retire at school's end
-UDK Photo by Earl Hachl
AFTER 49 YEARS OF GRADING HOMEWORK . . .
—CDR Photo by Earl Hachi
Dr. J. Neale Carman, instructor in the French department at KU since 1918, reflects on his 49 years of teaching at KU which includes training World War I soldiers in French for the battlefields of France. One of Carman's main interests has been a study of Kansas dialects, and in 1962, he published the first volume of "Foreign Language Units of Kansas."
By MERRILY ROBINSON
After 49 years of teaching at KU, Dr. J. Neale Carman of the department of French and Italian will retire this spring.
With Kansas' teacher retirement age set at 70, the length of Carman's stay at KU must be close to a record. After doing his undergraduate work here he began teaching in 1918, at the age of 21.
"I HAD MAJORED in French, and when I graduated, the war was still on," Carman said. "The government had built barracks down by where the stadium is now and needed teachers to train Student Army Training Corpsmen in French, since most of the fighting was being done in France. So that's how I got started."
Carman leaned back in his chair and smiled. "It was about the same in World War II," he said. "There were a lot of Navy officers on campus then and they were given offices in Strong Hall. Everybody began calling it "The Ship." And the fraternity houses they used became PT boats, numbered one through 12.
Carman received his Ph.D. in 1934 from the University of Chicago while on leave from KU. Aside from that, and a year spent in France, his entire teaching career has been spent here. Why?
"I MARRIED a Lawrence girl," he said, "and during the depression, it wasn't a very good idea to try to change jobs. The biggest reason, though, is that as a native Kansan, I feel comfortable here."
Carman was originally from Herington.
Carman's range of interests is wide and varied. His doctoral studies were done on the Arthurian period in French literature
and he plans to continue his work in this area after retirement.
A COLLECTION of his poems,
"On the Margin of a Scholarly
Career," was published and
presented to him at a dinner given
in his honor last Friday evening
by the French and Italian department.
"Constatation," written in
1859, provides a view of his teaching experience:
"There will be a meeting of—' How many times, O God, / Must this mild phrase come interrupt / like some chastising rod / A scholar's dreams of articles / glad editors will take! / The democratic process makes / the ivory tower a fake."
Perhaps Carman's overriding interest, though, is Kansas dialects. In 1962, he published the first volume of "Foreign Language Units of Kansas." He has begun work on two more volumes of the same work and plans to publish them after his retirement.
"DOING RESEARCH for this is mostly a job of knocking on doors and talking with people," he said.
He pointed to a large map of Kansas on the wall and began indicating areas of German, French, Scandinavian and Flemish settlement.
"In the German areas, for instance," he said. "I try to find out when they stopped speaking German at home, when children addressed in German rebelled and began answering in English, whether German is still spoken anywhere in the community.
Daily Kansam
Wednesday, May 3, 1967
4
"A LUTHERAN CHURCH in Russell still holds its Sunday morning services in German."
"These scare tactics caused Germans to drop their language, so that when U.S. forces began occupying Germany following World War II, very few young Americans could be found who could speak German."
The biggest changeover from German to English for Kansens came in the First World War, Carman said, when hostility toward the enemy grew to the extent that German - speaking homes and businesses began receiving coats of yellow paint overnight. A German minister in Wodren, south of Lawrence, was tarred an dfeathered for delivering his sermons in German, Carman said.
Carman's retirement will coincide with the KU graduation of his grandson, Ken Derrington, Prairie Village senior. Carmen plans to teach next year at the University of Missouri at Kansas City.
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