On Wednesday afternoon, June 10, 1931, Jamestown attorney Robert Jackson was one of the speakers at the Jamestown Public Schools’ annual memorial exercises for former teachers and students. On this occasion, Jackson spoke in the Euclid Street School auditorium about his former high school teacher and important mentor Mary Rosina Willard, who had died earlier that year at age 74. Jackson’s speech, which was published in a local newspaper, also is contained in his papers in the Manuscript Division of the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C., Box 32.
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Tribute to Mary Willard
By Robert H. Jackson, Esq.
Jamestown, NY
June 10, 1931
“When I am forgotten, as I shall be
And sleep in dull cold marble….
…
Say, I taught thee.”
Shakespeare, Henry VIII
Wolsey, who “trod the ways of glory, and sounded all the depth and shoals of honor,’ offered Cromwell as reason for his remembrance that “I taught thee.” It is appropriate, in an age when education is of foremost importance, that we former students gather in memorial to those whose claim to remembrance is “I taught thee.”
The recent passing of Miss Mary R. Willard sets her apart in our thoughts
today as one who upheld the best traditions of the teaching profession. There
are men and women in many walks of life who acknowledge proudly that their
inspiration to good reading, or to writing, and to living on a higher plane
of culture, came from this earnest and modest woman. None owes her a greater
debt or would make more prompt acknowledgment than I.
A correct and full understanding of the written word is the threshold of knowledge,
and ability to write simple direct English is the beginning of power. Miss
Willard dedicated herself to teaching these basic subjects and it was a labor
of love. A noble thought worthily expressed, a dramatic event graphically
described, a knotty problem lucidly stated, were to her marks of the craftsman
and, in a student, foretellers of a career. It is in large degree due to her
leadership and teaching that a standard of public speaking, journalism and
writing prevails in this city above that usual to one of our size.
I have not the perspective to analyze teaching methods and can only record
those impressions by which her work was distinguished to my untrained and,
let me admit, highly biased, observation.
Mary Willard belonged peculiarly to that period before the war, when we were
less distracted by mechanical speech transmission and less confined to mechanical
thought, when our work was measured by excellence rather than quantity, when
individuality was prized and cultivated and standardization was an emblem
of inferiority. Strongly individual herself, she sought and encouraged independence,
poise and indifference to social pressure which in this day so largely shapes
conduct and governs opinion.
No teacher of my time so completely identified herself with the interests
and hopes and worries and pleasures of her students. I think she would have
stood by us in almost any quarrel with faculty or Board of Education. She
had no belief that we were simply walking bundles of original sin. She accepted
youth as wholesome, its errors due to lack of guidance more than lack of right
intent.
No teacher mingled with her students with such absence of formality. Each
was known to her, as to his classmates, by a Christian name or often a “nick
name.” A fine womanhood and a keenness of intellect gave her that natural
dignity which lesser people seek through formalities and conventions. She
met us in unrestrained friendship, sympathy and equality. Leading into the
enchanted realms of fine literature, or exploring bypaths of English history,
she made student life rich, dramatic and full of romance.
“Men should be taught as if you taught them not,
And things unknown, proposed as things forgot.”
Such was Pope’s precept and Miss Willard’s example. One hardly realized she was teaching. Rules rested lightly upon her—even rules of discipline. She sacrificed no friendship over a split infinitive and lost no hope in a youth because he had gathered a vocabulary of slang. She could search an hour for a synonym and get an exact shading of meaning—that was the language of art. And she could characterize a pompous and platitudinous study hall speech as “just blather”—that was the language of life. Her appreciation of the fine and beautiful in life did not close her mind to the goodness and strength of the simple every day life.
Another feature of her work might arouse controversy. We are accustomed to
believe that public education, universal, free and compulsory, is a great
boon to mankind, and to suggest any element of imperfection in it is heresy.
The fact is, however, that compulsory education forces into public school
many, almost a majority, whose only reason for being there is that they are
of school age. Without background, without aspiration, without capacity, they
drag and clog the machine. They hold back those of more fortunate antecedents
and greater zeal to learn. The nitwit, because of his numbers, sets the pace
of the class.
Not in Mary Willard’s class. The nitwit got the course prescribed by
the Regents. It was all he could bear. There were no platitudes about impartiality—she
had favorites. They were chosen for no social or financial reasons. She favored
the student of industry and understanding, the pace of her class was set by
the quick, not the dead, the bright, not the dull. There were endless bypaths
of reading, or of composition, for those who sought it—and she had unlimited
time to help in activities related to literature, the drama or speaking for
those who would give their time and effort to match hers. The Avon Club was
parent to the Players Club and through it many young women received inspiration
to spend out-of-school hours in study of literature and dramatic art instead
of in frivolous high school social activities. Many men in public life today
came through school strengthened in the resolve to be somebody because they
found in Mary Willard a superior teacher who respected individuality and encouraged
development of the style, the strength and the talent one had rather than
trying to iron him out into a conventionally flat graduate. To those who feel
the poverty of a life of sales talk by day and small talk by night, she threw
open the treasure houses of accumulated scholarship of ages and bid us enrich
ourselves there, limited in what we carry away only by the effort we give
to the taking.
This appreciation would be incomplete if it failed to mention her working
in bringing to the young community a knowledge of Shakespeare. At home with
all the classics and the great efforts of English literature, the tragedies,
histories and comedies of the Bard of Avon were to her, as to most who know
them, the vary meridian of the art. The wealth of imagery and aptitude of
phrase from the great craftsman of all time, who in the language of Thomas
Bailey Aldrich “left nothing unsaid,” lent to her converse a richness
and breadth that made her as teacher or companion a constant inspiration.
She invested life with Shakespearean color—the children of his imagination
were her playmates and intimates. In the newly-discovered wisdom of local
oratory, she heard the platitudes of Polonius—she saw youth like Hamlet,
always trying to make a choice between courses, “to be or not to be.”
Her Romeos and Juliets are fathers and mothers now. Ladies Macbeth are still
goading husbands to ruinous feats of ambition that o’er vaults itself.
Lears still sting under the disappointment of the ungrateful child. Shylocks
still seek their pound of flesh. But the Falstaffs are statesmen now. Those
whom Mary Willard taught to view life’s tragedies and comedies through
the eyes of Shakespeare will leave at curtain fall, as she herself left, satisfied
that the world makes a good show and that the price is not too much.
The gratitude and affection of that long procession of students who filed
through the classes of Mary Willard goes forth to her as a member of
“The choir invisible
of those immortal dead who live again
In minds made better by their presence.”