The following story, which shall be delivered in multiple chapters, has little to do with India. It reflects a series of interviews I conducted a few years back, and which I finally have set to pen. Dan Marshall is nearing his death; he probably will not live to see my return. I am grateful for the time he took and the stories he shared. I will miss his voice and presence.
Shutesville
Don’t bother looking; it’s not on any map. It’s a locally held place, somewhere between history and hearsay, the geographic equivalent of an inside joke passed down from generation to generation, neighbor to neighbor.
Not a town, not even a village, just a scattering of houses, a few dirt roads, and one long arching hill: Shutesville Hill. A stretch of land so familiar, it can be taken for granted: tempered, rolling fields, a cool welcoming pond, a few unbroken barns, and woods, thick and deep, closing in. Just beyond the tall morning shadow of North Hill, the graceful arc blanketed with rock and trees.
It’s the birth child of Mr. Shute, one hundred and fifty years passed, his two-story house and former store still perched next to restless Route 100. Some how the name stuck long after he moved on, taking seat in the minds of successive residents, giving definition to one modest hill, amongst thousands of modest Vermont hills.
It’s closer to Stowe, but still within Waterbury, an important distinction for school buses, property values, and town meeting day, but not much else. A young man once posted a sign at the top of the long, gradual rise, the white face and dark green lettering looking south: “Upper Shutesville, Stowe three miles”. It lasted for a week, before a zealous highway road crew brought it down.
And it’s a clutch of stories and memories, recollections of days and people gone by, sweet and bitter, colored by time, traded like baseball cards from palm to palm.
Shutesville, Vermont, population unaccounted, Stowe three miles, Waterbury six.
Dan was once a tall man, probably rising some 6 foot 3, and his features still befit a large frame; expressive full hands, a wide mouth that reaches to a wider smile of white false teeth, and a long face that leans forward off his now curved back. Everything solid and large except for his eyes, which retreat beneath a broad hovering brow: pale, slight, and inquisitive.
I’ve known Dan for a long time, perhaps as long as I have memory. In my child’s eye, Dan was Mr. Marshall, the well-dressed man, dark suit with crisp tie, the absent University Professor who appeared unannounced in Shutesville each and every summer, and the occasionally forbidding man with the neighborhood’s best pear tree. In spite of his irregular presence, Dan occupied a firm place in my childhood constellation, an unnamed rotating collection of stars and planets that only a child can have, filled with awe and understanding, fear and curiosity, and people both mythological and real. That is the place from which I slowly entered the world.
The transition from child to adult is rarely definitive but there are some clear markers along the way. People’s names offer one such measure of change. I must have been in my early-twenties before I began addressing Mr. Marshall as “Dan” and it probably took another five years before I could say his given name without a lingering sense of impropriety. Still, he repeatedly insisted, saying with an emphatic Yankee accent; “Please Maaarc, call me Dan.”
He had retired to Vermont by then, leaving Tufts University in 1982 as head of the Education Department, “coming home” to his place in Shutesville. In a shift that must have startled both colleagues and students, Dan wasted little time in transitioning from college professor to sheep farmer. Each morning, instead of striding into ivy clad buildings of brick, mortar, and students, he made the slow walk from his house to Ruby Raymond’s old barn, a tall, somewhat askew building with courses and courses of chalk-red clapboards.
The barn, which was also part of my childhood constellation, rose up just beyond the shadow of our family house. Many years back, Ruby had hung a string of white wooden letters on the barn’s broad, asymmetrical face: “Vieux Roche,” or Rocky View, perhaps a tongue and cheek reminder of the boulders that pocked his fields and pastures. The public commentary, raised high and tall, was counterbalanced by a more private display of Ruby’s humor; a winged flying cow, rough hewn and white, which was attached to the miniature red door to the milking parlor.
Dan made full use of the barn for his new venture in sheep farming. On the lower floor, he converted the milk parlor into a convoluted den of recycled wire and weathered planks, a maze of improvised stalls constructed from old boxes, wooden palates and anything else that could be put to good use. On the broad, cavernous upper floor, Dan stacked woven bales of hay to one side, the tight yellow blocks climbing like half-open bleachers to the wooden beams high overhead. Elsewhere, rounding loaves of loose hay spilled onto the collective clutter of the Shutesville neighborhood, once stowed and long forgotten, buried beneath a thick choking layer of dust.
After graduating from college in 1988, I returned to Shutesville, the first of many such returns. I found work at a group home for teenage girls, their swirling mercurial emotions and slow-budding desperation hidden behind a non-descript brown ranch house.
The home was located just outside Bethlehem, New Hampshire. Every three days or so, I would make the two hour commute to the town of rambling golf courses and decrepit wooden lodges. Bethlehem was the summer retreat for New York City’s numerous Hassidic Jews, their June arrival as predictable as the annual return of swallows. Every year, tall, bending men descended upon the hill-capped town, wandering the sun-bleached streets and drying fairways, black trench coats flapping in the warm breeze, hands tightly clasped behind their backs. The wives, less visible, strolled further behind; heads covered in scarves, babies in tow.
When I wasn’t working, I rested and recovered in Shutesville, living above the garage in my mother’s new home, which sat at the end of a crowned gravel road that curled past the barn. She had built the modest structure of wood and windows during my last year in high school, trading the open, beam-laced rooms of Ruby’s aging farmhouse for a warm, intimate space filled with nooks and crannies. And then, shortly after completing the construction, she took off to live and work in the foothills of Bolivia.
Dan was deep into the farming operation by then. I’d stop for a chat, often finding him in the old milk parlor, wending his way through an eager cluster of wool, ears, and pitch-dark eyes, his large, bowed head scraping against the sagging whitewash ceiling. Dan seemed to share a language with his dominions, numbering around twenty-five; he’d call and they’d answer, their brays rising in a dissonant chorus of varied tenors, back and forth.
That year, Dan and I established some enduring patterns of our relationship. During our often long, wide-ranging chats, we shared news about our comings and goings, trading opinions but rarely agreeing on local and national politics. Dan offered updates on his sheep; the persistent and hobbling scourge of foot rot, or their variable diet of hay, grains, and pressed apple pulp, the red pungent mounds leaning against the barn. And I shared updates on my work and family, flung about different parts of the country and world.
Mostly, however, Dan told stories, some lived historical event, revealed and retold through his eyes. When he started down the path of a story, Dan took his time. He built the tale slowly, like a meandering river, curling through tangential events and larger than life personalities, each pulled from his profound well of memory. After many such colorful diversions, however, he inevitably returned to the main flow of the narrative, which might be a battle in World War II, an inauguration of a president, or some recovered image of a childhood long since passed.
I suppose it was a confluence of two compatible traits; I enjoyed a good story and Dan had plenty of stories to spin. Or perhaps it was a reflection of our recent pasts: I the deferential student, he the pedagogic teacher. Whatever the reason, I was regularly schooled in events large and small, as well as Dan’s own injection in history’s monumental turns.
I stayed in Vermont for a little over a year, observing the land and seasons, and taking a mature note of what I always knew as a child: the tilting spine of the Worcester mountains, the angled dying light of fall, the persistent, night calls of peepers, Vermont’s heralds of spring. One full rotation around the sun, and then I left, lured by adventure, heading west for an eventual landing in Guatemala.
As I’ve come to know, Vermont has its own powerful pull of gravity. Over the last twenty years, I have heeded its tug many times, occasionally to live, more often to visit, each time rekindling my relationship to the land and neighbors of one dirt road. Shutesville is my touchstone, the place I know best. I believe that is also true for Dan, his far-reaching stories filled with metaphors and images from the familiar round curving hill.
In the fall of 2005, aware of the frailty inherent in time’s passage, I asked Dan if he would share the stories from his long life. He was, of course, obliging. Even though he was nearing ninety, and age had clearly taken its toll, Dan still loved to tell stories.
The interviews, numbering more than twenty, typically were launched by a brief phone call on a Sunday afternoon. Dan was quick to extend the invitation, saying, “Come on down Marc.” By the time I had made the five-minute walk from my home, he had prepared two cups of tea, and a saucer filled with cookies. Then, we’d settle into our customary places in his cluttered living room, Dan in a sunken chair with his feet propped up, Camel’s Hump rising in the distance, while I landed across from him on a stiff Victorian couch. Before long, Dan was picking up the thread of a story from our previous meeting, carrying on the narrative as if we had never stopped.
Our conversations started with his earliest memories, mostly still-lives of a childhood on a Shutesville farm. From there we traced his steps, as school, war, and work drew him out into the world. Occasionally, I would ask clarifying questions or share a story of my own, but mostly it was Dan’s voice, quiet and steady, steeped in a deep Vermont accent, roaming from one tale to the next. All the while, I kept a growing pile of notes.
It is impossible to contain all of Dan’s stories in this piece. Dan’s life will be larger than what can be conveyed or told, try though he might. Stories, however, can reveal an outline of a man, his way of moving in the world, and the humbling refraction of a human personality. With the stories that follow, I hope to convey at least a glimpse of Dan Marshall’s long, remarkable life.
An Abbreviated Tale of Two Shutesville Boys
The Latin exhortation “Carpe Diem,” or “Seize the Day” is glued to a dusty, crowded mantelpiece in Dan’s living room. The letters, rectangular shiny things more often found on mailboxes, still remind him to make the most of life’s fleeting moment. This is not something you might expect to find in an aging, Vermont farmhouse. But then again, Dan has lived a lifetime of defying expectations, including his own.
Dan’s recollections of his childhood are sparse, buried beneath the weight of subsequent memories and experiences. Unlike later chapters, he has few stories that breathe with living experience. They are more like snapshots; brief visions of a child growing up on a hardscrabble Shutesville farm, and isolated images of a rural, conservative state that was reluctantly entering the 20th Century. Suffice it to say, Dan’s Vermont was a different incarnation than the state I came to know as a child, some fifty years later, even though our small footsteps trod many of the same paths and roads.
He was born on February 9th, 1917, in the midst of one of Vermont’s long, dark winters, his mother giving birth at home beneath the burning glow of kerosene lamps. Dan was the second child of Cethel and Arthur Marshall, his older brother Ralph arriving a few years earlier.
The fifty-acre Marshall farm straddled both sides of the Waterbury-Stowe Road and included pasture and woods. Their house lay tucked against the northern slope of Shutesville Hill, a dozen yards back from the narrow-gauge rail tracks and descending road that eventually became Route 100. This wasn’t the original location of the two-story home; the farmhouse, which had previously served as the local tollbooth, had been lifted back from the shoulder of the road after being struck by one too many cars.
Dan describes his mother Cethel Waite Marshall as “the driving force in the family,” the one who “kept food on the table,” and a woman known for her “shrewd bargaining skills” and frequent worries. She came from old Vermont stock, her historic family settling an area fifteen miles to the southwest of Waterbury, later known as Waitsfield.
Dan’s father, Arthur Marshall, was less ambitious. He was “easily pleased, and happy by nature, a quality that I liked,” Dan said, in spite of a life lived with illness. Arthur started out as a carpenter, following in the footsteps of his tradesman father, traveling across Vermont building homes and covered bridges. In the end, however, “he didn’t really like carpentry work,” Dan said, and later in life spent most of his time tending to the family farm and working shifts at the Waterbury State Hospital.
There was a fifth member to the Marshall household: Daniel Marshall. “My grandfather moved in with us,” Dan explained, “when I was about five. I listened to my grandfather. He couldn’t leave the house without me pleading to go with him. He made my childhood.”
Dan still holds countless stories that reflect his affection. “My grandfather bought a horse and tested her out. She was a husky horse and she would stop at the skid lane, she wouldn’t go any further. My grandfather decided to let me lead Molly. She knew I was a child and she minded me. I was so proud.”
“I remember when he bought the first car to be owned in Shutesville, a Ford. I was riding with him on the maiden voyage as he pulled into a garage yelling: ‘Whoa! Whoa!’ He couldn’t stop the car, he didn’t know how, and he drove right through the back of the garage, dropping ten feet into a swamp. He never drove again.”
“My grandfather knew Shutesville very well, he found his bride here, ‘walking seven miles each way,’ he used to say. He also was very close to my mother, especially with the poor health of my father. I was very fond of my grandfather.”
Dan also has vivid images of the small-farm landscape of his childhood. Pastureland, he said, stretched from the Worcester Range to the Green Mountain Range, wide-open, rolling, meadows dotted with occasional barns and silos. Cattle runs were not uncommon, herded along Gregg Hill Road on their way to the trains and markets. And railways ruled Vermont’s economic and social life, moving people and goods; connecting villages to towns, products to markets, and children to schools.
By the time my family arrived in Vermont, in the fall of 1966, the state was in the midst of a slow, tectonic shift away from its agrarian roots. Growing numbers of empty barns lined routes large and small, from major thoroughfares to threading back roads, the large sagging structures cornered by weeds and rusting tractors, abandoned or forgotten, gradually sagging towards rock and soil. Vermont’s marginal pastureland mirrored the changes, slowly falling prey to saplings and trees, which were oblivious to the rambling stonewalls that marked one field from another.
We took up residence on Shutesville Hill, two physician parents and four children, the oldest just entering school. We had moved from Baltimore after my father found work at the University of Vermont, a timely position that spared him a tour of duty in distant Vietnam. I was one year old, just lifting onto my legs, my soft, bare feet padding across the uneven floorboards of Ruby Raymond’s cold, tilting farmhouse.
Over the years, my family made good use of Ruby’s former cow barn, populating the lower floor with a growing menagerie of animals. Sheep were the mainstay, a half-dozen ewes and one intimidating, bruising ram, aptly named Buckingham. To the sheep we added a strong-willed horse for my strong-willed sister, a few itinerant ducks and geese, and my favorite, chickens, glorious Rhode Island Reds, round balls of crimson feathers galloping across the yard, scaly yellow legs flinging this way and that. These plump birds, I was soon to learn, were also favorites of Shutesville’s raccoon population, a startling and harsh lesson for a five-year old boy.
We weren’t really farmers; we inhabited the barn and made use of the land to fill our time, to keep the heat churning in a poorly insulated farmhouse, and to plant our urban selves on Vermont’s rural land. Each season had its task, part manual labor, part ritual, with some more welcome than others; hay to harvest in the humid heat of summer, wood to chop and stack on the steps of fall, animals to feed each frozen winter’s morning, and sweet sap to collect in the brown oozing mud of spring. My father and brothers led the way, handling the equipment and giving the orders, the first ones out the door, followed closely by my sister, blond fistfuls of hair pulled in tight, rubber boots sucking at her heals. I often lagged behind, just out of sight, waiting till their calls tipped towards the heat of anger.
In contrast to our limited use of the land, the Marshall farm was a thorough and productive operation, sustaining the family and ordering their days and nights. Like so many Vermonters of the era, the Marshalls pulled their livelihoods from the reticent landscape, taking what the land could offer. “We had thirty to forty cows” Dan said, “and sold the milk to three different creameries in Stowe and Waterbury. We raised potatoes, which we kept in a cold cellar and sold to a grocer in Burlington. We raised turkeys for thanksgiving and we boiled maple syrup. Maple sugaring was quick money and it helped clothe our family. We sold the syrup through the Waterbury Record, a weekly newspaper.”
Both Dan and his brother Ralph were expected to help around the farm. “We did a lot of chores,” Dan said. “We had to feed the calves, bring in the cows, and tend to the chickens. And we had to help with the logging and fire wood.”
Life wasn’t easy for the family of five; farm income only went so far. Dan’s parents also worked at the Waterbury State Hospital, which monopolized a large swath of the distant downtown, the dark brick buildings cast about spacious, even elegant grounds, with towering elm trees and wide-open greens. In addition to being the town’s largest employer, the psychiatric hospital came to define Waterbury’s reputation, the whispers and rumors of crazed patients lasting well into my childhood. By that time, however, the hospital’s doors were being pried open, the patients merging back into the communities from which they once came.
Although the hospital served as a source of income for both parents, Cethel was the steadier of the two. She worked long, backbreaking, and occasionally dangerous shifts as a nurse, fourteen hours a rotation. “My mother had her nose broken by a patient. He was in a wheelchair with restraints. He deliberately yanked his head back and broke her nose.” Dan paused from his story, and then spoke again- “I wish I could have done more for her. She died when I was twenty-four, from Legionnaires Disease I think. Just before the wonder-drugs came out. ”
Cethel had rejoined the state hospital in the aftermath of Waterbury’s 1927 flood, which reshaped the vibrant downtown in one cataclysmic, sweeping assault. Although the hospital’s buildings stood their ground, employees spent a “hellish night” trapped in the attics, trying to calm psychotic patients and their own fears, as the cold Winooski waters pushed at the floorboards. When those waters finally receded, Dan said, “many quit their jobs” and never looked back, permanently scarred by the twenty-four hour nightmare.
The flood left an indelible mark on both the town and its residents. In 1977, fifty years after the life-altering event, Waterbury held a commemoration in the wood carpeted gym of my elementary school. Deep into the evening, men and women, their faces softening with age, stepped to a microphone and shared recollections of the flood and its aftermath. They spoke of image and emotion, first witnessed through the eyes of a child, the impressions still vivid and fresh in their old and aging minds. I was just past twelve, my growing body hunched on the balcony floor and head tilted upon crossed elbows as I listened from above, mesmerized and transfixed by the terror, tenderness, and power of their voices, the hot gym air rising thick.
In hindsight, I suspect that I’ve always had a love both for stories, and storytellers; that may explain my affinity for Dan Marshall. People and anecdotes populate his tales, the way leaves hold to a branch, and his recollections of Waterbury’s November flood are no different.
As Dan tells it, John Weeks, Vermont’s republican governor, provided critical leadership throughout the flood, helping the state recover and rebuild. Later, after the debris was cleared and the public mourning complete, the state hospital renamed a ward the “Weeks’ Building”, as a show of gratitude and respect for the popular governor. According to Dan, John Weeks passed his last days in the same rising brick structure; his mind lapsed in a cloud of dementia.
Dan also has many tales of local characters; Waterbury and Stowe residents who found an abiding place in his memory. There was the local undertaker, Mr. Parker, “who would look you up and down when he met you, measuring you for a coffin.” The Parker family built a gymnasium above their funeral parlor and furniture shop; “it was common,” Dan said, “for the undertakers and the furniture sellers to be the same family.”
There was also Mr. Demerit, a “nice old man” who owned the Waterbury Cannery, a business that “you could smell from a long ways away during the packing season.” “Almost all of the youths, from 7th grade up, were paid to pick beans and corn for the cannery. Our family sold the sweet corn,” Dan explained, “to pay our property taxes.”
And there were Ida and Mark Shaw, Stowe residents who were “never without a few barrels of hard cider, both during and after prohibition. Ida was a likeable sort, but very nosey, knew everybody’s business and worth. Their daughter had T.B. and the family built a porch so she could sleep outside. They thought it would help her but she was destined to die from her illness.”
Like most small towns, families learned and occasionally kept each other’s secrets. Dan tells of Doctor Hopkins, the son of a prosperous Washington County family and the attending physician at his brother’s birth. Dan’s mother worked part-time for the doctor, providing nursing assistance at his many home births. One night, in the midst of delivering a baby, Doc Hopkins “collapsed on the floor with a seizure. The child was born and the mother was ok, but Doctor Hopkins asked my mother not to say anything. He knew it would ruin his career. She didn’t tell anyone but she did change doctors for my birth.”
A few years later, Doctor Hopkins “suffered a seizure while driving out of the Waterbury High School yard. He hit three adolescents across the street and killed all three. He asked my mother to testify at his trial and she did; he was acquitted but he never did practice medicine again.”
According to Dan, Waterbury wasn’t the “bed-room community” it is today. It was a working-class town, spotted with factories and businesses, including “grist and hardware mills, three granite sheds, a foundry, and an active commercial district.” The town also had its gentry; wealthy families who lived in the ornate, Victorian homes that lined Main Street, but they were the exception, not the rule. As Dan put it, discounting the prosperous May Farm, which was “financed by outside wealth, there wasn’t an indoor bathroom this end of Waterbury.”
I also grew up in a similar town, although thankfully, with indoor plumbing. Waterbury still had its pockets of wealth, in fact I suspect my family was counted amongst their ranks, but the majority of the residents were working-class, with a sizable minority not even reaching such modest heights.
As a child, I wasn’t fully aware of these differences, my mind too young to form hard distinctions of class or wealth. Instead, I had a child’s sense of poverty; the differing smells of kitchens and bodies, the patch quilt clothes that didn’t quite fit, and the ripples of unease I experienced each time our school bus turned down that one dirt road, choked by mottled brush, towards the Center’s lone trailer park. Waterbury, I knew and felt, had earned a reputation as a ‘tough place.’
These impressions, however, were transitory, ephemeral, never rising to the level of thought or prejudice. As ambling, vulnerable children, we still played and fought together, sharing marbles and stories, classrooms and playgrounds, while discovering original feelings of friendship, hurt, anticipation, and betrayal.
It was only later that the ‘waters began to part’, after I traded Waterbury Elementary School’s ancient brick hallways for the smooth linoleum sheen of Harwood Union High School. Slowly, as if pulled by some inexorable law of human nature, and fueled by curriculums that nourished distinctions, we began to separate: friends from friends, classmates from classmates.
Nearly fifty years earlier, Dan experienced similar tides of separation. “There were class differences,” he said, “between the children of the grist mill, and hardware mill, and doctors’ sons, and the children of the farmers from the hills. Waterbury High School, like many high schools in New England, was an extracting institution. If you were lucky, you went to University and left the state. Most, however, didn’t go to college, it wasn’t to be expected.”
The truth is that Dan Marshall should not have drawn the life he has. A precocious, curious-minded boy born into the rugged austerity of Vermont, which like the nation was teetering on the brink of the great depression- the odds were against him. In spite of the long shot, however, Dan managed to score a path more suitable to his nature than circumstances might otherwise have allowed. Dan likes to ascribe it to providence- “You either had luck or you had money. I had luck.” Modesty aside, his success also was due to a strong mind.
He entered school at the age of five, traveling three miles and some thirty minutes on the Mansfield Electric Railway to the Seminary building, a four-story wooden anomaly that to this day, towers over quiet Waterbury Center. According to Dan, “electric trains controlled the life of kids, four trips each day between Waterbury and Stowe, we set our schedules by it. During the cold mornings in wintertime, the conductor had to get out a blow torch to heat the rails.”
Trains weren’t just a means to an end; they played with schoolboys’ imaginations and bravado, the way autos would a generation later. Across Waterbury, it was a time honored right of passage for boys to climb down onto the Center’s trestle, a tall, gaping structure, that stretched across the swamplands between the old brick Methodist Church, and the imposing Seminary building on the other side. The boys would cling to the stilt-like timbers as the train slowly rumbled overhead. On rare occasions, the conductor brought the train to a full stop just above the boys’ heads, as the trestle gently swayed back and forth.
Dan spent seven years at the Seminary building, attending classes between two rooms. “There was a freestone stove, a kind of radiator that kept heat longer,” he said, but it was no match for the bitter winter winds that slipped through the building’s tall, single pained windows.
In a strange binding of fates, the Seminary Building also figured prominently in the panorama of my childhood. My parents and a few other local families purchased the abandoned structure in the early 1970’s, saving it from the wrecking ball. During winters’ long, tedious grip, we occasionally gathered a group of friends and neighbors for an indoor volley ball game, the novelty of our voices echoing through the Seminary’s cavernous gym, thick and frayed ropes, still tempting, dangling from the ceiling. During a game’s lull, I’d wander through the creaking hallways and classrooms, my steps marked in dust, reading the curling cursive missives scribbled on walls and desks, penciled decades before by children I could only imagine.
By the time Dan reached Waterbury High School, it was clear that he was graced with a mind made for learning; an ability valued in certain settings, but not always admired or respected on the schoolyards. “I wasn’t much of an athlete,” he said, “but I was considered a fairly good student. My father used to say if you weren’t a good athlete, you were wasting your time in High School.”
In truth, Dan was more than “a fairly good student;” he graduated from red brick high school at the age of 16, valedictorian of his class. Dan credits much of his academic success to Dascomb P. Rowe: “demanding” math teacher, coach, and principal of the school. “You had to be a well-prepared teacher to work at Waterbury High School. The high school principal had a big impact on my values. He did a great deal for the town of Waterbury. They made a lot of sacrifices, he and his family, I saw their house, and I presume his wife ate soup.”
Unlike my family, college was not a foregone conclusion for Dan. In spite of his obvious academic achievements, most boys from the farm returned to the farm; there simply wasn’t enough money to pay for secondary education.
When the time came, Dascomb, or Dack, as he was known locally, helped Dan apply for scholarships, loans, and grants, as they scraped together the tuition, dollar by dollar. “I started at the University of Vermont in the fall of 1933,” Dan said. “I was late about two weeks because I didn’t have enough money. I was working at a store in Waterbury when I got the call from Guy Bailey, President of UVM. He said ‘You come! We got more money to lend you.’ I wouldn’t have gotten any higher education if it wasn’t for Guy Bailey.”
Dan worked his way through the University, tutoring students, doing odd jobs, and “begging for money for four straight years. I had to work. I didn’t have enough money to join a fraternity. When you don’t have enough for a cup of coffee, there is no time for a social life. I lived with an elderly woman who was losing her mind. I tended her fire, and helped around the house, it was just short of solitary confinement; something I’ve experienced too much of in my life.”
In the summer of 1936, shortly after Dan completed his third year of university, President Roosevelt made a campaign train stop in Waterbury. Dan remembers the event well. “I saw Roosevelt come down the steps of the Pullman car, his eldest son bearing all of his weight. There was an animated crowd and I noticed President Bailey of the University of Vermont. He was next to the president along with the governor and senators. Bailey spotted me and waved me over, and John Griffith, a bruising police officer from Waterbury, delivered me back to the reception group.”
“President Bailey introduced me to Roosevelt, explaining that I worked in the U.S. Public Works for Youth Project, translating French documents for the Department of Agriculture. The president was very interested in this, saying ‘You must of learned a lot of French words. Let’s hear them,’ and he paused, ‘tell me the word for fertilizer…’ (‘Mierde,’ or ‘Shit’). Of course, everyone burst out laughing,” Dan said, as he angled his face forward, eyes pulled tight with brows raised in expectation, before filling his small, living room with laughter.
“Afterward,” Dan continued, “I could see that his legs were no good when he climbed back into the car.”
Dan returned to UVM in the fall of 1936 to complete his Masters of English. “I worked with Professor Tupper, a southerner who was an international scholar of Chaucer. He had a running feud with a group of Harvard scholars, friendly in tone, over the order of the Canterbury Tales.”
“Tupper wrote a letter to his Harvard colleagues,” he continued, “beginning with ‘Either the authorities of Harvard do not know, or they refuse to learn,’ before presenting his arguments for a particular order of the tales. This went on for quite a while, back and forth. In the end, Tupper was right.”
“I was very appreciative of Professor Tupper. His life ended in a tragic way. He lost his wife and daughter in an accident, and then he later fell ill with dementia. I understand that he went to deliver a paper on Chaucer, and that he became lost, forgetting where he was supposed to go. His life ended at the Brattleboro Retreat.”
After four years of begging, Dan had both a diploma and a sizeable debt. “I graduated in 1937, in the depth of the depression, with 300 other classmates. Only six of us had jobs, I found mine the Saturday before commencement, a teaching position at the Essex Classical Institute, teaching Latin and French. In the evenings, I also taught the French Canadian parents to read and write. I paid off my debts in four years, from teaching and then the Marines.”
Nearly sixty years later, I also flirted with the idea of becoming a teacher. In 1993, I applied to the Teach for America Foundation, the brainchild of Texas billionaire Ross Perot. Perot had started the organization in order to attract new “talent” to the ranks of teaching, sending the selected candidates, most of them recent college graduates, into classrooms the educational equivalent of failed nation-states.
I felt well-prepared for the challenge. I was living in Boston at the time, working every other week with juvenile delinquents at the remote Penikese Island School. The school sat atop a smooth windswept hill above the cold circulating waters of Falmouth Harbor, the furthest outpost of the Elizabethan Island chain, and two hours by boat from Woods Hole. The experimental program had been founded by George Cadwalader, an Ex Marine captain with thick shocks of unruly gray blond hair, deep hovering brows, and a permanent, painful hitch to his step, his body still riddled with metal from the war that my father barely avoided.
Every seven days, I rode the Harold M. Hill out to the tiny island and former leper colony, the gray flat-faced house rising like a weathered old tree from the rock-strewn soil. The island was an experiment in isolation: rudimentary, rustic living without electricity, toilets, or television. Just the unbroken intensity of twelve people, eight youth and four staff, the fluid, sometimes simmering human air softened by the constant wash of waves and cackles of seagulls, hovering aloft on a stiff ocean breeze.
As part of my application for Teach for America, I was asked to submit three letters of recommendation, one of which came from Dan. He wrote the letter by hand, the deep, blue ink curling to the edge of thin translucent paper. The letter began- “I suppose you may wonder why a sheep farmer from Shutesville, Vermont is writing a letter of recommendation for Marc Wennberg, and his application to Teach for America…” Dan then went on to detail his career as an educator, and his endorsement of my work and life experience, the narratives merging together on the same, familiar dirt road.
In the end, I failed to pass the muster of the selection committee. I suspect my rejection was due to a ‘class lesson’ that I delivered as part of the application process; a rambling ‘performance art’ piece on the history and process of Maple Syrup. Those five-minutes of physical theater, both genuine and incoherent, were as close as I came to teaching, and following in the footsteps of Dan Marshall.
Dan’s entrance into education in 1937 was far more lasting; it became a lifetime career. “I didn’t know anything else,” he said. “I always wanted to teach since childhood. It wasn’t a very thought out reason. Given my choices, I might have been as interested in farming. But farming was destined to go to hell. My career was teaching. I was aware you didn’t make money in farming.”
Dan paused for a moment and then continued. “I don’t mean to be pessimistic. You can do whatever you want to do… unless you’re confronted with a nationwide depression.”
"My parents were proud of me, although my mother wished I could have become a doctor and earn that much more money. My father was very pleased that I learned Latin. He said ‘you could always fake teaching but you couldn’t fake Latin.’ He didn’t have very positive feelings about education. My mother was the counterforce.”
At the end of 1940, Dan was twenty-three years old, just getting started with his career, and a few months away from the death of his mother. He was living in the farming community of Essex, filling his days with teaching, and nights with lesson plans, fully dedicated to the French-Canadian children who marched into his classroom every morning.
Dan, like the state and nation, was little aware of the approaching storm, which over the course of the next year would transform his life. “I didn’t think we were going to war,” he said. “It was a divided country until Pearl Harbor. I had been promised a position at Vermont Technical College and was looking forward to it.” Everything in life, however, was about to change, making all his expectations and hopes irrelevant.
1 comment:
Hi Marc,
Emma, Janna, and I are headed to Shutesville tomorrow morning. I hope Dan holds on so we have a chance to visit. I really enjoyed your rememberance.
xxoo,
Paul
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