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facts about people
Sep. 20th, 2009 07:46 pmI love being a librarian, and I love the internet. (Hey, I'm in my 8th hour at work today on the desk.)
I was looking up a professor of Classics at Dartmouth just now, to see if he's still teaching. I bought a bound copy of his class notes for Aegean Bronze Age Archaeology in about 1996, and handled it on Wednesday when I was moving some books. His name is Jerry Rutter and I met him only once IIRC, at Corinth in 1999 when I was digging and he was guiding some undergraduates around. Anyway, I discovered for the first time that his full name is Jeremy Bentham Rutter. What a moniker to give a little boy!
Following a conversation with my sister lately I got off on a tangent thinking about people and their forebears and early years, how we end up the way we are. It's especially interesting with public figures, about whom one may assume much that is in fact incorrect. Take George Will (we were originally discussing baseball) - he's a professed agnostic, and his father was a professor of Philosophy at the University of Illinois. Given his penchant for bowties, I half-expected him to be a Catholic convert - aren't all bowtie-wearing conservative intellectuals Catholic converts? This led us to William F. Buckley Jr., a conservative intellectual who had no need to convert to Catholicism, having been born to it. He was the 6th of 10 children, it turns out, and according to an autobiography his first language was Spanish, and second French, and he didn't get a grip on English until he was 7 and started school in England. His parents were American, but he spent his early years in Mexico and Paris; presumably he had vernacular-speaking nannies but one wonders how much interaction he had with his siblings and parents to have a limited command of English until 7? His first English-language schooling was also in England - it wasn't until high school that he went to school in the US. How he ended up with the WASPiest accent of all time out of this one cannot say - possibly it was applied at Yale.
Jerry Rutter is a precise, smallish man, who I am fairly sure also wears bowties. I know nothing about his politics but if they are conservative it is surely in reaction against the parents who named him for Jeremy Bentham. He is an excellent scholar, with a specialisation in pottery, and a real talent for synthesis, and I would guess, based on his publication history, a perfectionism that has inhibited him. His collection of class notes that I have is essentially a really terse textbook - it's sort of Cliff's Notes for the Aegean Archaeology grad student. (It's available at: http://projectsx.dartmouth.edu/history/bronze_age/) He went to Exeter, which argues an upper-class New England background, and then Haverford ('67) which might indicate Quakerism (taken with the Bentham), and then was in the army from '69-'71, which could indicate nothing more than bad luck (my undergraduate advisor was drafted while in grad school and did a tour in the infantry in Vietnam at the same date; his advisor gave him her edition of Thucydides to read, which I am sure made him popular at boot camp.)
How interesting people are.
I was looking up a professor of Classics at Dartmouth just now, to see if he's still teaching. I bought a bound copy of his class notes for Aegean Bronze Age Archaeology in about 1996, and handled it on Wednesday when I was moving some books. His name is Jerry Rutter and I met him only once IIRC, at Corinth in 1999 when I was digging and he was guiding some undergraduates around. Anyway, I discovered for the first time that his full name is Jeremy Bentham Rutter. What a moniker to give a little boy!
Following a conversation with my sister lately I got off on a tangent thinking about people and their forebears and early years, how we end up the way we are. It's especially interesting with public figures, about whom one may assume much that is in fact incorrect. Take George Will (we were originally discussing baseball) - he's a professed agnostic, and his father was a professor of Philosophy at the University of Illinois. Given his penchant for bowties, I half-expected him to be a Catholic convert - aren't all bowtie-wearing conservative intellectuals Catholic converts? This led us to William F. Buckley Jr., a conservative intellectual who had no need to convert to Catholicism, having been born to it. He was the 6th of 10 children, it turns out, and according to an autobiography his first language was Spanish, and second French, and he didn't get a grip on English until he was 7 and started school in England. His parents were American, but he spent his early years in Mexico and Paris; presumably he had vernacular-speaking nannies but one wonders how much interaction he had with his siblings and parents to have a limited command of English until 7? His first English-language schooling was also in England - it wasn't until high school that he went to school in the US. How he ended up with the WASPiest accent of all time out of this one cannot say - possibly it was applied at Yale.
Jerry Rutter is a precise, smallish man, who I am fairly sure also wears bowties. I know nothing about his politics but if they are conservative it is surely in reaction against the parents who named him for Jeremy Bentham. He is an excellent scholar, with a specialisation in pottery, and a real talent for synthesis, and I would guess, based on his publication history, a perfectionism that has inhibited him. His collection of class notes that I have is essentially a really terse textbook - it's sort of Cliff's Notes for the Aegean Archaeology grad student. (It's available at: http://projectsx.dartmouth.edu/history/bronze_age/) He went to Exeter, which argues an upper-class New England background, and then Haverford ('67) which might indicate Quakerism (taken with the Bentham), and then was in the army from '69-'71, which could indicate nothing more than bad luck (my undergraduate advisor was drafted while in grad school and did a tour in the infantry in Vietnam at the same date; his advisor gave him her edition of Thucydides to read, which I am sure made him popular at boot camp.)
How interesting people are.
