This is Roald Tweet on Rock Island.
In the 1930s, children growing up near 34th Street and 10th Avenue in the city of Rock Island had a distinct advantage over Greek children growing up in sight of Mt. Olympus. On 34th Street, the gods were visible. Each weekday morning, they emerged from their houses and walked a block down the hill to their classrooms at Augustana College.
It was an age when pedestals still dotted the landscape. Atop some were doctors. Lawyers and judges stood on others, as did the county superintendent of schools. But the highest and the most ornate pedestals were reserved for college professors—those gowned and hooded doctors of philosophy whose minds brimmed with the wisdom of the ages.
Kathryn Foulkes remembers growing up on 34th Street in Rock Island. Here lived the professors of history, English, and music. On the very highest pedestal of all stood Professor E. F. Bartholomew, who had taught every subject in the liberal arts at least once and had even been a college president. Now in his nineties, he was teaching philosophy. He read the scriptures so persuasively during chapel hours, standing on tip toe to peer over the pulpit, that no sermon was needed to accompany them.
As befitted their high calling, the professors on their pedestals paid little attention to the few mortals living on 34th Street, especially not to anyone so insignificant as a child. Their minds were on higher things.
But Kathryn Foulkes also remembers that now and then, when the Professor had gone down the hill to his classes at Augustana, Mrs. Bartholomew would come out to the sidewalk and invite three or four of the better children into her house. She walked them up the stairs to the second story, marched them through a door, and let them stand for a few minutes in the Professor's study. O, the awe. The rows and rows of old books, the grand desk piled with papers, framed honors on the wall, the heavy smell of intelligence. Then down the stairs and back out in the sun, souls overflowing with that brief taste of glory.
No lecture on manners, no Sunday school lesson could have impressed a youngster as that brief glimpse of Valhalla.
Rock Island Lines with Roald Tweet is underwritten by Augustana College, Rock Island, Illinois.
