Word: copey
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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Birthday. Charles Townsend Copeland, A. B. (his only earned degree), Harvard professor of English, bachelor, given to mustard suits, to scolding, to reading-aloud (Kipling, Dickens) to two generations of devoted undergraduates. Age: 70. Date: April 27. Said the New York Herald Tribune: "The men . . . knew that 'Copey' was one of the supreme teachers of their generation. . . . How the man could teach...
...Copey" is seventy today; and wherever there are Harvard men that means rich memories. There may be those who can speak of "Professor Charles Townsend Copeland"; to his students he is forever "Copey," one of the greatest teachers who ever walked across Harvard yard. For nearly half a century "Copey" has been scolding his students and cantankerously teaching them to write good English and to love good writing: and though they never knew a more crotchety professor, they love him for his every absurdity...
Other men have had more academic degrees and more academic distinctions. "Copey" never got beyond the A. B. degree. He never wrote a learned thesis for the Ph.D. parchment. And, Harvard, foolishly enough, penalized him for it. "Copey" was fifty before he was granted even an associate professorship; sixty-five before the grudging doctors made him a full professor. But the men who met him in his classroom in old Sever Hall, or climbed the stairs to his bachelor's sanctum in Hollis, and the hordes who poured into the Union whenever it was announced that "Copey" would read knew...
...join in hailing "Copey." He cannot be different at seventy from himself at sixty or at fifty. Doubtless he wears the same mustard suits, has the same temperamental aversion to drafts, the same outmoded predilection for Kipling and Dickens, and the same sadistic joy in making a late comer to his class or reading room miserable. He cannot have changed. And in days when second-rate academicians clutter the pages of "Who's Who" with learned degrees, and still bore their students; when university statisticians reckon in card catalogues the efficiency records of the faculty members, it is good...
...essayist (The American Mind), biographer (Walt Whitman, Whittier), he is a sparkling ingredient of Boston's erudite Tavern Club. There, in the little Colonial clubhouse hiding in a courtyard behind the Teuraine Hotel, he converts fellow members to the Americanisms and poetics of Walt Whitman. With Professor Charles Townsend ("Copey") Copeland he attends the club's dinners, carrying lighted taper in hand, singing "Wreathe the bowl with flowers of soul," and wearing a bright-hued vest with evening dress. To recognize the decade in which a member was admitted, each Tavern Clubman sports a dinner waistcoat of distinctive color...