Photos
Daily hansan
Features
57th Year, No. 46, Section C
LAWRENCE, KANSAS
Friday. November 29.1959
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By Carol Heller
It is not surprising that Prof. Benjamin Wallacker can eat with chopsticks or that he listens to oriental music.
He is the instructor of KU's first course in Chinese language.
Oriental culture is Prof. Wallacker's vocation and avocation.
He guides his language students in speaking, reading and writing Chinese. His office shelves are lined with Chinese textbooks and volumes of Chinese prose and poetry. An old Chinese map hangs on the wall.
He has a record collection of Japanese classical music and a selection of Japanese drawings and prints.
Oriental culture fascinates Prof. Wallacker.
War Inspired Interest
"I suppose the war inspired my interest in the oriental languages," said Prof. Wallacker.
"I was still in basic training during the end of the war, but we were just ready to leave the states when they began dropping the atom bombs.
"During the two years I was stationed in Japan I was editor of our Army division's paper—it wasn't much, just a sheet we mimeographed daily. I was editor only because I could type—and besides, it got me out of KP duty."
"Later we had the paper set in English by hand at a big Japanese daily newspaper. They had no English linotype machine.
No Queue For Him
"I remember the Japanese type-setter made shockingly few errors—using only 26 letters probably seemed simple to him after setting countless complex Japanese characters.
"When I left Japan after I got out of the Army I decided to go to college and study oriental culture."
Prof. Wallacker is a big collegiate-looking man with a crew cut, clear hazel eyes and a quizzical smile. He has a quiet way of tilting his head to one side and looking you straight in the eyes as he talks.
Burlingame, Calif., is Prof. Wallacker's home, and San Francisco is his favorite city. He loves to wander along the streets of San Francisco's China Town and browse through its bookshops.
Prof. Wallacker is a graduate of the University of California and has done graduate study at the University of Hawaii.
His college records are crowded with courses in anthropology: Chinese language, literature and philosophy; oriental histories; and Japanese and Malayo-Polynesian linguistics.
He considers himself a student of classical Chinese rather than of contemporary Chinese problems of economics and government.
He can quote such Chinese philosophers as Confucius and Lao-tzu, and the mystery of a Chinese book is solved when Prof. Wallacker dissects the flowery Chinese characters.
He explains that the Chinese language is based on tonal qualities and recognition of individual characters rather than on sound. Each character has a specific meaning.
A long row of volumes stretches nearly wall-to-wall on Prof. Wallacker's office desk. It is a Chinese dictionary affording a great selection of Chinese compounds and phrases
Chinese Cooks Score
"I like Chinese food—it tastes right. We overcook our vegetables, but the Chinese cooks know how to do it."
Prof. Wallacker knocked his pipe against a big seashell ashtray on his desk as he expounded on one of his favorite topics: Chinese food.
"Not long ago I tried out some Northern Chinese dishes—most Chinese food is served Southern Cantonese style, you know. Everyone says the northern style tastes best, but the difference was too subtle for me to catch.
"But I think the northern food is lighter in sauces and gravies."
There is only one nick in Prof Wallacker's store of Chinese lore.
He has never been to China.
Visual Aids Are Used For Concert Audiences
By John Macdonald
The increasing use of visual aids in the classroom has prompted a KU professor of voice to adapt this device to the concert.
Mrs. Miriam S. Hamilton, assistant professor of voice, calls this method of prompting audiences to use their imagination "designed listening."
"People's ideas are becoming so stereotyped that the art of imagination is not used anymore," she said.
Prof. Hamilton, an accomplished concert soprano, is also a talented watercolor artist. She employs both of these talents in her concerts.
She uses her painting ability to put on canvas her impressions and feelings of a song. At the concert she exhibits watercolor paintings in the auditorium lobby. These pictures, she feels, stimulate the audience to use their own imaginations to form their own pictorial impressions of the songs she sings.
She said young children have active imaginations but that as soon as they begin school these
imaginations, in many cases, are squelched or distorted in such a way as to discourage any further imagination in their later years.
"It is this creative, original imagination that I attempt to bring out in my concerts," she added.
Prof. Hamilton's method of stimulating the imagination is not new but it is relatively unused in the area of vocal concerts.
"We all have visualized a particular scene while we listened to a song," she said.
Employing one's imagination does not take away the actual artistic quality enjoyed by the listener, Prof. Hamilton said. The purpose of all art is to stimulate thinking and imagination as well as for the enjoyment of the audience, she said.
Before coming to KU in 1958, Prof. Hamilton appeared in many concerts and with several oratorio societies throughout the country. She was a representative of the United States in a concert tour in Europe and has sung with most of the major symphonies in the nation as well as on Broadway and summer tours.
Workshop Provides Training For Aspiring Writers, Poets
Twelve students are earning credit for writing poems, short stories novels, and plays in the Writers Workshop.
"We try to put the literary works together, instead of taking them apart." Arvid Shulenberger, associate professor of English, said.
Prof. Shulenberger said that many students who have been in the workshop in the past and several who are in it now have published articles in magazines ranging from "Wee Wisdom" to "The New Yorker."
"A artist is by definition a person who can't be taught. We try to let everyone develop his own style," Prof. Shulenberger said.
Admission to the course is by permission of the instructor. Students can earn up to six hours credit for the course but not more than two each semester.
Students wishing to enroll in the course must submit a manuscript showing special ability in at least one of the creative writing forms:
Divorce Suit Names Wife as 'Hitlerite'
DETROIT —(UPI)— Clyde M Watson, of Dearborn township wants to divorce his wife on grounds including that she is an ardent follower of the teachings of Adolph Hitler.
He filed suit in circuit court and quoted his wife Adeheide, 55, as telling him recently that Hitler said "all men after they reach the age of 65 should be shot and done away with."
Watson is 66.
An Expensive Kick
HARTFORD, Conn. — (UPI) — Robert Lodge lost a $10,000 lawsuit against a motorist after the jury concluded that Lodge was injured because he kicked the car.
fiction, verse or the literary essay.
Prof. Shulenberger has published a novel, "Roads From the Fort," and his poetry has appeared in "The New Yorker" and "Poetry" Magazines.
He recently returned from a year as a Fulbright lecturer at Aligarh University in northern India.
Education School Growing Rapidly
The School of Education boasts a doubling of enrollment in the past seven years. This year's enrollment is 850. It was 426 in 1952.
"By 1962 the School of Education should be one of the largest of KU's 11 schools," Dean Kenneth Anderson said.
"There will probably be more than a thousand juniors and seniors in the School of Education in three years," he said.
This is one school for which no new construction is being done at pre ent, Dean Anderson said with a smile. The School of Education was moved into remodeled Bailey Hall in 1956.
Dean Anderson, who is also the chairman of the education department of the Graduate School, said the number of graduate students in education has tripled in seven years. There are 300 graduate students enrolled this year full and part-time, as compared to 100 in 1952, he said.
"Moreover, about one-third of last year's graduate degrees were given from the department of education in the Graduate School." he stated.
Stronger emphasis is being placed on training for foreign language teachers. Today's educated person should be able to speak more than his native tongue, the Dean said.