On to Finish the Ph.D at Pitt (Part 15)
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As we got started in our new life at Pitt, Laquita decided to find a job other than teaching, so she applied to the University and was given the job of Chemistry Department Librarian. She quickly learned the principles on which the library worked and settled in to keeping the books and journals organized and aiding users when they were not finding what they were looking for. She had a basic knowledge of chemistry and had no trouble in familiarizing herself with the nomenclature of chemistry research. Laquita also decided to do some graduate work herself and enrolled in the master’s degree program in English, which she was able to finish by the time I had completed my work three years later.
The center of our social life was the church we attended, the Fifth and Beechwood Church of Christ. There we engaged not only in three worship and study meetings per week (Sunday morning and evening and Wednesday evening), we also were frequently invited to dinner by the middle-aged and elderly couples. Several of these had Southern backgrounds and their hospitality and good cooking reflected that culture. There was also frequent fellowship between the graduate students, some of whom we are still in touch with. Our closest friends were Wendell and Joyce Bean. Wendell was employed by Westinghouse Corporation as a research engineer, and Joyce was enrolled in the child development program at Pitt, where she had some contact with the famous Fred Rogers of the Mr. Rogers television show. Another couple that both the Beans and we were close to was Bennie and Neda Riley. Bennie was a graduate student in physics at Carnegie-Mellon University, and Neda worked with an accounting firm. The fourth couple of this group was Gene and Susie Couch. Gene was in the graduate program in physics at Pitt, and Susie was the consummate homemaker, staying at home and taking care of their little girl. It was through the Couches that we met Keith and Wendy Ratliffe; Keith was also in the physics program at Pitt. Keith was not a believer, but we were with them regularly because they were a part of our opera group.
Our best university friends were Bob and Nancy Mossman. I have already mentioned Bob’s new-found atheism, which was a constant matter of discussion and banter between us. They both came from California and had ebullient personalities. Bob was ambitious for success, and it was indicative of his independent personality that when he went job hunting after finishing his Ph.D., he didn’t go for a conventional academic position, but instead interviewed with business firms, persuading them that his broader liberal arts perspective and his writing skills, along with a strong personality, equipped him well to be hired into an executive training program. He was therefore successful in landing a job with Ford Motor Company in Dearborn, MI. Consequently, when I got my first job with the University of Michigan-Dearborn, the Mossmans introduced us to the town.
While we were in Pittsburgh, Bob and Nancy became involved in the civil rights activities of the Black church where Nancy had started attending. That aspect of their lives didn’t spill over much into our interaction as couples until we continued our friendship when we moved to Dearborn. There we met and socialized with several of their Black friends, but in Pittsburgh we had only their reports of these social interactions.
Apart from church gatherings, our richest social activity was our opera group. Each year the Metropolitan Opera came to Pittsburgh on tour, and a group of four couples, some from church (the Beans and us) and some from the University (the Ratliffes and the Mossmans), bought season tickets and attended the operas together, enhanced by having dinner beforehand. It was Laquita’s and my first exposure to opera, and we learned to love it.
As I got into my second year at Pitt and my third year of graduate work, I began to focus on what the subject of my dissertation would be. I wrote a term paper that year on the poems of Geoffrey Chaucer which were cast in the form of a dream, and that spurred me to consider other dream poems of the same period, the last third of the 14th century. Accordingly, the topic of my dissertation was, “The Dream as a Literary Framework in Works of Chaucer, Langland, and the Pearl Poet.” The thesis idea was that the dreamer/narrator in each of the poems analyzed is a much more individualized personality than in most previous dream works and comes to enlightenment about some matter of importance in the process of experiencing his dream. My dissertation topic was approved by the graduate study committee and my dissertation committee was appointed. My dissertation director, Dr. Alan Markman, would chair the committee and comment on my drafts at various stages.
During my second year at Pitt I was awarded a teaching fellowship, and that provided my first experience of college teaching. Along with most graduate teaching assistants in English, I was given classes of freshman composition. Apart from a basic syllabus for the course, I was given no guidance or instruction; it was merely assumed that I would learn by experience. I don’t remember much about the details of my composition classes, but I was certainly much better able to grade essays at the end of my year than I had been before, and I was given at least that much practical preparation for teaching English classes when I was employed full time after I graduated with my Ph.D. During my fourth year of graduate work—my third at Pitt—I was given only a tuition scholarship. My faithful wife kept us eating during my Ph.D. work with her job at the Chemistry Library. She also continued her own graduate work toward a master’s degree in English.
Some of the graduate courses I took left more of an impression on me than others. I have already mentioned Old English, which was very difficult, but which ushered me into learning to read Middle English, the language of Chaucer and the other poets whose works were the subject of my dissertation. I also took a course in the history of the English language and taught the course myself during my first few years as a full-time college teacher. The subject of linguistics was burgeoning during my graduate years, so an introduction to the subject had recently become a required course in the graduate English program. The new textbooks in the subject took a radically non-traditional view of the norms of grammar, contending that grammatical “rules” were not fixed standards, but were defined by popular usage, which changes with time. I was not enamored by the course, but it introduced me to principles of language that I needed to understand in the pursuit of my professional career. Another memorable course was an undergraduate course in classical literature, which I was allowed to audit. It introduced me to Sophocles and Plato and other non-English authors of which I needed to have read at least some.
Another course that I found difficult but needed to be introduced to was in Literary Criticism and Theory. I found (and still find) the language of this field of study often abstract and full of jargon. But it did acquaint me with schools of criticism and the reigning ideas about literature in different historical periods. More to my taste were the courses I took in Shakespeare and major authors of the 18th and 19th centuries.
Finally, in outlining our Pittsburgh experiences, I need to tell about the three places where we lived. Our first was a third-floor, one-bedroom apartment with an open area for kitchen, dining table, and sitting room. There were several other apartments with tenants on the first and second floors. The chief advantage of this place was that it was in walking distance of the Pitt campus. There were tensions, however, between us and the young women who had an apartment right below us on the second floor. They were fond of parties with loud music, which kept us awake. We inadvertently became acquainted with the singing of Johnny Mathes because these ladies played his music so loud that the whole apartment complex was able to hear it. Our first request for them to turn down the volume was met somewhat politely, but thereafter they were not receptive to our pleas. Another noise source was the trash truck that came around at about 5 a.m. every morning to service a restaurant across the alley from us. I don’t remember whether we got ear plugs or just got used to it, but I do remember being irritated and frustrated by these disturbances. It was another welcome to urban living.
Our second home arose from a proposal by our landlord, Dr. Beroes, an engineering professor at Pitt, to live in his family’s house, a couple of blocks away from our apartment, while they were away on sabbatical leave for several months. I think we still had to pay some rent, but the purpose of the arrangement was to occupy the house so that it would not be vulnerable to theft or vandalism. We were given an upstairs bedroom and had access to the kitchen for meal preparation. It seemed to offer a welcome respite from sharing a house with irritating fellow-tenants, but there was a major glitch when Mrs. Beroes decided to come home after only a month or two away. She was not easy to live with and turned out to be an inveterate liar. We finally looked for and found an attractive flat in a working-class suburb named Wilkinsburg, where we spent the final year of our time in Pittsburgh.
This was an interesting place to live. Our landlady was a lively elderly Irish woman with whom we had a fair amount of conversation. She was a bit mischievous, flirting with me and commenting on my “nice legs” and bantering with another of her tenants, an Englishman to whom she referred as “John Bull.” We had to commute to Pitt, but there was a trolley that went close to our house, and I used that to get to the campus, whereas Laquita took our car, since she had a daily job to get to. There was a service station across the street from us, so it was convenient to get the car serviced.
After spending a year researching and writing my doctoral dissertation, I completed it and applied for jobs, which at the time were fairly plentiful. After interviewing with several institutions at the national meeting of the Modern Language Association, and being asked for a second interview, the best offer I received was from the University of Michigan-Dearborn (U. of M., Dearborn Campus at the time). It had been established only six years before as an upper-division campus, oriented mainly to the professional programs in engineering and business administration. The second interview on campus went well, and I began my 36-year career at UM-Dearborn in the summer term, 1965.
Dr. Elton Higgs was a faculty member in the English department of the University of Michigan-Dearborn from 1965-2001. Having retired from UM-D as Prof. of English in 2001, he now lives with his wife in Jackson, MI. He has published scholarly articles on Chaucer, Langland, the Pearl Poet, Shakespeare, and Milton. Recently, Dr. Higgs has self-published a collection of his poetry called Probing Eyes: Poems of a Lifetime, 1959-2019, as well as a book inspired by The Screwtape Letters, called The Ichabod Letters, available as an e-book from Moral Apologetics. (Ed.: Dr. Higgs was the most important mentor during undergrad for the creator of this website, and his influence was inestimable.)
