A personal tribute to Arthur N. Talbot

by Wm. Phillips Talbot

"In 1932 my grandfather gave me my future. The great depression having hit my parents hard, I had just finished high school in Wisconsin without knowing what would come next. Out of the blue grandfather invited me to live with him and enroll in the University of Illinois. It was an amazing offer. Beyond earlier occasional brief family visits I don't think grandfather knew me, nor I him. He was then 75 years old and had lived alone (except for his aging housekeeper, Mary) for most of the years since his wife's death in 1919. Acquiring a teenage housemate, especially a grandchild, his first, who had shown no taste for his beloved engineering field, must have been an act of courage as well as of generosity.

"We both, I suspect, entered the relationship warily. At 17 I was naturally awed by his eminence, his quiet dignity and his unfailing courtesy toward others. I found him a private person, intensely self- disciplined, yet anything but self-centered. Had he not been so wise and caring, I would have had a much harder time living with this distinguished icon.

"I immediately became aware of the gap between grandfather's engineering world and my liberal arts tendencies. Nor was my confidence level raised when some of his faculty associates and students, invited in for tea, exposed their astonishment that a Talbot should be studying south of Green Street.

"Yet grandfather never conveyed to me whatever concern he may have felt for an alleged student who seemed to spend less time in solid courses than in such extracurricular centers as the Daily Illini offices or the R.O.T.C. drill field. At the breakfast table we would talk about which other meals I planned to have at the house that day. Thus he came to know a good deal about my activities even though we might not see each other again until the next breakfast. I believe he had real interest in what I was doing. Upon my appointment as student colonel he congratulated me -- without telling me he had held the comparable post during his senior year in 1880-81!

"The best opportunities for me to learn about his own interests usually came on Saturdays, when he put aside his professorial persona to become in effect a country gentleman. In the 1930s he would visit each of his three farms almost every Saturday. Whenever possible I would drive with him (or, when eye troubles later beset him, drive him). During these trips he clearly enjoyed enlightening me about the geology of the region, the local soils, the drainage patterns surrounding the Embarras River, the engineering of roads and culverts, the crops with their annual routine of planting, husbandry and harvest, marketing patterns and the government's involvement in them following the agricultural depression of the 1920s, and much more. His detailed knowledge of rural life did not stop there. Taking me to family cemeteries, he introduced me to the history of the pioneering farmers of Central Illinois. The depth of his knowledge of the lives, hopes and anxieties of his tenant farmer families repeatedly impressed me. So, often, did his modestly offered but penetrating comments on the national and world issues of the day.

"My four years at 1113 West California Avenue were more than just insights into one of the truly extraordinary men of his time. I cannot begin to describe how much I learned from him that was not taught in the university courses to which the $35-a- semester tuition fees (paid for by grandfather) admitted me. Beyond immensely admiring this eminent and caring man I grew to have deep affection for him -- and not only because he had given me a college home and, indeed, my future."