would meet President Dixon in the halls and he would break the ice by saying, in effect, have visions or perish, I never had a thing to say. I should have said, Like what? He would have replied, from 1947 on, at least, Like a new campus, a four-year charter, and a creel full of eight inch rainbows. Somewhere along the line, I lost my interest in receiving visions. Now I just make them up as I go. What was Thatcher Allreds vision? As his devoted student and later as his colleague when, after the war, Jennings Olson, Helen Mally, Carl White, and I from the class of 43 were teaching at Weber I never knew. I mean to praise him by saying that I doubt he had one that he would express publicly. Thatcher was the first ironist I ever knew, the first person whose values were so encoded that one delighted in the cryptogram and left the crypt to shift for itself. His desire to act and his impediments to actions were in such fine balance that to watch him ponder a course could be painful, even when hilarious, like watching a distinguished personage in full dinner dress chase a single pea around an empty plate with a fork, then decide that, after all, he preferred a kernel of corn, or nothing at all. Sterile ironists flourish in college and university faculties. Thatcher was ceremonial in his elaborate, almost obsequious, politeness; his precise, slightly stagey voice; in his fastidious decorum. He fussed endlessly over small and large matters alike. But he never missed a deadline. His plays, often brilliant, opened on schedule. Dan Bailey was sure God took over the rehearsals during the last week just to see if He still had the old knack of dividing the light from the darkness. Thatchers courses were memorable. He was not sterile. But watching his fecundity at work could drive you crazy. I had no idea of what life would do with me, so at Weber as often as I could I took only courses that interested me. One of my classes with Thatcher The Art of Interpretative Speech was the most valuable course I ever took in school. It was Im sorry Dr. Young more valuable than the one that emphasized opening classroom windows at the top could it have been The Hygiene of the Classroom? so that warm air rising could leave gracefully. I learned to read poetry and prose in Thatchers interpretative class. I learned to make some engagement of my own voice with the language and voice of what I was reading, a collaboration that was new to me; to make use of pauses, inflections, intonations, to discern tone, and to catch the mood of a work but to use it, not just go with it a difficult trick to learn for the sentimentalist that I was discovering myself to be. Thatchers classroom methodology if he had one was masterfully concealed. You read and spoke, he listened. He gave us some syllabuses. They were organized according to the weeks of the term. I am fond of syllabuses full of Roman numerals at the left margin. You always know where you are in a course like that. But the procedures and the content were Thatcher Thatcher coughing, sneezing, and wheezing with his asthma; Thatcher fighting his distinguished (tall, lean, hawkfaced, he resembled Basil Rathbone) baldness by arranging and re-arranging his dark shank of wavy hair in different positions downstage on his scalp; Thatcher giving criticism in sentences built on tiers of appositions with no predicates, for he seldom finished a sentence, or so it appeared. His classes were informal, and when we overcame the constraint imposed by his presence and mannered speech, we discussed many things. I remember only his remark after my first speech in Speech I I had chosen to inform the students about mitosis, having gone like a lamb into a botany class that in general a speech improves in direct proportion to the speakers knowledge of the subject, a timid proposition that I ignore to this day. It was Thatchers being there and reacting that one remembers. Willie Thomas, at the time the only black student on campus, except when Ray Freeman took a class, gave a funny speech about a rattle snake in his grandmothers cabin. Thatcher laughed until tears rolled down his cheeks and his swatch of hair fell across his forehead and over one eye. Twenty years later Thatcher still talked about Willies speech. Willie worked as a porter for the U.P. railroad, lived at the Porters and Waiters Club on lower Twenty-fifth street, was the best hurdler in the conference, a fine basketball player, and a humorously serious man. In the early spring of 1946, when I was micturating in the unsegregated toilets of the train station in Augsburg, Germany, I looked up (way up) and there, similarly accommodating himself at the adjacent urinal, was Willie. We had five minutes. We talked of Thatcher and that snake. I have never seen him again. Even the Porters and Waiters Club is gone, along with all the other local color of Twenty-fifth street below Washington that made walking from the Union Depot to Walgreens worth a tad of experiential credit or a Ph.D. in sociology, whichever is greater. A lot of practical experience in speaking and reading and the sense of learning without killing the thing we were trying to learn that is what we got from Thatchers classes. He was not modern in either his literary tastes or his way of teaching. He disliked the new critics that we were just beginning to hear about. He was a performer with a performers distaste for what cannot be enacted. He did not like highbrow literature, because he wanted enacted language, embodied gesture, to be accessible to an audience, now, not someday. Frost was his idea of an advanced writer. Ray West might prefer Joyce, Faulkner, Eliot, Donne, Marvell, and other hermetics. Thatchers taste, while not as ordained in the priesthoods of orthodoxy as Mr. Monsons, had settled in the comfortable evasions of the ladies literary clubs, in the book reviews he did on KLO with his wife, Pearl, and in the open shelves of the Carnegie Library, where the dirty works of Joyce, Havelock Ellis, and Radcliffe Hall were safely neutralized in the locked cabinets to which Therma Scoville held the key. But it was not Thatchers taste in literature or his way in class that made him for so many of us a great teacher. There was just something about the man. He liked us. We worked hard to earn his respect. Within that fussy, exasperating maneuvering was a person whose respect we wanted to deserve. Schools of Education and other cans of theory please copy. In the fall of 1946 I took a day off from Brigham Young University, where I was putting the finishing touches to what we then called a nervous breakdown, and came down to Weber to read something for one of Thatchers classes.