C.Carroll Hollis

Sketch for the Portrait of Walt Whitman by Thomas Eakins

There is of course no greater human love than that for a teacher who turned you on to the good life.

Thanks to UD Library Dean Margaret Auer, I finally got a Chapel Hill obit of Charles Carroll Hollis (1911-99). No wonder he suppressed his "Charles", preferring his mother's middle name, Carroll. What is more, C.Carroll sounds higher class. But he never put on airs. I have a permanent image of him, halfway up the classroom, on the left against the windows, expatiating on a text in his outspread right hand.

I was surprised to learn he started at University of Detroit in 1938! And he parlayed his friendship with Charles Fineberg, a successful business man who was the finest Whitman collector in America, into a job at the Library of Congress. It surprised me to learn he was only there for two years (1961-63). He escalated to Louis Rubin's U of North Carolina.
 
I last ran into him at an MLA convention in 1963. He was clearly proud of his pet student who had parlayed his brand new Ph.D. in 1957 into a rapid rise from Penn asst. prof at Penn(1959), to assoc. prof at the U of Hawaii (1961) to full prof and chair at Arcadia U (1962). Our last "virtual" encounter, alas, was in 1983 when I reviewed his last book on Whitman in my new role as a cultural global eye--in the Santa Press Press Democrat. (A copy of that review is in the SRPD pieces Mary Mueller recently sent me.). He was puzzled  but pleased at my describing  his prose as "funky". No other review (I've written hundreds) has ever given me such pleasure.
 
Succumbing to instant nostalgia momentarily, it was he who triggered my lifelong interest in architecture. Salaries were miniscule as Detroit was eeking out of the Depression, so he had a summer job at the shop of the Detroit Golf Club to pay for his three sons.

We used to stop and kibitz with him on our way to Cranbrook where the Finnish architect Eliel Saarinen and the Swedish sculptor Carl Milles were civilizing us Michigander barbarians! Through the good graces of George Booth, publisher of The Detroit News, and Albert Kahn, the genius autodidact architect who immigrated from Germany at age 11 in 1880.

It makes me silently weep at how Detroit destroyed itself by popular racism and managerial hubris.