A Student’s Memories of “Mrs.” Professor Sarah Vinke and Her English Department at Montana State College, Bozeman MT (1956-1960), By Robert Dennis Gary, usually just Dennis Gary.

We Are Saddened To Report That Robert Dennis Gary Passed Away In Jan 9, 2020, Likely From Covid17. You May Read About His Life => A Robert Dennis Gary Memorial Tribute Page & Autobiography: Click Here.

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This Page Also Includes Mr. Gary’s Added Memories in Response to Henry Gurr’s queries in a search for the correlations to Professor Vinke’s statement: “Are you really teaching quality these days?”

As reported by Robert Pirsig in his book Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance.
with probing and editing by ZMMQ Site master, Henry Gurr

[Site Master’s Note: Montana State College was renamed Montana State University in 1965.]

[Second Site Master’s Note: There are some minor discrepancies between the dates in A Brief Biography of Sarah Jennings Vinke, Found in the Burlingame Special Collections, Montana State University Bozeman and the dates in Mr. Gary’s memories of Sarah at MSC. However, on the whole, Mr. Gary’s recollections well support the dates and other facts which are further fleshed out in the Letters To & From Bozeman: Concerning Persons (or Events) of The English Department, Montana State College, 1945 to 1969**. With this in mind the, you dear reader should focus your attention on primarily personalities, the physical setting, and the relationships between the various individuals, and the faculty dynamic at MSC during this time with which this page is primarily concerned.]

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Table of Contents

I. Personal Memories of Dennis Gary

II. Memories of Professor Sarah Vinke's Colleagues in the Montana State University English Department.

III. Other Faculty and Events at Montana State College (1956-1960)

IV. Memories Related to "Radicals" on the MSC Campus

V. Experiences and Memories of Dennis Gary after MSC Graduation

VI. Personal Statement by Dennis Gary

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Personal Memories of Dennis Gary

Dr. Gurr:

On a whim I Googled “Sarah J. Vinke” the other day and was linked to one of your webpages, concerning the book Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance (ZMM).

I was a student of Professor Vinke. I attended MSC from 1956-1960, getting a BS in Secondary Education with an academic major in English. I took the second quarter of Oral and Written Communication from Dr. Vinke in the Winter Quarter of 1957 at Montana State College, now Montana State University. Later, at the urging of Jack Barsness, under whom I studied magazine article writing and short story writing, I took Shakespeare and Greek and Roman Classics from Dr. Vinke. I believe Robert Pirsig arrived at MSC in 1959, but by that time my remaining course of study was pretty much cast in concrete, so I never really got to know him. I read ZMM years ago and delved into it again the other day.

Below, I have written my memories of Professor Sarah Vinke and the MSC English Department for the years I was there as a student and an English Major.

I think my main contribution can be remembered incidents that the reader interprets from one's own perspective. I think the literature/writing person comes from a somewhat different perspective than the philosophical/psychoanalytical person.

Thus, Freud could say that everything in his system was in The Brothers Karamazov. But Dostoevsky just presents the story, interpret it as you will. According to Joseph Frank in his critical biography of Dostoyevsky, Dostoyevsky's editor would ask him how he could think like that and Dostoevsky would reply that he didn't think like that, his characters did. This is turning into a Proustian Remembrance of Things Past (In Search of Lost Time). In regard to my approach to Vinke, I am reminded of the Isherwood title I AM A CAMERA.

I hope my memories of Sarah J. Vinke and Montana State College will be of help in explorations of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance and Metaphysics of Quality.

Sincerely,

Dennis Gary
San Francisco, CA
25 October 2009

[Site Master’s Note: Mr. Gary says his “name on MSC rolls was Robert Dennis Gary, as opposed to just Dennis Gary. Computers era 1956-60 could not deal with middle names effectively.” His father was at one time an electrical engineer, and graduated from MSC in 1928.”]

[Second Site Master's Note: We believe Vinke is the correct spelling. But on occasion, even on official MSC documents, Mr. Gary has seen Vinki, a spelling found many places by Google these days. He says, "On the Montana Hall roster it was Vinke, but in catalogs and schedules it was Vinki Strong I sound . She had an explanation, but I can't remember it."]

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The Sarah J. Vinke I Knew

My Oral and Written Communication course from Dr. Vinke was one of the most bizarre learning experiences I ever had, though I usually got A's from Dr. Vinke and never had to give her a jar of watermelon rind pickles. After a unit on Aristotelian logic she told us she hoped we realized that none of this worked in real life. If you didn't believe her, you should try it on your date Saturday night in the back seat of your car. Also, in reference to the required reading of the The New York Sunday Times, she said that her colleagues thought of The Times as being akin to the Bible, but not to believe it, since The Times just supports our liberal prejudices.

It was a stroke of fate that I signed up for Vinke’s section in the first place. For that Winter Quarter, the class signup schedule had a designation for the student major that a certain section was intended for. Vinke’s class was intended for Education Majors, another section for Engineers, etc. Whether this idea originated in the English Department or the Registrar’s Office, I do not know. But it did not work because of conflicts with other courses; students needed a range of choices. I might well have chosen another time and another instructor, but for these section designations. At any rate, this system of designating sections was never used again. My association with Vinke was meant to be.

Dr. Vinke used to reserve the faculty lounge in the student union building and have us meet for her Shakespeare class there, instead of the regular classroom, because it was a better environment for discussing Shakespeare, over coffee and for some, including Dr. Vinke, cigarettes. (She used to carry a carton of Marlboros sticking out of her purse.)

Once, having commuted to class from our ranch near Gallatin Gateway in a snow storm, I raced up the stairs of Montana Hall and when I opened the door, the class greeted me with a burst of laughter. "Great timing, Mr. Gary," said Dr. Vinke, "I had just said, 'The sky must be falling; Mr. Gary isn't here.'"

In Shakespeare class she told us that all great drama consisted of blood, guts, and sex. Nobility of expression and thought was just frosting on the cake. A day after having us write a description of a spectacle from Richard III, she threw our papers in the waste basket, then produced sheets of butcher paper and crayons and had us draw a spectacle instead, because spectacle is a visual experience.

Did she know her Shakespeare? All I can say is that I had no trouble getting an A the summer of 1961 when I studied Shakespeare under Angus Bowmer, founding director of the Oregon Shakespeare Festival in Ashland, Oregon. Nor did I have trouble in courses in Shakespeare and in Renaissance Drama other than Shakespeare when earning a master's degree at the University of Oregon. In fact, I was urged to use my copy of the Harrison edition of Shakespeare instead of the Craig edition which was the departmental adoption at Oregon, because the professor felt that the Harrison was superior editorially. Who had picked the Harrison edition? Dr. Vinke.

I do not know classical Greek, but recall Dr. Vinke reading short passages of Homer’s Iliad aloud in Greek. She assigned the Richmond Lattimore translation which was new at the time and which she felt came closest to capturing the flow of classical Greek and, she mentioned in passing, that she had ridden the Freedom Train through Greece after World War II.

A friend of mine at the University of Oregon, a PhD candidate, saw me with the Lattimore translation. He was from Princeton and he expressed his surprise that anyone from Montana State would have even known about it! Additionally, Carolyn Alexander in her new book, The War That Killed Achilles, uses the Lattimore translation, except for her final chapter where she explains the necessity of using her own translation because of copyright problems.

Dr. Vinke also assigned Edith Hamilton’s Mythology. Before writing this book and others on Greece and Rome, Hamilton was Headmistress at Bryn Mawr School and the dates of her life overlap Vinke’s. On January 19, 2010, I was in the Border’s Books on Union Square in San Francisco and Hamilton’s Mythology was on display! Another of her books is The Greek Way.

[Site Master’s Note: We can see how perceptive Dr. Vinke was on knowledge of Greek classics, by observing that the Lattimore translation is still in print by the University of Chicago Press, with the current cover decked out with raves from rival translators. Also, it reveals that Lattimore taught at Bryn Mawr for a number of years, a campus that seems then to have been quite focused on the Greek Classical, and Roman Classical Civilizations. This remains true even to this day.]

[Second Site Master’s Note: In addition to Professor Lattimore, Professor Vinke seems to have had many close connections with the Bryn Mawr Campus. Did she go to school there, have friends there, and work with other faculty on projects there? We are seeking more information concerning this. For example, Robert Pirsig got the idea that she had attended school there and mentioned “The Seven Sisters” in this regard. See "Letters to & from Robert Pirsig 1994-2005" and "Letters to & from Robert Pirsig 2006-2007" for Mr. Pirsig's full letters to Henry Gurr.]

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More of the Sarah J. Vinke I Knew

Nearing graduation, I went to Dr. Vinke’s office to ask her to serve as an employment reference. When I asked Dr. Vinke for permission to use her as a job reference, she seemed delighted. I asked her why she preferred to be called Mrs. Vinke rather than Dr. Vinke and she said because she had a lot harder time getting a husband than a PhD and he didn't last nearly as long. (If memory serves me correctly, Dr. Vinke had been married to the MSC Dean of Agriculture.)

As part of the employment reference office visit, she asked me to tell her something about myself, like where I was from. I told her that despite being born in Chicago, I had essentially grown up at 421 West Main in Bozeman and on the family ranch two miles past Gallatin Gateway, near the foot of Gallatin Canyon and that my father (BS, Electrical Engineering, 1928) and two aunts were graduates of MSC. She said “You mean that you've gone all the way through MSC without telling anyone on the faculty this?” I responded that I didn't think this information had anything to do with me. She said something to the effect that it doesn't have anything to do with you, but it’s wonderful that you wanted to make it on your own. She said I would be surprised at the pressure put on the staff by alums to give their children top grades. "You've got Character, Mr. Gary," Mrs. Vinke said. She followed that with “You're Quality,” and in my bewilderment I told her that I associated the term quality with laundry detergents, coffee brands, and Buicks. Then she went off on a discussion of Character and Quality, but I just remember being surprised and confused by her reaction. For weeks after that in my study room at the Phi Sigma Kappa house or in the dark of the fraternity dormitory, I pondered what she had said.

Weeks later I was still pondering her statements that I “had character and quality”. It was as if I had been given a [huge] charge to do something with my life. Like Pirsig’s [comment in ZMM re Sarah herself], I would say her messages were perhaps Delphic in nature. What did she really mean? I think there is something of the inscrutable in such multi-faceted (complex) characters, as persons like Sarah Vinke. Someone, perhaps Sarah, said when teaching Shakespeare, you must always teach Hamlet last, or you will never get to another play. I can't remember the figures, but even today, new books and essays on Hamlet appear daily.

In fact, the following year in the darkness of my attic room at Mrs. Elliott's boarding house in Klamath Falls, Oregon, with my lights out and waiting to doze off, I would wonder about it, after a day teaching high school English. What kind of charge had she given me? "You've got Character, Mr. Gary!!" …“You're Quality!!”.

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Sarah Vinke on Quality

Henry Gurr asked me about Sarah’s use of the word “Quality” in relation to Robert Pirsig. To me, the quotation below from ZMM pinpoints the powerful influence Sarah had on Pirsig:

I suspect that Sarah refuses to be categorized, that she both talked about and acted out Quality, though acting it out without labeling her actions or intellectualizing them. The only time I remember her addressing Quality by name was in that appointment where I asked for a reference.

Once she told us, “You must shake your fist at fate. You mustn't let the gods think they are getting the better of you.“ Let me give an example of how she applied this to herself: At the point of getting one of her degrees, she had had her purse stolen. In response, she withdrew her last twenty dollars from the bank and went out and bought the biggest, ugliest woman's hat she could find!!

Dr. Vinke told me she was the third woman to be hired at MSC back in the early 1930's, joining Beatrice Freeman Davis and Kay Roberts. I had met Beatrice through my grandmother when Beatrice was retired and invalided, working on a never completed book. Kay Roberts I had met in passing because she was the wife of Arthur Roberts, drama coach and American history teacher at Gallatin County High School (now Bozeman Senior High School). There is confusion as to correct spelling of Sarah’s married name: On the Montana Hall roster it was “Vinke,” but in catalogs and schedules it was “Vinki.” She had an explanation, but I can't remember it.

In Oral & Written Communication, Dr. Vinke told us to “Take very good care of the textbook, Effective Communication, and only bring it to class when asked, so that it would be in good condition when we went to sell it on the used book market, because it wasn't “worth keeping.” I said to Jack Barsness that I found that strange since Howard Dean had dedicated the book to her. Jack said the reason for the dedication was that the manuscript had been rejected by the publisher the first time it was submitted and Mr. Dean was moaning and groaning and wringing his hands about the rejection. Dr. Vinke told him to stop his whining, that she would take the manuscript home and fix it for him. When resubmitted, it was accepted by Prentice-Hall. But Jack said Sarah was right, the book still wasn't worth keeping.

TO DR. SARAH VINKE

Without her encouragement and help, the work
upon which this book is based would not have
been undertaken.

[Site Master’s Note: Here, as in many other reports of Mrs. Vinke, we see she is sensitive to needs of others, and willingly and extensively comes to their aid. As well, we see how effective she was when she decided to take action!]

I told Barsness that I had gotten a lot out of Mr. Dean's Introduction to Literature course which was essentially a course on the New Criticism as put forth by I.A. Richards. But Jack said that the New Criticism was not what literature was about. On the other hand, Jack said that when Howard got that computer brain of his clicking, Jack was powerless against it. For more on Howard Dean click here.

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Self-Criticism in Speech

Dr. Gurr sent me Sarah Vinke’s article, “Self-Criticism in Speech,” which was about in-class speech instruction and helping students be at ease and better able to accept the criticism of fellow students. He asked me if what Dr. Vinke’s article stated fit my experience.

What speech I took from Vinke was incorporated in the Oral and Written Communication course. I am trying to remember what procedures she used. I know they were not just one speech after another. A perhaps irrelevant memory is of the female student who at the beginning of her talk draped a cat cadaver floating in formaldehyde in a sealed clear plastic container over the speaker stand, but did not refer to it at all during her speech. When asked about it afterward, the student said that we were told the importance of using an attention getting device and that it had certainly caught our attention. (By the way, it was commonly thought you should keep close watch on your pet cat during the term dissection was being taught in science courses.) The methods Dr. Vinke advocates in her “Self-Criticism in Speech” sound like something she may have done, but I have no clear memories of it, something perhaps complicated by the fact that I took a good, though more conventional speech course my senior year at Gallatin High, which included being the announcer for a fifteen-minute radio show recorded in class but broadcast over a local radio station; so I still got nervous giving talks, but accepted it as natural and as something that went away with time.

[Site Master’s Note: For more information about Dr. Vinke’s full “Self-Criticism in Speech” article, please click on this main menu item at left. What we know is posted there, along with Mr. Gary and Professor Gurr’s related observations.]

I would be curious to know if in various searches for people who knew Vinke, anyone has run across June Dalyrimple (sp.) who was Dr. Vinke’s teaching assistant during the 1956-57 school year, Ms. Dalyrimple was the instructor from whom I took the first quarter of Oral and Written Communication. I know that Mrs. Vinke, shortly into the winter quarter she subsequently taught me, said that I was already pretty good at this stuff. “Who did you have for fall quarter?” And when I told her, said “That explains it. She's my assistant."

On one occasion, when Dr. Vinke was going to be gone to a conference for a week, she assigned speeches and asked me to go each day to get the key to her office from the department secretary, pick up her roll book and a tape recorder, and to call on the students in turn to give their talks. I remember that there was more to it than that, such as writing comments and handing them to the speaker, the speaker answering questions, etc. At the time, I was concerned about being considered the teacher’s pet, but did as instructed. In retrospect, again, was Mrs. Vinke sending a message to me about my future?

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Concerning Professors Parker, Burlingame, and Vinke’s Methods of Conducting Speech Classes and the Vinke Article “Self Criticism in Speech” in the Journal Western Speech.

Merrill Burlingame of the History Department, in a Methods of Teaching Social Studies course, had us orally deliver our term papers [in class] and accept questions from the class on them. In this respect, be sure to study John Parker’s methods (in the discussion below regarding MSC English Faculty,) where it says “deliver term papers orally“.

[Site Master’s Note: This could possibly indicate an influence by Dr. Vinke on these two faculty members, or the reverse. Also note that Mr. Gary’s memories fit well the procedures discussed in Dr. Vinke’s paper “Self-Criticism in Speech” which appeared in Western Speech: Volume 15 Issue: Issue 1, Jan 1951 by Sarah Jennings Vinke.]

[Second Site Master’s Note: The above-mentioned Vinke Article “Self Criticism in Speech”, is available in most University Libraries and on the Internet for about $30. Serious ZMM fans and researchers may e-mail me for more info. Click on the link at upper left in the main menu for more information. We will post on this page perhaps 200 selected words of Vincke’s article here on ZMMQ, if the copyright permission is not too expensive.]

I can remember doing a research paper for Dr. Vinke in which she had us put the footnotes immediately following the line of text the footnote referred to and setting the note off with page-width underscores, rather than having the notes at the foot of the page or the foot of the paper as is usual. It was one of three methods in the Effective Communication book, but not a lot of fun in the days where we were limited to manual typewriters. The idea of this format was that the eye did not have to jump back and forth between the bottom of the page or paper and the text.

I commented to Dr. Vinke that nobody actually uses this method.

Sarah's response, "I know, that's why I assigned it."

The same applies to a book report assigned in her Shakespeare class in which she wanted us to write down all the interesting details we remembered from Marchette Chute's Shakespeare of London. I did the more conventional review on the strong points of the book. I got a C on it. When I approached Dr. Vinke with the complaint that nobody assigns book reports where you recite details from the book, she again said, "I know, that's why I did it."

When I asked if I could do the report over again according to her instructions, Sarah said, "Oh, don't waste your time. I'm going to give you an A anyway."

In the freshman communications course, it was a departmental requirement that we read Harper's magazine every month. Dr. Vinke required us to outline the articles and put our outlines on the board, contrasting them to the outlines of other students who also put their outlines on the board. I was mystified at the time why we did this, but perhaps it fits with the Sarah Vinke method outlined in her article in Western Speech.

Sarah could snap back. A student told her that he had gotten C's on all his Shakespeare tests, but a D for a final grade. Her response was that nobody who can't write a decent complex sentence deserves a passing grade in Shakespeare. The student said this D could keep him from getting a teaching certificate in English and her response was, "I certainly hope it does."

A week or so after the start of freshman English, she also told us that things would ease up after the drop deadline had passed and she got the class down to a workable size. She said, “Any graduate from a Montana high school will be admitted to MSC, but we don't have to keep them.” I remember that during freshman orientation week, a speaker had told us to look on either side of us. “Only one of you will be here four years from now. Two of you will have flunked out.”

An athletic coach and his wife were in the Shakespeare class. Sarah found the opportunity to remark that there was a curious perversion of the Greek word "mentor" on the sports page. "Well," she concluded, "if a coach can be called a mentor, a guide to the wise, so can a kindergarten teacher." This after having walked into the room, taking a cup of coffee from the hand of the coach, and saying, "How thoughtful of you." Minutes later she said, "Oh, dear, I just realized you bought this coffee for yourself, not me." This as she finished off the cup of coffee!!

I did not take the second quarter of Shakespeare offered by Dr. Vinke, because of a schedule conflict. I did read King Lear that summer which I spent on the family ranch. When I went in and asked to discuss it with her, she was delighted and liked the fact that I felt Lear equaled or surpassed Hamlet as a tragedy. Dr. Vinke, in fact, never made it to the Romans in our Classics course, simply saying on the last day that the Romans were all a bunch of copycats and that all we had to do is substitute the Roman/Latin names for the Greek names and we would have it all.

Henry Gurr asked me to comment on the list of books from Sarah's home, posted with Letters To From Pirsig on his website. [See "Letters to & from Robert Pirsig 1994-2005" and "Letters to & from Robert Pirsig 2006-2007" for Mr. Pirsig's full letters to Henry Gurr.] Unfortunately, I have none of my books from that era, having moved once too often and left such behind. However here are the memories elicited by reading that list: The names Fitts, Fitzgerald, and Graves are all familiar. We did study in detail Oedipus Rex and Antigone, but I have no way of identifying the translations used. In an introductory class of twelve weeks (really more like ten) it would be hard to go into great depth on translation issues. Referring back to my earlier notes on Vinke, I several times brought up the Richmond Lattimore translation of the Iliad and proofs of the high regard in which it was (is) held by such scholars as Fitzgerald. Also, I noted Sarah reading (reciting) in Greek on occasion.

In Shakespeare class, she had us buy, in addition to The Complete Shakespeare, the College Outline Series of outlines of the plots of the plays. She said this was not cheating, because the plots were common knowledge in Shakespeare's day. Also she assigned Marchette Chute’s Shakespeare of London which more appropriately could have been titled The London of Shakespeare. Curiously, the book was researched entirely in the New York City Public Library. It certainly makes more sense than the wilder suppositions in Stephen Greenbladt's Will in the World.

My parents had to practically drag me to the movie Bridge on the River Kwai because I thought I should stay at home and study Hamlet. The next day Dr. Vinke spent the whole hour discussing the Bridge on the River Kwai.

[Site Master’s Note: Is this the Populist, as opposed to the Greek Classics, Sarah Vinke coming out?]

Joe Fitch, who was the modern drama teacher and coach, had insisted that Death of a Salesman was not a tragedy because Willy Loman lacked heroic stature and so could not suffer a great fall.

Dr. Vinke insisted that in the day and age of the common man it was the spirit we measured and its fall and therefore Willy Loman was a tragic hero.

In Shakespeare, she told us that there was a revisionist theory that Richard III was a fine, upstanding king who had been smeared by history. “Don’t you believe it. He was a dirty, nasty little humpback just like he appears in the play,” Vinke said.

[Site Master’s Note: Mr. Gary discovered the Sarah Vinke article “Books I’ve Enjoyed” which was published in The Montana Library Association Quarterly, Volume 5, Number 3 (April 1960), on page 6. The article is available on the Montana Library Association site. Navigating to the article is not easy, but as Dennis Gary said: “… there is Sarah in all her bizarre glory. You will have to search [read closely] for "Vinke", but she's there… To find the article, once the link comes up, type “Vinke” into the box at the upper right, and hit GO. Be patient! Slowly the journal pages will appear, and the little book icons (also upper right). Use the book icons to go from page to page.]

[Second Site Master’s Note: A copy of the Vincke article “Books I’ve Enjoyed,” and related commentary, are available on this site.]

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Shakespeare, a Possible Reflection of Vinke, the Populist

Henry,
You said your original impressions of Professor Vinke, from ZMM, were those of a Classicist, and an academic. And based on this you were totally surprised by Professors Vinke’s chatty commoner’s article, “Books I’ve Enjoyed,” mentioned above. Perhaps the populism you sense in Sarah is also illustrated by Shakespeare and his theater. Here are some of my memories about Shakespeare. It is probable I got a lot of them from Professor Vinke.

Shakespeare was a commoner, born in Stratford on Avon and thought to have gotten the standard public education of his day. He disappeared for a number of years to surface in London as an actor first, and a playwright second, with what became the King's Company. Formal "scripts" were not published as they would make the play susceptible to theft by other companies. It is thought that some of the earlier Quartos were written out from memory by other players. It was only after Shakespeare's death that his plays were assembled by others into the Folio editions. (Quartos were printed on pages folded into fourths, Folios into halves.) Much effort has been expended trying to prove that a member of the educated or royal class secretly wrote the plays, for example Queen Elizabeth’s trusted and close adviser, Francis Bacon. But most scholars still feel they were the work of Shakespeare.

The plots were common to Shakespeare's day and the histories frequently borrow verbatim from Holinshed's Chronicles.

Shakespeare's audience included not only royalty and the aristocracy, but the groundlings who stood on the floor of the theater (cold bare earth!) as opposed to sitting in the surrounding tiers of boxes that the upper class used.

The stage projected into the audience and the groundlings were known to jump onto the stage, especially during fight scenes.

As Sarah noted, the commoners and the roustabouts in the plays were much more realistic than the kings and queens, because Shakespeare knew them firsthand.

Shakespeare's contemporary, Ben Jonson, referred to him as Will Shakes-scene, because of Shakespeare's habit of borrowing from other people's plays.

Today, we think of Shakespeare as the possession of the educated classes, but in his day the fans ranged from Elizabeth I to street urchins.

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Memories Triggered

Henry Gurr asked me to review the transcript of his interview with Shirley Luhrsen, a student who took classes from Professor Vinke and later taught English under Vinke’s direction. This triggered the memories below:

I've been in the house Shirley Luhrsen describes in your telephone interview with her as being that of Dr. Vinke, eaten those dishes she describes, seen and heard that piano. I can't remember who played it but was asked if I would like to (I don’t play.) I can't remember who all was there or what the occasion. But sometime before the party, Sarah walked into a class I was in, not her own, and handed me an envelope saying, "Here, this is for you." Inside was an invitation. Only one or two other students in the class got an invitation. I was staying in my fraternity’s house at the time. What a contrast!

I don't think I have much more on Sarah's home. It may have been a duplex arrangement. Not so much cluttered as tightly organized, a place for everything and everything in its place. I may have also been concerned with getting back across town to the fraternity house for dinner as we were fined for missing it.

In regard to your questions on Sarah and religion that you asked of Shirley, I'm trying to remember what Sarah said about church, probably to me in her office. It was something to the effect that the importance of Sunday attendance was to get away from the cares of the workaday world and commune (she did not say with what or whom).

Shirley tells you of Sarah’s trouble getting around with a cane, during her final years at MSC. Montana Hall did have an elevator, but it was so slow you would have to allow fifteen minutes to get the elevator to go three floors and back. Rolling open the door took strength as well.

Shirley alludes to a Bozeman production of Henry IV and Sarah explaining the stir it caused in the community. What I remember fits this well: I have studied the Henry plays under Sarah; and under Angus Bowmer, at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival, who at the time was producing Henry IV, Part I. While I was there, Bowmer himself played the part of Falstaff that summer. Also, Waldo McNair at U. Oregon covered this and related plays. In the play Henry IV, the character Falstaff is engaged in leading Prince Hal astray and frequents the “house” of Mistress Quickley and Doll Tearsheet. He also drafts rich men’s sons into his army and then lets them buy their way out using the money to hire his barfly cronies. In order to get credit for slaying an enemy soldier, Falstaff stabs a dead man, saying, “The better part of valor is discretion.” One can imagine how all this went over in small town Montana seventy or more years ago. I think Sarah alluded once to the local production and its problems, but I can’t remember anything specific. Teaching veterans on the GI Bill could be an added problem even when I was in school because many were still taking advantage of the GI Bill rather than going to class out of any love of learning. Also, of course they were somewhat older and more experienced in the way of the world.

Shirley's mention of WWII veterans brought back this memory: Once when Sarah stepped in on a minute’s notice to substitute in Major American Writers for Paul Grieder, and was certainly filling in time, she asked how many of us even knew what Moby Dick was. Before anyone could chime in about it being the name of a book and a whale, a veteran chimed in that it was a venereal disease. It didn't phase Sarah who just laughed with the rest of us and then went on.

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Memories of Professor Sarah Vinke’s Colleagues in the Montana State University English Department

1956 -1960

In the 1950s, many English instructors at MSC, pretty much were self-proclaimed specialists, so that Jack Barsness, who actually was fascinated by pulp-Westerns, taught creative writing and the second term of Major American Writers. Titus Kurtichanov, whose master's was in Education, taught Russian Literature because his parents were Russian and he taught Bible Literature because he was religious. Mr. Parker (later Dr. Parker) was a technical writing instructor (an important course at MSC), but also taught Major British Writers, according to Jack Barsness, because nobody else wanted the damn thing. Jack said if he had been stuck with the sequence he would have skipped the entire era of Romantic Poetry from Wordsworth through Keats and Shelly. Paul Grieder, who at the time headed the English Department, had a certain laissez faire attitude which allowed his staff to do pretty much what they felt like, according to Jack.

[Site Master’s Note: This also applied to Sarah Vinke, who thus had the liberty to teach the course in Greek and Roman Classics, for the entire campus. In the words of Dennis Gary, “I have a feeling that Sarah was more than a self-proclaimed specialist, in that she also had the formal training, although I guess we don’t know for sure.”]

Robert Pirsig

Here is an account concerning my knowledge of Robert Pirsig and the Robert Deweeses, during my time at MSC. If memory serves me now, Pirsig was asked to cover for another instructor, Mr. Lawrence (Sp), in a course in English Romantic Poetry. I was in this class when Pirsig stated that he had nothing to say on the subject of English Romantic poetry and went on to one of his own favorite topics, Quality, and that is where the topic of the DeWeeses’ studio and Quality came into my awareness, and why I made a brief visit to the DeWeese studio. Unfortunately, I had been drilled by my parents that the Garys were not artistic and so did not seek to get involved, though the people at the studio were friendly.

I believe that the Theory of Writing textbook Pirsig hated (as stated in ZMM) was almost certainly Effective Communication, Howard Dean, Prentice-Hall. This presumes that the freshman sequence Pirsig taught was Oral and Written Communication. There was also a freshman sequence which was simply called Written Composition, but it used a different textbook and was in fact spearheaded by Jack Barsness. Pirsig might have taught that sequence instead. For more on Howard Dean.

Robert Pirsig may also have felt stifled by Roland R. Renne, the President of Montana State College during those years MSC President Roland R. Renne.

And for an enlarged perspective of the pressures that Pirsig refers to in ZMM, read "Threats to Academic Freedom at Montana State College," History Professor Robert Dunbar's Monograph.

Robert Pirsig's Letter to Montana Governor Nutter reported in the Bozeman Daily Chronicle, protesting budget cuts at MSC, go to MSC Instructor Asks Probe Over Budget Issue.

Peter Voulkos, whose vases Pirsig mentioned in ZMM and who was a student of Robert DeWeese, became famous for his ceramics, etc. and spent much time in the San Francisco Bay Area. His family lived about a block from my grandparents in Bozeman and his mother used to come over to have my grandmother read and explain to her mail she had received that was written in English. The Voulkoses were Greek. (Spelled as Voulkas in ZMM, which must be in error.)

John Parker

It's strange how things keep folding into each other. I mentioned John Parker in regard to a Major British Writers course and also that he was primarily a technical writing teacher. Now I see a reference to him in Ian Glendinning's mention of Pirsig's paper on "Quality in Freshman Writing." I can remember seeing a notice of Parker delivering this paper for Pirsig and finding it passing strange that a professor many years Pirsig's senior would be doing so. Both Parker and Pirsig were mild mannered and innocuous in appearance. Little would I have suspected that Pirsig was about to leap into cultural history or that Parker would be associated at least in passing with. MOQ.

Apparently, Parker was also interacting with Vinke. He used to give open book essay tests in Major British Writers (a practice I later used in ninth grade college prep courses). But more to the point, he set a term paper deadline several weeks before the end of the quarter and then had us present our papers orally to the class and we were expected to answer questions from the class and himself on the papers. Also, the class was supposed to take notes during the presentation and hand them up to the speaker, after which he could comment on them and take questions from the class. At the beginning of the third term of British Writers, Parker informed us that his procedure for having us deliver term papers orally was an adaptation of a procedure advocated by Dr. Sarah Vinke of the English Department. (This is similar to what Professor Vinke advocated in her article: “Self-Criticism in Speech”.) Incidentally, I discovered that Parker enjoyed off-color humor so I used to build a reference to something bawdy into my term papers. It worked every time.

I always thought that Parker didn’t much care for me. But when my roommate, a chemical engineering major, was having trouble with technical writing, Parker suggested he find an English major to help him with his grammar. When my roommate asked him if he thought I could do it, Parker told him his troubles were over. So, there I was correcting the grammar of a paper I didn’t even understand and succeeding!
[Site Master’s Note: The above-mentioned Vinke Article “Self Criticism in Speech”, is available in most University Libraries and on the Internet for about $30. Serious ZMM fans and researchers may e-mail me for more info. Click on the link at upper left in the main menu for more information. We will post on this page perhaps 200 selected words of Vincke’s article here on ZMMQ, if the copyright permission is not too expensive.]

Verne Dusenberry

Regarding Verne Dusenberry, one of Robert Pirsig’s fellow professors who is extensively featured in Pirsig’s book Lila, I think that the course I took from Dusenberry involved a trans-cultural approach to literature. This was a concept at the time I found something of a stretch and a bore, though looking back I can see its importance. (I wish I had an old MSC catalog so I could give the exact name of the course.)

Dusenberry offered a course on Montana Indians through the history department, which at the time was headed by Merrill G. Burlingame. Professor Burlingame, who had written a high school level textbook on Montana history, taught a course in it at MSC.

[Site Master’s Note: A collection of research materials on MSC/MSU history from 1895-1968 collected by Merrill G. Burlingame is available here.]

[Second Site Master’s Note: A collection of Verne Dusenberry’s papers, including those relating to his time at MSC/MSU and his extensive research on Northern Plains Indians, is available here.]

Titus Kurtichanov

Further afield, Titus Kurtichanov was of Vinke's generation and also a full professor at MSC. He had me deliver a paper I had written on the parallels between Crime and Punishment and The Brothers Karamazov to our Russian Literature class. He was delighted when a fellow student caught me in a contradiction.

Kurtichanov used to wander into other instructors’ classes, ask them what they were doing today and when they responded, say, "That's a good idea. I think I'll try that." He later explained that he used to forget where he was going and since he was in the wrong class, he had to say something.

When Verne Dusenberry suffered a serious illness several years later, who was it that came charging out of retirement to volunteer to teach his classes for free? No one else butTitus Kurtichanov at age seventy! The one time I visited Mr. Kurtichanov at his apartment, he was in the basement, flat on his back trying to fix the boiler in the absence of the manager. He had been forced into retirement because they could hire two new instructors for what they were paying him. At the cemetery upon the death of my mother, I looked up from my mother's burial ceremony, and whose second-hand Cadillac came barreling up the cemetery road but Kurtichanov's. He came running up the hill, saying “I was afraid I'd be late.” Later a fraternity brother who was in one of Kurtichanov's classes said Kurtichanov had walked into class the day of the funeral and said he had belatedly heard of my mother's death and the test scheduled that day was not as important as his being at the funeral, and if any one didn't like it that was just tough. Then he walked out the door of the classroom, to attend my Mother’s funeral.

Kurtichanov liked second-hand Cadillacs because he figured they were the only cars big enough to deal with his girth and he could not afford new Cadillacs.

Walking past Kurtichanov's office one day, I saw him in his swivel chair reading a copy of Time Magazine. Knowing the liberal bent of his fellow department members, I expressed surprise.

Kurtichanov swiveling to face me, a big smile on his face, eyes twinkling, said, “I do this on purpose. The other day Mr. Dickinson walked by, and when he saw me reading Time, snorted, '"Time Magazine thinks Abraham Lincoln is still President.”

“I looked at him and said, 'Young man, you've forgotten that Lincoln ever was President.”

I personally had a grudge against Dickinson, since he had given me a C+ the Spring Quarter of Oral and Written Communication. I guess he sensed my conservative background. He'd returned one paper in which I had quoted an article from the Reader's Digest with the comment, “You should be ashamed of yourself quoting the boobs Bible” in the margin.

Charles Billings, III

Charles Billings, III joined the Theatre Arts program at MSC in 1958 or 1959. He was from one of the Carolinas. I took a course in play production from him because I had to, not because I wanted to. Commuting made participating in his program difficult for me. So, I thought he didn't much care for me. But back on campus after my mother's funeral, who comes running across the campus, against the traffic lights, cars screeching to a halt, but Charles Billings, III. "Was that your mother I read about in the paper?" he asked. "Yes, it was," I said. "I'm so sorry,” he said. “Here, let me give you a big hug."

As I finish the above, it seems that some of the ideas that contributed to MOQ were almost palpable in the air at MSC at that time. And this is turning into to a real Remembrance of Things Past!

Jack Barsness

In addition to the comments above, I remember that Jack was a big bear of a man, especially compared to his colleagues. He had dark bushy hair, was portly to say the least, and tended to wear pink shirts, purple ties, a heavy black corduroy jacket, and brown and white checked slacks. He also appears in ZMM.

Joe Fitch

Fitch taught Modern Drama and directed productions at MSC. He decided to stage Streetcar Named Desire, but had to get approval by the Dean of Women. This Dean Brown had veto power, but had to pick one of three plays submitted. So Joe submitted it along with two of the most risqué French plays he could find and Dean Brown was thus forced to pick the lesser of evils, Streetcar.

A few years ago, the director of a theater in Marin County, CA told me that Joe was one of the greatest theater people he had ever known.

By the way, one of the historic streetcars on Market Street, San Francisco, was obtained from New Orleans. Its destination sign reads “Desire.”

Paul Grieder

Paul Grieder headed the English Department during the years I was at MSC (1956-1960). He graduated from Iowa, though he did not have a PhD. I told him once that I had relatives from Dubuque who used the expression "usen't to" He was Episcopalian and spent some of his childhood with his father on a mission to China. At any rate, Grieder said, "Gary, Irish, and Catholic: the wrong side of the tracks. That explains the usage." (I am Irish, but not a Catholic.) Actually, we got along well. When Mr. Dean broke into an appointment I had with Grieder, saying, "Paul, this can't wait," Grieder told him it would have to, that this time was reserved for me. As Dean withdrew a starled look of disbelief on his face, a document of some sort clasped firmly in his hand, I told Grieder he didn't have to do that but Grieder said he did. "This hour is for you." For more on Howard Dean . . .

In an entirely different matter, when Paul Grieder decided to take over Jack Barsness' Magazine Article Writing course when Barsness was ill, he proved so boring and his remarks so irrelevant that my fellow students decided to boycott his Friday presentation. As I raced up the stairs of Montana Hall to get to class, I met my classmates coming down and they literally grabbed me, holding me high in the air and taking me with them back down the stairs of Montana Hall, telling me that they had decided "we" would boycott Grieder's lecture as we exited. When Jack Barsness returned, Grieder ordered Barsness to dock all of our grades by one full letter, meaning I would get a B instead of an A. As in private I pleaded with Barsness not to dock my grade, Jack replied, "Tell you what I'll do. Since Paul will in no way make an exception for you, when you take my Short Story Writing course, if you do all the assignments acceptably, I will guarantee you an A."

Grieder was delighted that I wrote for the school paper, calling me a master of indirection. "Every time I think you've lost it and I'm reaching for a marking pen, everything falls into place, usually in the last word of the last sentence. You've pulled me through a subject I did not even care about, trying to figure out what you were getting at, but only then finding out." When he found out I preferred being called by my middle name, Dennis, he said he would announce that at the next departmental meeting. “You mean you actually talk about me at faculty meetings?” I asked, and he replied, “All the time.” Paul told us once that he had slept all night in a Chinese opium den while hitchhiking in China. Most of the students thought, oh, that's what’s the matter with Grieder. Grieder won a trip to Israel and offered to report on it in Kurtichanov's Bible Literature course. "Tell us about Bethlehem,” implored Kurtichanov. "It's one of the filthiest places I've ever been," he reported, much to Kurtichanov's dismay.

Howard Dean

I have mentioned Howard Dean several places above, specifically in Sarah Vinke on Quality. Howard Dean headed the freshman English course, Oral and Written Communication, and authored its textbook, Effective Communication published by Prentice Hall and findable on Amazon.com (later editions also bearing Ken Bryson's name as well as Dean's). This almost certainly is the textbook which totally frustrated Pirsig (interesting I brought this possibility up earlier, click Robert Pirsig).

Below find the cover of EFFECTIVE COMMUNICATION:

Dean was very intense (as I also indicated). He and Barsness had their differences, but I thought Dean an excellent teacher in his courses Introduction to Literature and the Modern Novel, especially in his explication of William Faulkner's stream of consciousness novel The Sound and the Fury. Howard Dean was a proponent of I. A. Richard's New Criticism concept which emphasized the text, but as a matter of standard practice, ignored the historical context of a piece of literature and the author's life (perhaps a much needed correction of the emphasis on the author -- the text be damned). But Jack Barsness protested that the New Criticism was not what literature was all about. On the other hand, Jack said that when Howard got that damned computer-like brain of his clicking, Jack was powerless against it.

Dean had a degree from the University of Chicago, although not a PhD. Cliff Davis who taught Zoology had earned his doctorate from Chicago, quoted one of his Zoology professors there as defining life as "one damn thing after another."

Dean is mentioned neither in ZMM nor Lila, but Pirsig does mention him in the following:

'''From:
The transcript of the “Metaphysics of Quality: A New Paradigm for Values & Healing” discussion featuring Robert Pirsig with Leland ‘Chip’ Baggett from'
“THE HEART OF THE MATTER:
VALUES FOR A WORLD COMMUNITY”CONFERENCE ,
July 29th - August 1st, 1993 San Diego, California. Recorded by MichaelBran 'From the 1993 Conference of the Association for Humanistic Psychology, a pre-Conference Institute with Robert Pirsig and Chip Baggett on the Metaphysics of Quality: A New Paradigm for Values and Healing.'

[Pirsig states:]

He [Phaedrus] was a new instructor and the Faculty was there a long time and they were asking reasonable and logical questions. Some of them were University of Chicago graduates and they had heard this old business about values for a long time and they asked the almost classic question: "Alright, are these values you're talking about in the subject or are they in the object?"
The fellow who asked had the name Howard Dean. He was the de-facto Head of the Department and he wanted an answer to that question. He said: "You go into your classroom and you go talking about values, all right, come up [and] deliver with us too. I mean you may buffalo your freshman students but we got a little more sophistication here." So he was really in a spot… I was really on a spot! Well, they gave [Phaedrus] a dilemma here.
He said: "Because if Quality lies in the object, you got to ask yourself: 'If this is a high quality watch I have to be able to say where it is in scientific terms, I am going to find the Quality in the watch and you'll find that if you examine it too closely the Quality isn't in the watch, the quality is in my relationship to the watch and other people might have a different relationship.'"
So the question came up: "Is it subjective? If it's subjective, is it whatever you like?" And that was unsatisfactory. [Phaedrus] went between the horns of this dilemma, he went through it and he said: "Quality is not subjective, Quality is not objective, Quality is a third entity, which is neither one. It is independent of both subjects and objects." Now you wouldn't normally assume that's so but in logic it's a completely permissible equation to take that third alternative and he took it. And that was the beginning of this long structure: the MOQ…
(The above excerpt, from the AHP Conference Presentation is used courtesy of Anthony McWatt and Pirsig's complete AHP Conference Presentation appears on McWatt's website devoted to Robert Pirsig. Click here for Pirsig's complete AHP Conference Presentation).

I suppose Pirsig calls Howard Dean, a defacto department head because the actual head Paul Grieder was usually lackadaisical. Howard seemed very intense, a perpetual scowl on his face and would flex his lips as if chewing on something even when he was simply thinking. When driving home a particularly important point, Dean would frequently strike the black board so hard with a stick of chaulk, that the chaulk would shatter, Dean then looking back and forth frantically seeking another chaulk stick! See also Dean's interaction with Paul Grieder.

Pirsig’s Discussion, Is Nested Within Professor Sarah Vinke’s Urgings "Are you really teaching Quality this quarter?" in Pirsig's book, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance.Go to ZMM page 185 last paragraph and continuing on page 186. Also Robert and Gennie DeWeese mention Quality on page 175 from top down.

Dean earned his Bachelor of Philosophy (PhB) degree from the University of Chicago, a university which Robert Pirsig would later attend and is detailed in the later chapters of ZMM after leaving MSC. Go to ZMM page 344 and following pages.

For Sarah Vinke's way of dealing with EFFECTIVE COMMUNICATION's presentation of Logic, see The Sarah J. Vinke I Knew. first paragraph. But then Sarah had sufficient standing in the English Dept. to do so.

For an added perspective on Pirsig's remarks, see Allen Kittell of the MSC History Department remarks Theoretical and Ideal vs. the Practical

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For further discussion of the above see:
Howard Dean Nemesis to Robert Pirsig in the MSC English Department.

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Other Faculty and Events at Montana State College, 1956-1960

MSC President Roland R. Renne

Roland R. Renne was the president of MSC. I knew him, his wife, and daughter. Dr. Renne presided over the tremendous growth of MSC after World War II through 1964. He took a prolonged leave of absence to become economic adviser to the Philippines which displeased many Montanans, but he argued that this position could only enhance the reputation of a college that featured agricultural economics. I did a story for the college paper, The Exponent, on a five-year plan he proposed for the campus. He asked me if he could read it before publication stating that he would in no way censor it but would like to make sure any quotations were accurate. Since I did not take shorthand or use a recorder, I agreed. But Renne was delighted and made no changes.

For years after that if, for example, he saw me at the railroad station, he'd leave his party to shake my hand. As a rule, if he saw someone else in his own campus reserved parking spot, he would block their car with his state-owned car and go on to his office. But once, as he was leaving for the day, he saw me searching for a parking spot. He waved me into his spot, saying he would notify campus police it was okay.

When I needed a leave of absence the last quarter of my senior year due to the fatal illness of my mother, he happened to see another official drawing up the leave. He insisted on signing it himself, adding a sentence to the effect that he intended to grant me my degree on time.

Renne instructed the official, Bernard Copping, the College Treasurer, and a friend of my family's, to add a second sentence, "The faculty's cooperation is required." Turning to Bernie, Dr. Renne stated, if anybody gives Dennis Gary a D, F, or incomplete, I will personally go into the Registrar's Office and up the grade. Academic Freedom goes only so far." I heard this from Dorothy Copping, Bernie's wife.

As to MSC being a teaching college, it may have been hard on the faculty but it was great for the students. At Oregon, professors caught up in publish or perish frequently used their classes as testing grounds for their research at the expense of a comprehensive view of the course material. Faculty concern for the students was quite the opposite at MSC!

For an article on President Renne and other "great" “MSC Presidents", click here: Bozeman Chronicle Newspaper: Posted: Sunday, July 17, 2011 12:15 am

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My Memories, Related to “Radicals” on the MSC Campus

In ZMM, Pirsig refers to all those phony radicals who are really right-wing reactionaries who make it possible for true radicals to exist easily in Montana because they look good by comparison. Here is what I remember:

The University of Montana literary critic banned from speaking on campus (mentioned in ZMM) was Leslie Fiedler. He had already displeased the Montana Board of Regents by an essay criticizing Montana. He did speak across the street at the Lambda Chi Alpha fraternity. Curiously, Dr. Renne refused to ban a known Communist and homosexual from speaking on campus when the American Legion protested.

The essay by Fiedler that upset a dentist on the Montana Board of Regents was entitled “Montana; or the End of Jean-Jacques Rousseau.” In it, he maintained that Montana would have a split personality until it could reconcile the noble savage of the Montana rodeo with the dirty Indian of the Montana reservation. Also, Montana needed to reconcile the noble, heroic cowboy of legend with the cowhand who came to Missoula, Montana, on Friday and Saturday nights, got drunk and staggered down the street to the local whorehouse. This also appears in Fiedler’s An End to Innocence along with “Come Back to the Raft Ag’in, Huck Honey!”, a discussion of the homo-erotic in American Literature. Curiously, Fiedler had turned down offers from Cal in order to return to the University of Montana after World War II. But the Board of Regents felt they were not paying him to write things like this. Eventually he ended up at NYU Buffalo where he made headlines when his daughter turned him in to the police for possession of marijuana. His reaction: he grounded his daughter. No daughter should turn her father in to the police.

The Communist who WAS allowed to speak on campus by Dr. Renne was Bayard Rustin. Rustin also had a morals conviction. Renne told the American Legion and VFW that all students at MSC were able to deal with both homosexuality and Communism.

For a verification of the above incidents and a further perspective see “THREATS TO ACADEMIC FREEDOM AT MONTANA STATE COLLEGE” -- a monograph by Robert G. Dunbar.

Robert G. Dunbar of the History Department was a Marxist. He concluded a lecture on Marx and his theories by saying that a colleague at one of the universities in the Dakotas had told his students that Marx made perfect sense and got fired for it, so he was not going to tell us that. Dr. Dunbar was the only history teacher I had who could tell you on the first day of fall quarter exactly what subjects he would cover and where he would end the course the last day of spring quarter, and actually do so. He was more interested in the trends of history than reciting one detail after another. He also told us that a study of the Reformation proved that Catholics and Protestants should never marry each other. Dr. Dunbar sometimes substituted for the minister of the Bozeman Presbyterian Church, until the parishioners realized that Dunbar was either an agnostic or an atheist. Years later a state of California archivist told me that Robert Dunbar was brilliant and could have gone anywhere he wanted to, but that he preferred staying at MSC where they didn't know a Marxist when they saw (heard?) one.

A Dr. Kittell (sp?), a Stanford University PhD, came to the Montana State History Department in the late 1950's, after he was fired by a California college or university for refusing to sign a loyalty oath. He was an avowed Castroite. How long he was at MSC, I do not know.

Merrill Burlingame, who headed the History Department, was not a radical by any stretch of the imagination. But he told me once that what he liked about me was that I asked questions that other people were afraid to ask. He said he didn't always agree with my answers, but the questions were more important than the answers.

[Site Master’s Note: Sounds a little bit like “radical” Dr. Vinke!]

I wondered if Burlingame and Pirsig had ever met each other? Since Burlingame used to talk about being a law clerk for a noted defense attorney in Minneapolis, Minnesota, I asked if he had ever met Pirsig. He said he only knew of him.

In those years (1958- ) a Dr. Arnold Hauser was hired by MSC to teach Philosophy, I think via the History Department. I believe he got his PhD from the University of Chicago and remember him remarking that when he enrolled at Chicago he was warned that he might never live long enough to leave the University of Chicago. I wonder if he and Pirsig ever talked (compared notes) about the philosophy department at Chicago?

I was once looking at the English Department bulletin board with Dr. Ken Bryson (who taught Speech) and his wife, and commented that a topic of an announced English Department get-together looked interesting, but that I guessed I would never get to attend it. Ken and his wife said they could get me in if I wanted to go, but Ken's wife said that such get-togethers were nothing I could imagine. She said at the last such, her husband and Jack Barsness had engaged in a belching contest. I did, in fact, go—and found it different and the refreshments good. [good is Mr Gary’s manner of speaking.] I did not witness any belching contests.

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Experiences and Memories of Dennis Gary after MSC Graduation

After graduation from MSC, I taught high school English for seven years, in Klamath Falls, Oregon, and in the Sacramento River Delta town of Courtland, California.

Klamath Falls was a lumber town in southern Oregon, not that different from the towns I knew in Montana. The Courtland Joint Union High School District was in the Sacramento Delta, an area of California with a culture all its own. The delta is rich in agricultural resources and not heavily populated. Courtland High was 40% Mexican American, 20% Chinese American, 20% Japanese American, and then the rest of us. The wealthy landowners, growers of tomatoes and pears, were secure and not afraid of new and opposing ideas. At one time Walnut Grove, another town in the district, had an Oriental grade school and a White grade school. The day after Pearl Harbor, the chairman of the elementary school board called a board meeting. He was quoted as saying something to the effect that our Japanese brothers are in trouble and that he would entertain a motion that the Walnut Grove schools be integrated immediately. The Delta, he said, must send a message to the world that it stands as one. The resolution was made and passed. This did not stop the confiscation of Japanese-owned property in the Delta and the Japanese were having a rent strike while I was there, putting the rent in a bank account. Peculiarly, in Locke, a Chinatown also in the district, there is to this day a steak house called Al the Wops.

Thinking about Pirsig and Dr. Vinke, I wonder: Did I teach Quality? That is not for me to say. I was told by the boyfriend of a former student, years later, that the students of the first ninth grade college prep course I taught referred to me in subsequent years as the teacher who made the difference, who taught them skills that worked in every class.

In my second year, another teacher asked what I had done to those students? What had I DONE such that they knew more than the rest of the students? And that the other students knew that they did, and that, in fact, sometimes they knew more than he (their teacher) did and weren't afraid to say so?

I got into a big argument in an English Department meeting where the older teachers complained about my giving open-book essay tests and urging the students to think for themselves. By contrast they said that their Multiple Choice Tests and Matching Tests taught mental discipline. Our job was not to teach critical thinking, it was to teach values. When I asked whose values, the response was “our values.” When I asked what if the world changed and our values no longer applied, they said “that will never happen.” I still am troubled about this. Especially when looking back at 1960 from the year 2010 in which banks that were in danger of failing a year ago, are still rewarding executives more than ever! A year when a Nobel Peace Prize winner talks of a just war. . . Sometimes I think of having a T-shirt made reading “Franz Kafka was Right” (re: “The Trial” and “The Castle” which in 1960 seemed interesting 20th century fairy tales, but now seem grim reality).

To put it another way, a year ago, when I was in the hospital recovering from a total knee (joint) replacement, who did I send to pay my rent? A friend, Charles Pitts, who was then homeless and living under a freeway, never fearing that he would pocket the money.

[Site Master’s Note: Charles would later be featured on the front page of The Wall St. Journal and on its website in an article titled, “On the Street and On Facebook: The Homeless Stay Wired" – Mr. Pitts Lacks a Mailing Address But He's Got a Computer and a Web Forum.] AFTER this Wall Street Journal article comes up, you will have to “Register to read for free.” or “Subscribe”.

I met a former student from Courtland twenty-five years later and she said her husband had just attended a "cutting edge" seminar at UC Berkeley on the linguistic/grammatical theories of Noam Chomsky. When she picked up the materials and started discussing them with her husband, he told her she made the ideas seem like old hat. She told him I had discussed those theories in her tenth grade English class in 1965.

Similarly, I encountered a former student while visiting the Sacramento State University campus who told me that he owed a lot to me. He said I had to work extra hard to teach him English because in the home he spoke Chinese, but that he had had no trouble in freshman composition and the sophomore humanities course at Sacramento State University. He said that his best friend at “Sac State” was the son of the commanding officer of one of the large air bases just north of Sacramento. He said that he was born in a shack in a Chinatown in the Sacramento Delta and had been the guest of honor in the mansion of a US Air Force colonel and that would not have been possible without me.

I once told a fellow teacher at Courtland that I had at last met a student I knew was more intelligent than I was. She wondered how I could deal with such a terrible thought. I replied, "My privilege to serve." Later, that student would be affiliated with UC Davis and a teacher at the Davis Waldorf School.

I also told a class it would be fun to play academic "king of the hill," and that if one of them could knock me off my perch, he would become the teacher. But that we couldn't do that because then I would be fired and starve to death.

With regard to Robert Pirsig’s Quality, I remember assigning a 10th grade class at Courtland (CA) to write an essay on the “Worthy Use of Leisure Time,” not the ”Worthwhile Use of Leisure Time." Forty some years later, the only one of these papers I can remember is the one by the top student in the class. As I have said, I think he was more intelligent than I. In it, the world had become so automated that people had nothing but leisure time and to keep them out of trouble, the government had hired the intelligentsia to devise ways of filling lesser people’s leisure time and also to fill the intelligentsia's time and keep it (them) out of trouble. His hero had been assigned to write scripts for television shows, but having found this tedious he had programmed a computer to create the scripts for him. He then committed suicide leaving a note that life was just too boring now that he had nothing to fill his own time. After reading this piece, I was considering giving him an F on his paper, or returning it as unsatisfactory, because he did not follow instructions: He had written a short story instead of an essay. Suddenly, it flashed on me that the student had outfoxed me, and I gave him an A. He had made his point through an Orwellian tale (like 1984). The other students did their conventional best and I gave them the expected A's and B's as well.

[Site Master’s Note: In retrospect we see that in the writing of his 'ZMM'' Book, a similar choice was made by Robert Pirsig. Originally it was just series of “Chautauqua Lecture Chapters” that were rather static & dry. Then he added to the beginning and end of each chapter the “Travel Narrative”. This turned it into the action of a novel, with dynamic people, traveling roads, and mystery worked in!]
i
In ZMM, Pirsig’s assigning a student to write about one brick in the Main Street Opera House reminds me of sitting in a seat at Holy Rosary Catholic School in Bozeman. This was an elementary school where I had been “stuck” to keep my grandparents happy. There, seeking to relieve the boredom of the Baltimore Catechism, I gazed out the window at the Emerson Public Junior High School. The walls had bricks of different shades of red. I remember trying to form images of comic strip characters and possible stories about them out of the bricks.

After leaving teaching in 1968 following a nervous breakdown, I spent a year in Stockton CA, working as a social worker in Old Age Security, not a good way to recover. Then I entered an Alcohol Rehab program in Sacramento, eventually getting a job as a hotel timekeeper.

[Site Master’s Note: Having once been a teacher myself, I hope the readers of this document know that teachers in all levels of American public schools are now—and have been—under tremendous pressure. After years in the classroom, they often suffer their own form of "battle fatigue". Perhaps, not as severe as in war, but no less real. And the better teachers are the ones who suffer the most because they keep trying to hold the students and themselves to very high standards. These teachers don't give up, despite often impossible circumstances. And our modern society doesn't help them much. Eventually they become exhausted, give up the exhausting, unrewarding effort, and leave teaching! There are of course parallels here to what happened to Robert Pirsig, as reported in ZMM. ]

After that, I was unemployed for some time and lived in a boarding house run by Dorothea Puente, Sacramento's serial killer. She may have come close to killing me because on the day I moved out, as a parting gesture, she offered me a "nice, cold glass of ice water." Several hours after that I was vomiting and had diarrhea, then felt weak, but exhilarated, as my body had purged the toxins.

Just imagine, two important women in my life: Sarah Vinke and Dorothea Puente!

Next I moved to Visalia, CA and was a Claims Representative for the US Social Security District Office. It was unfortunately only a one year appointment.

I returned briefly to Sacramento and then with the proceeds of an unemployment check in my pocket, hitchhiked to San Francisco where I continue to live. I have worked for Eastman Kodak, microfilming at Crocker National Bank, where I was trained as a word processor; at Bechtel Engineering, doing word processing first in Space and Defense where I worked on a bid for a Pentagon contract, and second in Mining and Minerals. Subsequently, I worked under contract doing word processing for the California State Judicial Council/Administrative Office of the Courts; and after that, for the San Francisco District Attorney's Office transcribing police interrogation tapes. Later, I was a shift supervisor for the Tower Records Classical Annex in San Francisco and worked for several call centers.

Looking back for instances, when I made a difference, three stand out. I could not have planned for them, but it is as if I had lived all my life preparing for those moments:

1) Back in 1961, at the beginning of the second semester of my first teaching assignment and looking more like my students than a faculty member, I was called into the principal’s office. There sat one of my students, Ken R., in one corner and the vice-principal in the other corner.

And then I .

Later in the day a school counselor told me, “When you walked into that office, Ken R. was headed to juvenile hall, but after you left, he received an apology from the principal who personally approved Ken’s promotion to sophomore English. And the vice principal was put under notice that if he ever got caught lying about a student again, he would be fired.” Then the counselor shook my hand and said, “You earned your wings today. You are a teacher.”

It seems that Ken R. and the vice principal had gotten into an argument over a missing textbook and the vice principal had called Ken a dirty little thief. Ken R. had then called the vice principal an SOB and the vice principal had slugged Ken; covering himself by saying he was defending me which was not true.

2) Seven years later, another student also named Ken (W.), my yearbook photographer, came to me and said he dreaded going out to take the pictures of the football team because the coach would call him a girl, a sissy, the class clown, and a time waster. I walked Ken W. out to the football practice and sure enough the coach started in. So, I called him aside and really read his beads, telling him we could either settle this, then and there, or in front of the school board, but if he wanted a fight, he was on. The coach then apologized to Ken W. in front of the team, called him a fine young man, and pledged his cooperation. Years later, I ran into Ken W’s mother. She told me Ken was in his second year of law school and doing quite well. In the course of the conversation she told me, ”The biggest thing you did for my son did not happen in English class, but at that incident on the football field.” She went to say, “He went to school that day a little boy and came home a man. With that one gesture, you single handedly boosted my son into adulthood.” At about the same time, I ran into the coach and he told me that he was a better coach because of that and several other run-ins we had while I was on the faculty.

3) Finally, the year I was a claims representative for Social Security, an aunt and uncle brought their niece and her six-year-old daughter in to see if they could get benefits for the little child, on the grounds that she was mentally retarded, having been placed in special education by the school district. I instantly recognized the mother as a Downs person and saw that the little girl was not retarded. There was no connection with any of our programs, especially as the husband/father was employed, though he had moved out of the home. Complicating matters, I found that the mother’s (Downs person’s) own parents had recently been killed in a collision.

So, I shifted the interview to an evaluation of what the Downs person was capable of doing and an evaluation of the little girl’s capabilities. Then, I referred them to the head of the Regional Center for the Challenged (retarded). Later, I encountered the uncle who told me that I had changed lives that day. The husband was back in the home, the little girl was in regular classes and doing quite well, and the mother was receiving counseling and training on how to be a good housewife and mother. The Uncle said that he and his wife had what they called “golden moments” in their lives and that they considered my interview one of them , along with their honeymoon in Hawaii, and their month in Europe on their 25th wedding anniversary. “Mostly,” he said, “you gave a damn.”

[Site Master’s Note: And this brings us right around to the central point of ZMM: Caring and being a person of value. Quality. ]

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A Personal Statement by Dennis Gary

By inclination, I am a literature person, not a philosopher, although someone with a degree in philosophy has told me that my interest in linguistics puts me in the same ball park. Twice in my life only, I have been on (the back of) a motorcycle, and that for less than thirty minutes. I am more of a house plant than an outdoors man, though growing up on a Montana ranch necessitated learning about nature. I have walked the streets of Bozeman, wandered the buildings of Montana State College, learned in the classrooms of Sarah Vinke and visited her office, fished from the banks of the Gallatin River, climbed Mt. Blackmore, and been in Cottonwood Canyon. All these things are in, or referred to, in ZMM. Like Pirsig, I have looked out the windows of Montana Hall and seen the Madison range. I wondered then how Sophocles and Shakespeare could have made it across such vast expanses, to this cultural oasis, Montana Hall?

I sought Sarah out several years after graduating when I was back in Bozeman briefly, not knowing whether she was dead or alive. I found her address on Arthur Street and knocked on the door. No one answered. Then I noticed a door bell and rang it. A woman answered the door, and I explained who I was and that I wondered if Mrs. Vinke still lived there. She replied that Mrs. Vinke did not, but said it was okay that I had asked.

I was living here in San Francisco when Pirsig's son was murdered. I can remember taking a bus that went past the Zen Center and over to Haight St. to view the scene of the crime. Somehow, it seemed the right thing to do.

Years before, while passing through Bozeman, I entered Montana Hall, while it was empty. It certainly had the feel described by Pirsig in ZMM.

A few years ago, I made the acquaintance of Walter Sokel, a Professor Emeritus at Stanford University and subsequently at the University of Virginia. He has written three books on Franz Kafka, one in German and two in English. What coffee shop conversations we had! Me talking to a real expert rather than a self-proclaimed expert! He had been born in Vienna of Slovakian Jewish parents, so had a good start already at understanding a Czech Jew, who was writing in German. Sokel was born in 1913 in the city of Freud, Vienna, as he once put it. Sokel fled to this country in 1939 and got degrees from Rutgers and Columbia before coming to Stanford. But despite my lesser credentials, we could communicate instantly and with authority. It was wonderful. I cherish such high points of my life.

Currently, I am living in a room in a residential hotel in San Francisco and making do on what I get from Social Security retirement and a small annuity, courtesy of Wells Fargo, which took over Crocker Bank in 1986. Life on the jagged edge, I sometimes call it. Most of this was typed in the H2O Café on Polk Street in San Francisco, surrounded by drug dealers, prostitutes, the disabled, and a smattering of businessmen, artists, professional people and students. I’m about twenty minutes from the Cal Berkeley campus and less than two hours from Sacramento and the Sacramento Delta, none of which I have visited in years.

Sincerely

Dennis Gary
7 February 2010

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[Site Master’s Note: Here as I complete the approximately tenth editing cycle, and despite the fact that I have in the process read this many times, I have a reaction to report. => Once again, reviewing and editing Dennis Gary’s whole document I discover that—like reading a good novel—I am suddenly sad when I arrive at the ending! I realize I want the pleasure to continue, which is the mark of a good piece of writing! This is a sincere feeling and reaction.]

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Links to Additional Reading Related to the Above Memories

2) Following the Footsteps of My Mentor, Professor Sarah Vinke: My Life as an English Teacher, and Other Memories, by Dennis Gary.

3) Dennis Gary’s Values in Thought and Action: My Standards at School and in My Career, by Dennis Gary.

4) Memories of Deer Creek Mountain Ranch (an MSC Faculty Outing), by Dennis Gary.

5) Henry Gurr’s Montana State University Archives Page

6) Archives Commentary and Connections to Memories of Sarah Vinke, Louis Vinke, Allan Kittell, and Robert Pirsig

7) “Books I’ve Enjoyed” by Sarah Jennings Vinke, with added commentary by Dennis Gary and Henry Gurr (Originally published, 1960, in the Montana Library Association Journal)

8) Commentary Regarding "Book I've Enjoyed" Sarah Jennings Vinke and Information About Viewing on the Internet by Dennis Gary and Henry Gurr

9) Pirsig Memory, “The Divine Sarah”

10) Vinke, Pirsig, and the Origins of “Quality” and MOQ

11) Shirley Luhrsen and Sarah Vinke: Letters to and from Bozeman

12) Anthony McWatt's Robert Pirsig WebSite Of Jan 22 2018, As Saved By Archive.org.

13) Peter Voulkos's website Voulkos & Co.

14) “THREATS TO ACADEMIC FREEDOM AT MONTANA STATE COLLEGE” -- a monograph by Robert G. Dunbar.

15) Howard Dean, Nemesis to Robert Pirsig while Teaching in the MSC English Department, by Dennis Gary.

16) Pirsig, MSC, and Zen, a selection from In the People's Interest, A Centennial History of Montana State University

17) Interview with David Swingle, Museum of the Rockies, Bozeman, Montana, on Robert Pirsig, ZMM, MSC, and Bozeman, Montana, by Dennis Gary.

18) Interview with Kay Campeau, Bozeman, Montana, on Robert Pirsig, ZMM, MSC, and Bozeman, Montana, by Dennis Gary.

1a) Photos of Faculty, Administrators, and Students at Montana State College: 1956-1960, by Dennis Gary.

1b) Further Photos of Faculty, Administrators, and Students at Montana State College: 1956-1960, by Dennis Gary.

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Edited by Andrew Geyer 03 July 2011. Additional Editing by Rosanna Willhite 02 July 2012, Dennis Gary 10 - 31 May 2014. RevByHSG03Oct2023
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