My mother’s great-uncle Ward went to Yale as an undergraduate in the 1890s; we have his letters discussing the plight of those denuded by that decade’s Panic/Depression. And he writes about attending concerts by the great entertainers who toured to New Haven.
As a graduate student, he converted from Presbyterian to Unitarian and transferred divinity schools. “How could you?” asked his sister Rhoda, my great-grandmother (the one married to a missionary with whom she lived in South Africa for 25 years and raised four kids.)
But Ward had strong beliefs, as well as a wide range of cultural interests. “If one looks for heroes in a family–which one shouldn’t–he was my hero,” Mom says.
In 1956-57, my mother had just graduated from Tufts and was working in a research lab run by Harvard Medical School. Coming home from work, she ran into the octogenarian retiree, racing down the subway steps. “Oh, Shirley I can’t stop to talk—I’m going to a Pete Seeger concert!”