A Tale With Many Meanings

Here is an example of a story William C. Graustein tells frequently as part of his work on behalf of the William

Caspar Graustein Memorial Fund, which was named for his uncle. It is adapted from a version that appeared in one of the fund’s annual reports and starts with an anecdote about a friend his father made when he was attending Harvard University.

Amos White would study in the library because he could not afford textbooks. One day the library clock stopped, and White came late to class. My father was sitting near the middle of a back row when White opened the door of the lecture hall. The professor saw White, interrupted his lecture, and said, “You are late. Get out.”

“Sir, the clock in the library stopped.”

“Out.”

“But, sir….”

“Get out!”

The professor started down the aisle toward White to throw him out. Several students seated in the aisle seats rose and stood in the aisle to block the professor. White, seeing his entrance to the classroom turn unexpectedly into a confrontation, turned around, left the room, and closed the door after him.

“And do you know what Amos did then?” my Dad would say with a chuckle. “He remembered there were big heating grates in the floor of the room, so he went down to the basement, found the grate that was by the lectern, sat down in the basement underneath the grate, and took notes on the rest of the lecture!”

My father admired White’s resourcefulness and clarity of purpose. As a child, I heard my father’s story as a fable with Amos as the hero. The moral that I heard in that fable was to avoid confrontation, but never to lose sight of the goal. That was advice my father practiced as well as dispensed, both at home and in his work — I never saw him lose his temper, and he never seemed to lose touch with what was important to him.

When I was in college, at the time of the civil-rights movement, my father told the story again, and mentioned for the first time that Amos White was a black man….

In reflecting as an adult about that story, I no longer heard a parent telling a child a fable. Rather, I heard for the first time, my father telling me of a milestone in his own education. It was Amos, rather than the professor, who was the teacher that day, and my father remembered the lesson for a lifetime….

I went to the archives at Harvard and found that Amos and my father had been classmates in the local public high school. Only five black faces looked out from the pages of their college class album. Reading the names of the others in the class, I began to imagine that my father, as the son of an immigrant dairyman, may have felt as out of his element in the predominantly upper-class world of turn-of-the century Harvard as Amos looked. Amos helped to show my father how to succeed in this unfamiliar world by maintaining a clarity of purpose, a vision of what he wanted to accomplish….

My understanding of this story, and of the purpose of education, has changed with time. I heard it first as a statement of how things were and hear it now as a story of how things change. Like many stories that bear repeating, it is also a tale of troubles overcome: at the level of the confrontation in the classroom in 1902, of the growth of two young people beginning to find their ways in the world, and of opening access to higher education.