting “Dear Patty and Alice,” purposefully addressing two living human beings. Whenever students were upset about their grades, she gave them the opportunity to revise a second—or even a third—time. If students fell asleep in class, she would hand them a get-well card that included a generic printed sentiment like, “We miss you, and we hope you are feeling better soon!” along with a handwritten note on the order of, “Please let us know if there is anything we can do to bring you back into our world in this class.”
Over the semester, distant and disengaged students surrendered, revealing their talents to us, turning in papers that differed dramatically from their trudgings through required assignments with which they had initially tormented us.
Now, as an assistant professor at the University of Southern California, when I encounter undergraduates who seem to have, as their one aspiration, the hope of enduring until the end of the semester, I think, “Well, we’ll see if they can hold to that, or if they can be persuaded to unleash their minds and spirits.” I don’t always succeed. But whenever I feel frustrated, I ask myself what Patty would do—and then I do that. The more I teach, the more I realize that this approach pays dividends that far outstrip the initial effort to meet students where they are.
In higher education, woe turns out to be an elective, not a requirement.
Part Three:
Alice’s and Patty’s Co-Authored Invitation to Anyone and Everyone Who Values the Teaching and Writing of Western American History and Who Thereby Has Reason to Admire Howard Lamar and to Celebrate His Lifetime Demonstration of True Grit
Later in 2020, Howard Roberts Lamar will turn 97.
If you went to Yale and took his courses, or if you are yourself a Western American historian, you already know that you are indebted to him. But if you are a person, in any line of work, who aspires to understand the American West, then you are also in his debt, even if this is the first time you have realized this.
In other words, there are reasons aplenty to write him a note of thanks and appreciation.
Here is the address for cards and letters:
Professor Howard Lamar
Maplewood at Orange
245 Indian River Road
Orange, CT 06477
If you prefer email, you can send messages to George Miles, the Curator of the Western Americana Collection at Yale’s Beinecke Library, george.miles@yale.edu, who will make sure that these communications get to their intended recipient.
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