C. Everett Koop '37 on Ray Nash

"He Was Teaching Me To Teach."

"GOT TO KNOW RAY NASH in the fall of 1936. There was a little ad in The Dartmouth, one day, that said if you had any interest in printing, there was somebody in the basement of Baker Library who wanted to meet you. So I wandered over and immediately felt attracted to this man. He was dressed in a way that was typical of a lot of faculty in those days: chinos, tweed jacket, necktie not very well tied. But there was a smell to Ray Nash's tweed jacket. It was a combination of a very faint kind of shaving lotion, smoky fire, pine woods and I had a feeling it didn't get cleaned very often.... If you were to wake me out of a sound sleep today after all these years and pass that smell by me, I'd sit straight up and say Ray Nash!

I never took a course from Ray Nash; at that time he was the college's typographer, not someone teaching classes. He knew type fonts and he knew calligraphy and he knew the people who made them. He made me understand graphics. The conversations I used to have with him always seemed to be intimate conversations, almost sotto voce.

I remember he would have a flight of ideas: I'd ask him a question and he'd tell me the answer and then he'd say that reminds me, and that reminds me, and that reminds me... I'd go over to spend an hour with him, set some type maybe, but then come back with five more ideas that I'd have to pursue some other time. He made me introspective. He showed me that the distant horizon was farther away than I knew.

I never gave any thought to being a teacher when I was here as a student. I was headed for a very narrow field of surgery. I wanted to be in a teaching hospital operating all day long. Well, there are no people like that. The people who do that have to be professors, and professors have to teach.

As it turns out, although my proteges over the past 50 years have been people who wanted to go into medicine, I have made some of them into very good teachers. I've expanded their horizons to include specialties in medicine that they didn't know existed before. I can tell you there's tremendous satisfaction in lifting a young person out of what he thinks are the confines of your relationship into a whole new expansive field of understanding.

I never realized that what I wanted to do carried a such huge teaching obligation. I never thought, as I was learning graphics, that Ray Nash was teaching me to teach.

C. Everett Koop

C. EVERETT KOOP, A PIONEER in the field ofpediatric surgery, was the U.S. SurgeonGeneral from 1981 to 1989.