Word: copey
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Harvard has a considerable capacity for self-celebration. University chroniclers manage to narrate two centuries of picturesque student shenanigans (to set against the serious troubles of the 1960's) or to commemorate fabled teachers, such as the Mr. Chips-like "Copey." They do not recall how before American entry into World War I, Charles Copeland, who lived his adult life in an undergraduate dormitory and never traveled in Europe, unremittingly goaded his comely, impressionable students into volunteering for often lethal service in rickety biplanes and ambulances in France...
...that time I was taking a course in English composition with Charles Townsend Copeland, better known as Copey, whose genial, sometimes crusty, habit it was to bring outsiders into his classroom, usually without notice to his students. The idea was to shake us up; an element of surprise was part of the process. Copey styled himself Harvard's "reader-in-ordinary." When he gave his readings, in a dry Maine accent and a gravelly baritone, he required absolute silence from an intimidated audience. He was about as 18th-century as a man could be; his academic life largely centered...
...lasting surprise of the class, he escorted Feliz Frankfurter and his wife Marian to the front row in our room in Emerson Hall. The class size was limited to 24, so we were a tight, expectant little company. Copey explained that he got to know Frankfurter when the latter was a student at the Law School where, said Copey he has been pouring out words ever since. Today Felix had something special in his mind. Whereupon, for two hours Frankfurter spread before us the details of the "portentous case of Sacco-Vanzetti." He brought to that small room the full...
...short as Copey himself, Frankfurter seemed to loom over us. He made us feel that a massive obscenity was being perpetrated, not only against the grandeur of the law, which was being fouled in Massachusetts in the name of justice. His voice was that of a Hebrew prophet. It was not lament. It was fueled by a determination to correct an evil. He was Isaiah rather than Jeremiah...
...Copey was not content with the shaking-up Frankfurter gave us. We were full of the case but not quite prepared for Copey's next staged event. Several weeks later, Copey ushered in Robert C. Benchley (Class of '12), who wrote themes for Copey many years before. Benchley, a great writer of humor, began dead-pan to read from the latest work of Donald Ogden Stewart, a fellow practitioner. In high dudgeon, Copey broke in, and said, "No, no not that. We don't have to hear the words of a Yale man. You know perfectly well why I brought...