by seeing my friend once more. I
went out there and stood by his side for quite a while. I recalled the
happy days spent with him on the campus. I thought of his kindliness,
his loyalty, his devotion. Carl Parker shall always occupy a place in
the recesses of my memory as a true example of nobility. It was hard for
me to leave, but I felt much better."
From one of his women students: "Always from the first day when I knew
him he seemed to give me a joy of life and an inspiration to work which
no other person or thing has ever given me. And it is a joy and an
inspiration I shall always keep. I seldom come to a stumbling-block in
my work that I don't stop to wonder what Carl Parker would do were he
solving that problem."
Another letter I have chosen to quote from was written by a former
student now in Paris:--
"We could not do without him. He meant too much to us. . . . I come now as
a young friend to put myself by your side a moment and to try to share a
great sorrow which is mine almost as much as it is yours. For I am sure
that, after you, there were few indeed who loved Carl as much as I.
"Oh, I am remembering a hundred things!--the first day I found you both
in the little house on Hearst Avenue--the dinners we used to have . . .
the times I used to come on Sunday morning to find you both, and the
youngsters--the day just before I graduated when mother and I had lunch
at your house . . . and, finally, that day I left you, and you said, both
of you, 'Don't come back without seeing some of the cities of Europe.'
I'd have missed some of the cities to have come back and found you both.
"Some of him we can't keep. The quaint old gray twinkle--the quiet,
half-impudent, wholly confident poise with which he defied all
comers--that inexhaustible and incorrigible fund of humor--those we
lose. No use to whine--we lose it; write it off, gulp, go on.
"But other things we keep, none the less. The stimulus and impetus and
inspiration are not lost, and shall not be. No one has counted the
youngsters he has hauled, by the scruff of the neck as often as not, out
of a slough of middle-class mediocrity, and sent careering off into some
welter or current of ideas and conjecture. Carl didn't know where they
would end, and no more do any of the rest of us. He knew he loathed
stagnation. And he stirred things and stirred people. And the end of the
stirring is far from being yet known or realized."
I like, too, a story one of th
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