Arthur Naething Remembered...

If you timed your dash just right, up the stairs from the Grille Room, past the wall of tiny mailboxes, and into the corridor outside the Headmaster’s Office, you might have heard it.

A resonant baritone voice -- self-trained but with the surgical precision of that of any great actor and with the pitch and range of a violin, matched by its owner’s timing and intuitive understanding of the value of pauses and silence -- would wash outwards from the glorified shoe-box of an office and say something like “Mr. Kerson is at bowling team practice right now. I shall give him your message presently.”

Not yet halfway through his tenure at the school but already a living legend on campus, Arthur Naething used to…answer the Hackley Switchboard.

It is in retrospect as if you could have phoned the studio which filmed Hamlet and had your call answered by Laurence Olivier, or if you called the White House and got a President, or if you dialed up The Folger Shakespeare Library and reached Shakespeare.

Periodically the official switchboard operator, his friend Kay Dolecal, would emerge from the cubbyhole and Arthur Naething, Chairman of the English Department, terror of the underclassmen, and a teacher who has stayed with nearly all of his students nearly all of their lives, would fill in.

“Mrs. Dolecal deserves her respite from the people with whom she usually speaks,” he told me 40 years ago, pausing to give me that look before adding, “As do I.”

That sequence of events -- thinking no task beneath him, helping a friend, explaining himself to a student, his whipsaw sharp mind creating a flawless joke in a fraction of a second, delivering it with perfect timing, and knowing the joke would not offend its victim but in fact bond him more certainly -- might sum up Arthur Naething.

Yet those of us who try to explain Arthur to those of you who missed him -- and if you missed him, you missed him the way the other primates missed evolution -- find ourselves in the same predicament he did when trying to explain Hamlet. A decade ago he told me that he had just read the play and as he came across one line, he was convinced that a word in it had not been there the last time he had looked.

Such it is with Arthur.

Who have you ever heard speak Shakespeare’s words better? Or Melville’s? Or Whitman’s? Who else could play all the parts? Who could stop the action and jump into the audience and stand next to you and ask you if you were really seeing what was happening?? Who could repeat a quote like Lear’s “nothing can come of nothing” so often that class after class, year after year, would in unison repeat it back to him at just the right pause in his analysis? Who else would new alumni seek out for personal counsel or simply in recognition of the fact that college produced no teacher like him?

Who else could exude authority and dignity and yet deliver line after line that elicited laughter, often at his own expense? Who could maintain the perfect balance of the deadpan joke? Who else could both insist that his classroom chairs and window shades be precisely aligned, and yet also unleash upon the school the chaos of “Moby-Dick Day?”

From Arthur Naething came nearly four decades’ worth of students who believed, as he did, that the key to education was writing and the key to writing was self-discipline and the key to self-discipline was pride: You should treat each page you wrote as if it not only had your name at the bottom, but as if it was to be the only thing you would be remembered by. If you are in that group with me, you already know that I have written and re-written and scrapped and re-started this essay for two full days, out of fear -- not that he will haunt me for a comma splice or too many hyphens (“Do you buy them wholesale, Mr. Olbermann?”) -- but out of fear that it will not live up to his standards and that somewhere he will misinterpret this as a failure not on my part but on his.

Thus it is comforting in our time of grief and loss that his niece and nephew should both have told me that they sent their beloved uncle birthday and holiday cards with dedication and affection and with willingness and without obligation.

And with fear.

Because he would correct their grammatical mistakes. And then return the greeting cards to them.

They will weep at Christmas when there are no more returned cards with “Sentence Frag.” scrawled across them, just as we will weep that there are no more papers, or emails, or utterances for him to roll his eyes at -- as if we were truly weeping at just grammatical corrections and not at the loss of a soul so large as to be almost immeasurable.

And yet, as always, he will have the last words on this and behind those words will be unexpected comfort and guidance. When we sat down a decade ago for a formal interview, I closed with the obvious question, never imagining that his answer would provide solace for just this moment.

His phrase, a phrase so inspirational and eternal that it is now rightly carved into the very walls of the school, was created not in a time of elation or success or even academic insight -- quite the opposite.

“It originated in my classroom, I think in a moment of depression or frustration. Something possibly had upset me, not with my students, but the world at large. And perhaps subconsciously I’m thinking, well, this is the future of the world, this is the future of America. Don’t go out in the hallway and make a noise and run around. Go out and do something. The world could use something and use some beauty.

“So, go forth and spread beauty and light. Teach. Instruct. Share your Knowledge -- and that’s it.”

-- Keith Olbermann ’75

Keith Olbermann is a sports and political commentator and author. He currently hosts a late-night show on ESPN2 and TSN2 called Olbermann, and is studio host of TBS’s Major League Baseball postseason coverage.

Watch Keith’s 2003 interview with Mr. Naething here.