1956

Charles Morrissey alerted me to the news that Roger Lee Emerson was honored as the eighth recipient of a Lifetime Achievement Award by the Eighteenth Century Scottish Studies Association, an international society examining all aspects of 18th-century Scottish culture and society. In a speech honoring Roger, the speaker praised him for the depth of his scholarship and for his distinguished publishing record, but above all for his great generosity to his fellow scholars and for his patient and kind mentoring of younger historians. Present at the conference to congratulate Dr. Emerson were his last graduate students, now each history professors, who had all been encouraged in their studies by his unselfish supervision. Roger is professor emeritus of history at the University of Western Ontario and remains active as a scholar, making research trips to London and Edinburgh in an earnest effort to finish a biography of Archibald, the Third Duke of Argyll. Later last summer Roger and Charles spent some time exploring Roger’s roots in Vermont’s Northeast Kingdom. Charlie reports that “around Barton, Vermont, Roger’s birthplace, there is hardly a house or other building Roger can pass without telling a story about its history. He’s a rich fund of regional lore.”

My Internet research on Charlie found he had been much too modest about his own career. Last October the history department of the University of Alabama in Huntsville welcomed him as a distinguished oral historian. He gave two public lectures, the first to the honors forum on “Oral History and the Modern Presidency” and the second on “Life and Memory in America: Oral History in an Age of Public Amnesia.”

He also gave guest lectures in two classes and met with members of the history department to discuss the public history program being developed. A past president of the Oral History Association, Charlie began this career in 1962 by interviewing former members of the White House staff during the Truman administration for the Truman Library and now is the oral history consultant for the Oral History and Archives Program at Baylor College of Medicine in Houston and the Howard Hughes Medical Institute in Chevy Chase, Maryland. He has directed oral history projects for the John F. Kennedy Library, the Ford Foundation, Harvard University and Dartmouth College. He also has been a consultant or evaluator for the Pew Charitable Trusts, Carnegie Corp., National Endowment for the Humanities, Centers for Disease Control and other agencies. He frequently teaches oral history workshops and has published more than 50 articles about oral history.

News has come of the deaths of four of our classmates: Keith Ladd, Ted Clause, James Pereire and Irving Clark. Obituaries appear in this or a later edition of the DAM.

Each deceased classmate is memorialized by the donation of a book to Baker Library by our class. Books are selected by the head of acquisitions services. The most recent additions focused on European art, and subjects are chosen to enrich the entire Baker collection.

P.O. Box 968, Quechee, VT 05059-0968; (802) 295-8912; stewwood@aol.com