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A sage on
her stage: remembering the venerable Miss Brown
By Mary Alice Casey
If you’re lucky, you had a teacher like Miss Brown.
Patricia Ackerman, Connie Savoca Beringer and William Brill feel
they are very, very lucky. They had the real thing.
Lurene Brown, AB ’32 and MA ’36, returned to her alma
mater as an acting English instructor in the summer of 1946 after
several years as a primary and secondary school teacher. She remained
until June 1978, when she retired from the English Department faculty
as an associate professor. A note jotted by longtime President’s
Office secretary Marie White informed President Charles Ping of
Brown’s departure: “Lurene Brown has retired quietly (she
wants no publicity), so has returned her contract unsigned.”
Ackerman, BA ’66, now chair of the Ohio University Board of
Trustees, says it’s time she and Brown’s other disciples
sing their mentor’s praises.
“It truly is long
overdue,” says Ackerman, who wants to see Brown remembered
in the University’s new Emeriti Park. “I believe people
who benefited from her instruction will come out of the woodwork
and say, ‘I’m part of Miss Brown’s Brigade. I’m
one of the ones she prepared to do the right thing.’”
The right thing, at least for Ackerman and Beringer, her college
roommate, was to teach. They and hundreds of others had Brown for
Methods in the Teaching of High School English. Both can still hear
her favorite line: “You cannot teach what you do not know.”
How
you can participate
To pay tribute to Lurene Brown, Patricia Ackerman proposes a
landscaped garden, wooden bench and tree be placed in Emeriti
Park. Thirty-seven features have been named in honor of distinguished
former faculty and staff since the four-acre park was established
at South Green Drive and Oxbow Trail last year. The Brown memorial,
which would be designated with a plaque, would cost $12,000,
and Ackerman has put up the first $500. To contribute to the
fund or find out how to honor any former faculty or staff member,
call 1-800-592-FUND or send an e-mail to giving@ohio.edu. |
Several contributors
to Ohio Today’s letters column have shared their memories of
Brown after reading of her October 1999 death in the magazine. They
noted in particular the professor’s grammar and usage tests,
which she required her students to pass with a score of 90 or above.
“People really sweated that,” Ackerman recalls. “She
set the bar very high.”
Yet Beringer, who teaches English at Skyline College near San Francisco,
says she appreciates the confidence she gained from clearing that
bar so many years ago.
“I am not afraid of any question whatsoever concerning grammar
because of the grounding I got in Miss Brown’s class,”
says Beringer, BA ’65. “I attribute a lot of my confidence
in other things to her as well.”
Toward the end of Brown’s career, William Brill, AB ’77,
took her Introduction to Fiction course during winter quarter of
his junior year. Their relationship endured long after he had absorbed
the short stories by Thurber, Steinbeck and Chekhov she required
students to read. They kept in touch by letter, and he would stop
at her home on Grand Park Boulevard when he made it back to Athens
a couple of times a year.
“She had a lot of former students who visited,” says Brill,
a Columbus attorney who helped with many of Brown’s personal
affairs in her later years. “She called her house Brown’s
Beanery and Bunkhouse because students would stop by for coffee,
and they were always welcome to stay the night.”
Yet in the classroom, he says, Brown was demanding, wanting only
the best effort from her students. Asked to describe her, Brill
seems able to visualize Brown standing in front of his fiction class
like it was yesterday, not two and a half decades ago: “chestnut
hair, bookwormish glasses, petite.”
Stature didn’t seem to stand in Brown’s way, though, when
it came to taking command of her class. That’s something on
which Ackerman, Brill and Beringer all agree:
“She was the sage on her stage,” notes Ackerman. “She
was the czar of her classroom,” adds Brill. “She had a
serious purpose and she communicated that with her students,”
says Beringer. “There was nothing frivolous about her.”
Nothing frivolous perhaps — but memorable.
Mary Alice Casey is editor of Ohio Today.
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