Class News

Rolf Dumke rejoins the Class of 1964 with a personal essay

February 14, 2018

Rolf Dumke matriculated with our Class, graduated with the Class of 1965, and just recently decided to affiliate with '64 instead of '65. Here is an essay he wrote on that occasion.

Neil Hoffmann and Sam Francis of the Class of 1964 informed me that I could be associated with the Class of 1964. Although I matriculated with the Class of 1964, I took a year's leave of absence and graduated in the Class of 1965.

This will give you a short synopsis of my time at Yale:

I'm originally from the class of 1964, but left Yale for a year after my third year and graduated in 1965. Most of my friends from Yale are former roommates and classmates in Calhoun College, Class of 1964, with whom I have regularly exchanged emails and photos over more than the last decade, as well as many intellectual and political exchanges: Brooks Carder, Morris Dean, Greg Gilbert, Nortin Hadler, Chip Pickett, Mark Ramsaier, Steve Weller have been my main contacts in '64.

So, it would be nice to receive information from the class of 1964, given the fact that I hardly know any members of the class of 1965.

As an immigrant student, I was in a very small minority (of one?) at Yale. Although I was top boy in my big high school class at Shaw High in East Cleveland, Ohio, I had just learned about middle-class life in America. Yale enlarged my scope of persons, values, and life styles at the upper end of the social scale in America after my initial half decade, 1953-57, living in the Hough District in Cleveland, a notorious black ghetto. I had zipped through three class environments in America in my first eight years after immigration: really lower, middle, and upper-middle to upper class.

Each presented interesting challenges that I presumed to handle well. But Yale was more complex. My German Lutheran background and schooling in St. Paul's Lutheran elementary school and Lutheran High provided the guide in a ghetto peopled by many emotionally failing and criminal white and black persons. Friendship, social support, and guidance to immigrants was provided by the large German-American clubs in Cleveland. They were a halfway house in my growing up in America. My parents stayed in this environment for the rest of their lives. But I wanted to become a full American and was guided by teachers and students in my schools. But I missed the useful role model of parents who had attended a university and lived successful professional occupations in America.

At Yale I first had to learn to write a decent paper in English and was appropriately drilled by our instructor in English 100, Mr. Marriott, an Oxford MA., who gave back my redlined papers, striking out needless adjectives and esoteric words, and simplifying the arguments. It was a hard job to clean up my own bad style. Luckily, I'm married to my wife, Susan, who is still superior in English. She helps translate texts on art exhibitions from German into English with a friend. The translations are often better and clearer than the original. Mr. Marriott had me tag along to the Elizabethan Club house on the New Haven Public Square. A lot of Oxford English was chattered by thin young Englishmen to impressed young American women in flowery summer gowns, all drinking tea in the garden, a tranquil show of English gentility in rough America. It was surreal! It seemed that the Oxfordians played out their gentility trump against the brawn and wealth of Americans at Yale.

I was almost overwhelmed by the richness of the ideas provided by Yale College courses. They were a huge smorgasbord to gorge upon. Which I did, switching majors too many times in my first three years. This lack of focus and the declining grades — grades, at times, seemed irrelevant — resulted in my request to take a half-year's leave of absence from Yale. The Dean of Yale College smiled, nodded his head, and said, take a full year. He was right. I needed the time to consider a new approach, no longer as consumer of general education but now to learn useful ideas to build up a stock of knowledge for a future profession.

I took many memorable courses at Yale:

The wonderful Vincent Scully's History of Architecture

I will always remember the first class with Scully on stage. With his long thin staff he pointed up at the columns of a huge projection of the Parthenon Temple to the Goddess Athena on Athens' Akropolis, stating, "This is where it all began." It was thrilling!

I later took a course from an architect who designed one of New Haven's new fire stations in the early 1960s. Most of his seminar time was spent discussing the political machinations required to get this small public contract. This turned me off architecture, even though I was fascinated by Eero Saarinen's Ingalls Skating Rink, a beautiful building of a whale or giant fish. My brother, Rainer, actually had the skills to become an architect in New York City after getting a degree from Cornell. He was bothered by the severe fluctuation of demand for architectural services and specialized in medical and laboratory buildings where there is a more even demand. He has designed a spectacular beach house on the Hampton shores of Long Island for a wealthy family. But these one-off contracts for truly innovative houses demand much time and do not earn sufficient income to be worth doing again. He has become a specialist working to design and repair hospitals and laboratories of the Veterans' Health Services, instead.

John Morton Blum's astute, American History in the 20th Century

US history in the 1930s was a disturbing story of nativists with Father Charles Coughlin's poisoning political intercourse in his radio broadcasts. Similarly, Senator Joseph McCarthy's anti-communist investigations and the House Un-American Activities Committee besmirched government officials and persons in the media in the late 1940s and 1950s with unsubstantiated charges of treason. These were ugly modern witch-hunts that are re-appearing again against Muslims and immigrants today under President Trump.

Paul Weiss's Socratic, The Philosophy of Art

Weiss argued that beauty and truth are wed. Later, I realized that this was basic to John Keats' 1819 poem, Ode on a Grecian Urn, that concludes, "Beauty is truth, truth beauty — that is all ye know on earth, and all ye need to know." Lacking realism, I used to believe this truism for a long time.

Theme a day, Creative Writing, by Robert Penn Warren and individual English instructors

Unfortunately, I failed because I ran out of topics which I believed were "interesting." I had strangely ignored the fact that as an immigrant much of everyday life at Yale was still unusual and that each such episode should have been a good topic for a theme-a-day. It seemed to me that other Yale students were set on an automatic course control with a set of expectations that had been wired in by their own, largely unquestioned family backgrounds. I then engaged in a vast reading of American popular novels to understand this country, but failed:

I found JD Salinger's Catcher in the Rye, the acclaimed teenage rebellion, silly and strange.
Ditto much of the Ernest Hemingway's macho stuff, although I learned from his lean writing style in Mr. Marriott's class, reading the short story, A Clean and Well-Lighted Place.
I shrugged at John Galt, Ayn Rand's heroic market economy man in Atlas Shrugged. Unfortunately, this is the Bible of today's Republican hard core. How silly! and destructive of American democracy today.

Leopold Pospisil's grand refutation of Thor Heyerdahl in People and Problems of the Pacific

I received my highest grade at Yale in this course in my senior year, writing two scathing book reports on other anthropologists' inadequate field studies and a seven-book final exam. Pospisil surprised me when he said I could become a good cultural anthropologist and offered to support my application for graduate training in a major university! Initially I took the course because it was said that one got good grades from LP. As well, his course was known as an early morning waker when Pospisil got to the physical anthropology of head, body, and breast shapes which differed between Papua/New Guinea's native populations in the high mountain valleys and between Australian natives vs. those in other islands. His good pictures of coniform vs. hanging breast forms got a lot of attention. This information was of excellent use at cocktail conversations! However, in response to a dramatically rising class size he warned in the first class that grading that year would be stringent to weed out basically uninterested students. The next class showed that he was heard; it was one half of its former size. As the course developed I became more enamored with his topic, how anthropology could determine the historical timing, origin, and method of the settlement of the incredible size of the Pacific Ocean and its many widely-spaced islands. For the final exam I asked myself what is the overarching question that the course attempted to answer, the useful approach to exams that my roommate, Steve Weller, had asked himself since freshman times. It was clear to me: Pospisil refuted Thor Heyerdahl's theory of settlement from South America, using physical and cultural anthropology. That was the question asked in the final and it looked like he had never gotten such a good response before. I aced it.

Peter Demetz's, History of German Literature

I became literate in German literature with Demetz's book and lectures. It is incredibly useful to know the big themes in literary history because analogies are often made to today's activities. Analogy and metaphor are important stylistic elements of language and thinking. In the 1990s Demetz was a guest of Marcel Reich-Ranicki's immensely popular TV program, Literarisches Quartett. MRR was Germany's literary pope and I was proud that my former teacher Demetz was his cardinal!

Werner Baer, Economic Development

Baer was a very stimulating lecturer on this modern topic of how poor countries become rich and of theoretical economic growth theories. Baer's book on Industrialization and Economic Development in Brazil, 1965, led to his professorship at Vanderbilt. Baer suggested I should apply to Vanderbilt for graduate studies. Which I did, receiving a full scholarship.

Andreas Papandreou's graduate seminar in Economic Development

This was a very popular course with many emotional Greek, Indian, and Latin American doctoral students who argued for the morality and effectiveness of more US aid to today's developing countries. AP was a Greek economist and later prime minister who ended a half century of conservative rule in the 1980s, modernized the economy and politics, established liberal labor laws and a national health program. They have, ironically, evolved into today's big problems of an overspending state that has been taken over by left-wing labor unions.

My task of working 20 hours per week for Yale, a requirement for my scholarship, resulted in memorable incidents. I cleaned tables and the dining room each evening at Branford College in my first two years. Interestingly, the Yale drama department rehearsed two notable plays in the dining hall after we bus-boys cleaned the hall. The first was Samuel Beckett's puzzling Waiting for Godot, about life as a senseless waiting for death. Our retirement plot? It was the antipode of Horace's famous saying, Carpe Diem! Seize the Day. The second play was Johann Wolfgang Goethe's Ur-Faust. His story of how Faust sold his soul to the devil, Mephisto, for knowledge was more relevant to a student. The question arose, am I in such a pact unknowingly? In one sense, yes. Elite college scholarships to bright underclass students eliminates future possibly problematic revolutionaries. It buys off their revolutionary fervor. Ur-Faust or, the original Faust, was a zippy, shorthand version of the ponderous, published long poem. It was wonderful to see plot and acting meld together to become alive over the weeks. I stayed for almost all of these rehearsals, astounded at the magical transformation taking place on stage, handling a cold, stale mug of coffee at the end of day.

More interesting was my work for the Yale Peabody Museum of Natural History. At the time the exhibition hall was mounting a new dinosaur exhibition with a huge skeleton of a Brontosaurus in the Great Hall. One exhibitor was an anthropologist mounting smaller exhibitions in cases next to the walls. Among others, her task was to determine the color layout of the exhibition with subdued blue-green hues. Every day she met me with a slip of paper with a particular color she wanted to use in her cases, cut out from different magazines. I was required to make a copy of colored paint in a small glass container. I had two sets each of color sets, one with a metallic sheen, the other pure color, with about two dozen different colors for each set. She showed me how to do this at the first meeting and gave me a tryout with another color to copy and paint on a slip of paper, dried with a fan. Dried colors look different from wet colors! I quickly learned how to analyze the color composition of everything I looked at, just as I later learned to analyze the taste of wine as a combination of fruit, berry, vegetables, herbs, minerals, and other tastes like leather. I was then given the skeletons of tiny dinosaurs to draw them and attempt to picture them looking alive with skins and feet down. This didn't seem too complicated. As a result, one of my own tiny dinosaur pictures may still be in the Museum exhibition today. The lady liked my drawing ability and took me to the Museum director to find out whether I could join her on an ongoing dig in the Aegean Sea near Turkey next summer. He said yes, if I would major in archaeology. The requirement was to learn old Greek and Sumerian. Not all that difficult for you with your German background, he meant. But I thought the price to spend the summer surrounded by pretty, lightly dressed female anthropology students was too high, given the uncertain job opportunities in the field. Thus, an opportunity closed.

My last student employment was for Prof. Krieckhouse in the Psychology Department, running a new learning experience on a rabbit in his lab. Usually, he was testing if rats learned to avoid electric shocks in a maze under the influence of different doses of dexedrine. I had to recalculate his analysis of variance calculations for his learning rats. This was all done by hand, using mechanical counting machines, and took a long time! With an appropriate dose, treated rats learned more quickly and reliably. Krieckhouse was also to test if the autonomic nervous system, which controls bodily functions, can learn, an important question. However the machine that had been built to test a rabbit was badly constructed, loud, and failed. A subsequent better machine and test actually did find learning of the autonomic nervous system.

In my final year at Yale, after a sobering spell, working one year as foreign-exchange teller at National City Bank of Cleveland, I focused on international trade (under the young Richard Cooper) and economic development in my economics major (under the stimulating Werner Baer) and learned a lot of trade and growth theory. It had become clear that I had to set priorities. Professional development required professional learning. I had also gotten to know a wonderful girl at Lake Erie College in Painesville, Ohio, and wanted to improve my professional status, to get a college degree, before marriage. My alternative offer at that date was from the assistant head of the international department of NBC who had just gotten the job as head of a Portland bank's international department. He wanted to take me with him to the west coast.

After graduation, I wrote a letter to Dr. Noble, Susan's father, asking him for the hand of his daughter in marriage. He sent me his OK. I liked the guy and loved his daughter. My former roommates Brooks Carder, Mark Ramsaier, and Steve Weller attended our wedding in Washington, PA in September 1965.

And a new, post-Yale chapter of growing up in America started.

Rolf

Rolf Dumke, PhD Economics, Wisconsin
Kaltwiesstrasse 2
83026 Rosenheim
Bavaria, Germany