Deceased June 9, 2020
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In Memory
In his statement published in our 50th reunion yearbook, Harlan’s first sentence embodied his Amherst education, quoting an infamous query demanded in our first English 1 essay: “Where are you, and how do you know?” Harlan wrote: “By October ’83 my spot was that my mother had died in a nursing home in Michigan. After flying her body to the family burial plot in Boston, I drove back to Amherst on the way to her memorial service in Connecticut.” He and his son checked into the Lord Jeff Inn, and Harlan walked up to the campus, where he encountered Professor Theodore Baird; he told him he was a teacher and that he’d been thinking about metaphor for 25 years. “That means a lot to me,” Baird said.
Baird took care of his wife, who had Alzheimer’s disease, until her death; he lived to be 95. Harlan wrote in 1983 that he had a similar role for his wife, who had polio and post-polio syndrome. He nursed her until her death.
Harlan taught at Detroit Institute of Technology and at the Greenhills School, striving every day, he said, to be the best teacher he could.
My own friendship to Harlan dates back to fall 1956, when he had a role as the one-eyed cyclops in Euripides’ satyr play, which I had translated. He wore a huge mask, now in the Amherst College archives, designed by my roommate Ralph Lee ’57, a theater major.
My last memory is of Harlan at our 60th class reunion. Unable to walk easily, he rode around campus in a cart. At a reading hosted by our class, he read his poem “Lord Hamlet’s Lesson,” which concludes: “When we answer summer autumn winter’s call, Spring prepares us; love’s readiness is all.”
Bob Bagg ’57