Reflections While Moving On

L OOKING back over one's career from the vantage point of retirement can be a sobering experience. The route can be traveled only once; there is no turning back for another try. One sees so many forks at which one might have made a different choice or a better investment of time and energy, with more fruitful results. But in general I feel reasonably satisfied with a career that I terminated when the time seemed right, when I felt ready for a new direction. That, I believe, is the ideal way to enter retirement. Neither of my parents attended college, but both were caring, energetic, intelligent people who encouraged their children to achieve. As I was endowed with a mind that, at best, was good but not brilliant, whatever I was able to learn as a student in the public schools of Cranston, Rhode Island, was gained by diligent application. In the process I discovered that I enjoyed learning, even though Latin was a struggle and chemistry a near disaster. Quite early I succumbed to the romantic lure of the past, and for a while aspired to a career in archaeology. At Brown University, however, I eventually majored in English with a strong minor in history. By the time of my senior year, having studied under such inspiring historians as Sinclair W. Armstrong, Robert H. George, and James B. Hedges, I decided that I preferred history to literature, but by then it was too late to change the major, so I was graduated with honors in English. That sound training in both literature and composition I have never regretted, for it, combined with my earlier exposure to Latin, has contributed substantially to whatever ability I may have in the writing of readable prose. I enjoyed college so much (even as a townie) and developed such a rosy view of the professoriat, that I simply wanted to go on spending my years in the academic environment. Quite definitely, I had chosen my career. The Second World War intervened, as it did for most of us who were emerging in I942, with the result that I spent nearly four years as a deck officer in the navy. That experience proved to be profoundly memorable for me in a way which I eventually tried to share with others through a personal memoir recently published by the Kent State University Press.' Publicly, I have been at pains to urge others who also lived through that war, especially those who later became trained researchers and writers, to

American and British Literature Analysis · History · Lexicography and Language Studies