Grandfather's House

For 11 years after they were married, Arthur and Virginia made their home on West University Avenue in Champaign. They then built their permanent home at 1113 California Avenue in Urbana, the house the grandchildren remember. Today that house is no longer standing, the property having been transferred to the University in the late 1960s to make room for the four-square-block Krannert Center for the Performing Arts, completed in 1969. The house was located about where the lobby of the Krannert Center is now.

Most of Arthur's grandchildren were born after Virginia's death in 1919 but long before Arthur's death in 1942, so the house at 1113 California Avenue is remembered as "Grandfather's house." The weddings of Arthur's three daughters -- Mildred, Rachel and Dorothy -- took place there, as did the weddings of Dorothy's daughters -- Barbara Goodell and Lucy Goodell.

The house was welcoming and comfortable, according to Arthur's grandson Arthur II. "He always called me into the study for a man- to-man chat -- that meant serious discussion! I quaked in my boots because I feared that perhaps he had heard about some boyish prank, but it was to reinforce his values in education, his encouragement to study, to use my mind as he gently put me through my paces."

In "Grandfather's house" there was a closet where the Irish housekeeper, Mary Connelly -- who was called Big Mary, to distinguish her from Little Mary, Arthur's granddaughter Mary Westergaard -- kept toys for the grandchildren. "Grandfather had a wonderful toy -- a beautifully-built steel cement mixer, in which you could pour rice," Peter Westergaard, one of Arthur's youngest grandchildren, remembers. "The housekeeper always had a jar of rice. You could turn the various cogs and get this thing to mix the rice and it would pour out. An ideal toy for a lord of cement to have in his house and I loved it!"

"We visited him almost every summer while he was still alive," Herbert Gilkey recalls. "My mother [Mildred] would pack us up and we'd set off to Urbana. I remember him as a rather reserved, dignified gentleman, with a white mustache. He owned farmland around Tuscola and Villa Grove. He would drive down there periodically to check on the crops and the buildings and all that sort of thing. He'd get all the kids in the car and drive down on Route 45. Very nice beans!

"He had all his cars named," Herb continues: "a 1924 Cadillac touring car which he called Big Brother; a 1930 Cadillac named Lady Waverly; and in the mid '30s a T LaSalle, which he named Sal." "The LaSalle went to the Westergaards after Grandfather died," Mary Barnes says. "I t weighed 5000 pounds and lacked power steering and power brakes. Peter and I learned to drive with this behemoth!" "Grandmother's car was a 1917 Electric named Arabella," Arthur II adds. "But Grandmother didn't care much for driving Arabella," Mary says, "so Rachel often enjoyed the opportunity to use it."

"Mary Westergaard, Arthur Talbot [II], my brother [Warren Jr.] and I and the two Gilkey boys [Herbert and Arthur] were all within three years of each other," Barbara Fuller explains. "So it was almost more like an extended family in ways. Because, living in the Grandfather House, everybody got to Urbana sooner or later. And it was just a very nice kind of thing. Then World War II came along and we all moved different places. I haven't seen Peter Westergaard since the Yale game of 1950."

Warren Goodell Jr. lived with Arthur from 1937 until Arthur's death in 1942. 'The students kept the furnace going. By then he was getting on in years. He enjoyed having the company.

"When I started in as an engineering student there at the University," Warren continues, "of course I had my trusty K&E log-log deci-trig slide rule. Everybody carried them on their belt at that point -- they had them on a little strap. And he was very -- not indignant -- but didn't think slide rules were a good thing. He could do all his mathematics in his head. He thought it was just horrible that we all had slide rules as props for our ability to calculate. I wonder what he would have thought of the supercomputers now sharing his building!"

"I remember his giving me a long talk on why we should have base 12 rather than base 10," Barbara Fuller recalls. "He wrote a little paper on base 12 because it's so beautifully divisible by so many numbers. A calendar would come out even. The one he liked was one that had a couple or three days every year that didn't need a date. It would come out with an even number of days and an even number of business days in a quarter, that kind of thing."

"Grandfather had a strong belief in a good education to stimulate and magnify natural abilities," Arthur II says. "I am a product of the 'look and read' system. It was a well known fact that I couldn't spell. Very early he gave me an appropriate dictionary and with it a crash course in its function and how to use it to my advantage."

Professor Talbot never passed up the chance, when asked, to give advice to young students. Writing in the September 1937 issue of the Illinois Technograph, on the eve of the occasion when the Materials Testing Laboratory was to be renamed the Arthur Newell Talbot Laboratory, he advised entering freshmen that "college work is your main job and that the results and the rewards of your student work depend largely on the way you handle yourself. Choose carefully and wisely your closer friends -- they will be a help or a hindrance now and afterward."

"I remember," says Warren Goodell Jr., "the quiet enjoyment he felt when the lab was named after him. It was the first building that the University had ever named after a living individual."

"One thing I remember about Grandfather was that I can't imagine him ever going shopping for presents -- he wasn't that kind of a person," Barbara Fuller claims. "I know there were always Christmas and birthday checks to our parents for us. And something like my first bicycle was from the Grandfather money. But the year I graduated from grade school, which would have been out at Loda (Illinois) in the eighth grade, and we were down in Urbana and he asked me if I would care to go for a walk with him, and I said, 'Yes I would.' And we walked across campus to Schrauch's stationary and book supply on Green Street. Well, he had evidently made a trial trip over there because when we got there they carefully pulled out a tray of fountain pens that had been set aside, and there were five of them, and I was allowed to pick out the one I wanted. It was really quite an occasion, and I used that pen all through high school and all through college."