Written and read as a part of the memorial service for Walter Havighurst; February 19, 1994. Reprinted with permission of the author.
Member of a distinguished academic family, Walter Havighurst was born on November 28, 1901, the son of Freeman Alfred Havighurst, a member of the faculty of Lawrence College, and Winifred Weter Havighurst, who was also a faculty member until her marriage. An older brother, Robert, became a famed educator at the University of Chicago; brother, James, became a prominent attorney in Cleveland; younger brother, Alfred became a well-known historian at Amherst College; and sister, Miriam Johnson, a retired librarian, lives in Batavia, Illinois.
Growing up in college towns in Wisconsin and Illinois, Walter
Havighurst was much influenced by his older brother Robert,
who preceded him in enrollment as a student at Ohio Wesleyan and
then in faculty appointment at Miami. Robert was serving as
professor of Chemistry at Miami when Walter visited the campus for the
first time. The next year, when Robert went to the University of Chicago,
Walter was appointed instructor in English and a resident advisor at
old Fisher Hall in 1928. Before coming to Miami, Walter had completed
his Bachelor of Arts degree at the University of Denver in 1924, a
BachelorÕs degree in Sacred Theology at Boston University in 1928,
and a MasterÕs degree from Columbia University in 1928. Along the way,
he also studied at Kings College, London.
Searching for challenge and meaning in his life, Walter Havighurst tried
his hand at a number of vocational and avocational pursuits: he had
served as a deck-hand aboard Great Lakes steamers, and then on ships in
the merchant marines in the Pacific and around the world; he had also
pastored a New York City inner-city Methodist Church. But it was on the
Miami campus that he found his niche in life. One who helped him
find it was Marion Boyd, an instructor in English at both Miami and
Western College, with whom he shared a departmental office, and then,
after their marriage in 1930, his life. Another was Joseph M. Bachelor,
an honor graduate of Miami and Harvard, who returned to Miami as a member
of the English faculty and an authority on vocabulary after editing the
New Century Dictionary. It was Marion, an accomplished author in her
own right, who encouraged Walter to realize his potential as novelist
and regional historian. It was Joe Bachelor who invited Walter to become
his assistant in 1928, and who also helped persuade the young instructor to
try his hand at writing.
Through the years, Walter gained a mastery of the English language equaled
by few. He possessed a rare talent for using words, finding through
their combinations melody, harmony, and tone. L. Scott Bailey,
a 1948 Miami graduate, once said of Walter that "he could set my soul
humming with the music of words."
The music of words. Think
about it. Then think of beautiful prose composed by Walter
Havighurst during the half-century that he lived and worked and wrote in
the home in Shadowy Hills that he and Marion shared at the edge of
MiamiÕs formal gardens.
Almost all of Walter's writing centered on the land between the Great Lakes
and the Ohio River--he called it the heartland of the nation. Whether
fiction or fact, his works always had historical setting. In explaining his
early and abiding fascination with History, Walter once reminisced:
". . . I began to find in myself a dual curiosity, wanting to recall the
Midwest of early times while trying to understand its present. Now every
scene is two scenes, the land as it was and as it is; the wild free earth of
the Indians . . . and the tamed, possessed, toiling, striving, hugely
productive American Midwest.
To generations of Miami
students, Walter Havighurst was Mr. Miami, the one who better than any
other knew and loved the University, its history, its traditions and
folklore. His book, The Miami Years, one of the finest college
histories ever written, is still used as a text in the History of Miami
course offered on this campus each year.
Let us recall for just a few moments the titles of some of the other
nearly forty volumes written by this truly great, though modest, man of
letters. Note the recurring themes of the Great
Lakes, the rivers, the Midwest, and most particularly, his adopted Ohio,
the state "shaped like a wind-rippled flag," in Walter's words.