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Web Exclusives:
Under the Ivy October
6, 2004: He was a lion of a man, wrote William Chapman White ’23, a “leonine man, with a large head, a shock of unmastered hair. He walked like a lion, a hurried and worried lion, always solidly on the earth and in a good bit of a rush.” The man was English professor J. Duncan Spaeth – “though no student of his ever called him that,” noted White. “Doc” Spaeth, rather, was one of Woodrow Wilson’s original preceptor guys. An 1888 graduate of the University of Pennsylvania with a Ph.D from the University of Leipzig, Spaeth arrived in Princeton in 1905 from Philadelphia, where he was teaching at a high school. He immediately took over as Princeton’s crew coach, leaving his mark with a trademark roar. “He never needed a megaphone to shout his instructions,” remembered White. “In fact, there was a story around that on one day when he roared, “Take up your stroke now – 36—37—38,” the coxswain of the Pennsylvania crew, practicing on the Schuylkill River fifty miles away, heard the shout and drove his eight into a lather.” His stentorian voice also made him a legend in the classroom. “The timid freshmen who took what was innocently called ‘English 101’ entered his first class at the wretched hour of eight a.m.,” wrote White. “They assumed they had some familiarity with the English language. After all, they had been to high school or prep school and knew the uses of the pronoun, the principal parts of irregular verbs, and could name a few of Shakespeare’s plays. What more was there to English? “A middle-aged man who looked as if his clothes had been thrown on him as he was leaving his home in a hurry puffed into the classroom. He looked the new class over for some sign of intelligence and shook his head. ‘We are to study 19th-century English poetry,’ he announced. ‘I will read some.’ Thereupon, in a voice that shook the old and long-gone classroom he took up Tennyson’s ‘Ballad of the Revenge,’ roaring and fondling the words at the same time, like a skilled trainer handling something alive and powerful.” White’s essay, which first appeared in the New York Herald Tribune (for which White was a correspondent) and was reprinted in the September 24, 1954, issue of PAW upon Spaeth’s death at age 86, makes clear that Spaeth’s gift was the powerful expression of his own love for language. Even in the early 20th century, he was a rare find: a teacher first. “Dr. Spaeth enjoyed lecturing and argumentation more than writing and argued that his publications were “less for library shelves than for living people,” said his proper PAW obituary. Indeed, he gave PAW the following as his epitaph: in Latin, “I live to learn, I learn to teach; I teach that those I teach may learn to live.” But White recorded some of Spaeth’s own words that might
serve as well: “The English language is a living thing. It
is more than words. It is words plus the imaginations of the writer
and the reader, plus freshness plus life. It is something to cherish
as long as you live. Remember that!” Jane Martin ’89 is PAW's former editor-in-chief. You can reach her at paw@princeton.edu
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