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st. lawrence university magazine | fall 2014
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Living with Harry
I want to most heartily recommend
Daniel Reiff ’s book on his father, Pro-
fessor Henry Reiff, Teacher, Scholar,
Mentor. It is a wonderfully rich book,
full of photographs and letters and
other documents that give a deep
and wide-ranging sense of Harry and
his multiple achievements and his
personal life.
Reading the book, I felt I was living
with Harry and his times, culminat-
ing in his early years at St. Lawrence,
bringing the University alive, too. I
roomed in the Reiff house at 84 Park
Street in the 1950s, when I was an
assistant professor of English at St.
Lawrence, and can testify to Harry’s
devotion to the University.
Edward Clark | Medford, Massachusetts
The writer is professor of English,
emeritus, at Suffolk University. The
book about Professor Reiff is available
from brewerbookstore.com.
to create the Adirondack Park Agency
to ensure that no large-scale develop-
ment such as this would be on the park’s
horizon. There will forever be a lot of
Peter’s spirit in that Grasse
River we fought so hard to
protect.
Richard Grover | Canton,
New York
In the days of
housemothers
I was touched by the remem-
brance by Jane Wendt Wilson
in the Winter 2014 Class Notes
for 1957 concerning Mrs.
O'Brien, the housemother at
Gaines House.
Elizabeth “Bessie” O'Brien was my
grandmother. She was born in 1892, and
could remember celebrations marking the
end of the Spanish-American War. In the
late 1940s, after raising two daughters, she
started a career when most people would
be thinking about retirement: she came to
Canton to become a housemother at St.
Lawrence, where one of her daughters (my
mother) had graduated in the Class of 1943.
The stories recounted in the note certainly
ring true: Gram had no-nonsense standards,
and when she was in charge, she usually
got her way. She eventually retired for real
around 1960, and lived well into her 90s.
Thank you for the unexpected reminder
of how people can touch other people's
lives, even so many years later.
Michael Sheard | Memphis, Tennessee
The writer is Rutherford Professor
of Mathematics, Emeritus.
ST. LAWRENCE university magazine volume lx111 | number 4 | 2014
St. Lawrence University does not discriminate against students, faculty, staff or other beneficiaries on the basis of race, color, gender, religion, age,
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and activities. AA/EEO. For further information, contact the University’s Age Act, Title IX and Section 504 coordinator, 315-229-5656.
A complete policy listing is available at
Published by St. Lawrence University four times yearly: January, April, July and October. Periodical postage is paid at Canton, NewYork 13617
and at additional mailing offices. (ISSN 0745-3582) Printed in U.S.A. All opinions expressed in signed articles are those of the author and do
not necessarily reflect those of the editors and/or St. Lawrence University. Editorial offices: Office of University Communications, St. Lawrence
University, 23 Romoda Drive, Canton, NY 13617, phone 315-229-5585, fax 315-229-7422, e-mail , Web site
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Editor-in-Chief
Neal S. Burdick '72
assistant editor
Meg Bernier '07, M '09
art director
Alex Rhea
associate art director
Susan LaVean
Design director
Jamie Lipps
photography director
Tara Freeman
News editor
Ryan Deuel
class notes editor
Sharon Henry
A memory of Peter Van de Water
In early spring 1972, I received a call
from the president of the Horizon Cor-
poration in New York City. He wrongly
assumed that I, as director of planning
for St. Lawrence County, would be
pleased at the news of Horizon’s purchase
of 25,000 acres of Adirondack forestland
in the Grasse River headwaters. Horizon’s
plan was to build dams and golf courses
and subdivide the land into thousands
of building lots to be sold nationally to
private investors.
A furor of state and national sig-
nificance developed over the proposed
scheme. Local newspapers expressed
unbridled support for the proposal,
which, it was asserted, had the promise of
transforming this Adirondack “waste-
land” into a magnet for new home buyers
and recreation seekers. But a groundswell
of opposition also quickly emerged, and
it was through this controversy that I
met Peter Van de Water ’58, whose death
was noted in the summer issue of this
magazine.
A decision was made to organize against
the proposal; Citizens to Save the Ad-
irondack Park was formed and Peter was
elected its president. The CBS Evening
News ran a story in which a canoe ap-
peared, quietly slipping through still
water, Peter in the stern, talking about
the value of the Adirondack wilderness.
It’s the vision of Peter in that canoe that
lingers most in my mind…a man at
home in the wilderness environment he
loved, arguing for its protection.
The battle, which we won, played a
huge role in New York State’s decision
Are You Going?” reminds me of what we
believe St. Lawrence students may appre-
hend as they come casually into the
Quad from stone steps or a sitting wall:
“O do you imagine,” said fearer to farer,
“That dusk will delay on
your path to the pass,
Your diligent looking discover the lacking,
Your footsteps feel from
granite to grass?”
they are indeed wayfarers, of mind
and dream, passing with diligent looks
“from granite to grass.” And the grass
becomes a consulate of paradise.
College courtyards and university
quadrangles perpetuate the green imagery
found in the oldest conviction that an
academy of learning requires a time and
place of ample leisure. Only in a fleeting
moment of paradise is it possible for the
mind to strive for freedom and, ultimately,
to have a chance of surpassing the mind’s
limits. The motive of the Quad in all its
activities today—whether frisbee games
or chairs in a circle—is freedom; and once
we have known that, we ought to fear its
loss. I know this from an office window
overlooking the Quad, for there is no more
beautiful sight than a student sprinting
across the grass, hands outstretched under
a long-tossed ball. The young legs run
as if the earth has no end and the land is
forever green. The unbound, measureless
free play of intellect still matters.
The Quad expresses its paradise motif
in which students dream of themselves
as better than they are. The Quad is a
beloved memory for us of other years and
for no better reason than it recalls a free-
dom that for the rest of our lives we are
somehow trying to regain. The memory
of walking across the Quad in sunshine
or moonlight, of heeding the horizon line
of the Adirondack hills, is akin to what
Josiah Royce once described as the pause
in the day given as “a principal glimpse
of the homeland of the human soul.” n
—WLF
he cherished st. lawrence
Quad is curiously undivided,
tracing no paths, labyrinths
or walkways across its plane
geometry. This square field
is also notably different from
the equivalent flat places on
other American campuses for its unadorned
interior and exclusive greenness. Its simplic-
ity is exceptional. The Quad features no
fountains, statues or structures. There is no
monumental gate or obvious entry point,
which makes sense because there is no brick
wall or iron fence defining its perimeter.
It is just an expansive main lawn, slightly
tilted to the sunrise. Its unusual subtlety,
nevertheless, is loaded with moral signifi-
cance and community meaning.
Many American colleges were intention-
ally placed on the edge of the rural wilder-
ness, often before there were good roads to
get there. St. Lawrence’s history took root
in this venerable tradition. On the surface
of this frontier heritage, these choices of
location seem prudent because land was
cheapest there and the ideal of undistracted
learning was best accomplished when stu-
dents stayed at impossible distances from
denser, hurried populations.
There is much more to this story, however,
than older economies can explain. In fact,
the St. Lawrence Quad reflects a deeper
and longer perspective about the workings
of a college, something more than a once-
quaint remnant of pastureland.
In the earliest years of building American
colleges, the founders always aspired to the
conditions of paradise. In their design and
purpose, the builders wished to leave bold
statements to their posterity, though usu-
ally without the means of grand architec-
ture. No matter what building ambitions
were imagined, the first colleges reserved
in their plans some untouchable, unbuilt
ground as a central educational necessity.
They gave priority to their green spaces.
The dream that a wilderness contains
within it “paradise” is very old, actually
traceable linguistically and mythologically
to Assyrian and Persian sources; the word
“paradise” itself is derived from an ancient
tradition of setting aside a park-like royal
enclosure. The idea of paradise as a garden
later emerged in the more familiar narra-
tives set down in Jerusalem, Athens and
Rome. The belief that in the midst of an
incomprehensible wilderness there can be
a garden, a place of sanctuary, was a power-
ful physical and metaphysical theme of
unexpected variation; it gave hope through
centuries of inescapable, hard human
experience in the chaos of a wasteland.
Paradise seems a far country, yet never
far from home. From desert monasteries
to medieval universities, the quadrangle,
the cloister, and the close were ways of
remembering the quest for meaning in
the wilderness. To find the serenity and
freedom of a garden, the richly explored
premises of both Dante and Milton,
brings together a thematic coherence that
is our institutional extension of paradise,
a place as simple as a lawn but also a place
to find a reliable corner of one’s mind.
W. H. Auden’s 1931 poem “OWhere
AWord From thePresident
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From granite to green—the Quad’s purpose