DOCTOR NO

Jerry Harkins

Ninety-two miles west of Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, in Huntingdon County, about half a mile south of where County Route 393 crosses 829 and about four miles east of Raystown Lake lies the tiny hamlet of Calvin.  To say it’s off the beaten track is as much an understatement as can be made about Anyplace, Pennsylvania.  393 is – or was last time I drove it –  a dirt road, well maintained and graded twice a year but not plowed until there’s at least a foot of snow.  The ZIP code, 16652, serves the whole county and the post office is in a convenience store attached to a nearby gas station.  The population was 209 souls in the 2000 census which had fallen to 175 ten years later. Calvin isn’t on most maps.  Neither is either Wright Cemetery or Trough Creek Cemetery which makes it difficult for genealogists interested in the Glasgow family for whom, in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Calvin served as home turf.  The American branch of that distinguished family of course.  

Just why so many Glasgows settled in and around Calvin is not clear.  They were Scotch Presbyterian Dissenters (that is to say Scotch Irish) whose forbearers migrated to the anthracite region of eastern Pennsylvania. By dint of thrift and hard work, a goodly number of them must have escaped the mines and wound up farming in Huntingdon County.  One of the family, born sometime around the turn of the twentieth century, was George Mileus Glasgow, Jr. (although he never used the “Junior”) later known as Doctor No for reasons that will be explained in due course.  (As to that odd middle name which he guarded as a state secret, perhaps his mother descended from the Eleventh Century worthy Galfridus Mileus, originally of Bayeux, France.  Galfrid was one of the Normans who visited England with William the Bastard in 1066.  A more likely possibility:  there is no shortage of people named George M. Glasgow in Pennsylvania town records. Most of the M’s stand for Miles which is a fairly common patronym.  In such a rural area, the Glasgows and the Mileses must have intermarried frequently over the generations.)

George Junior became the Kavanaugh Professor of Speech in Fordham University’s School of Education from the late 1930’s until 1961 or ’62.  At the time, the School was located at 302 Broadway, the old Astor Building at Duane Street.  Almost everything else said about him, including what you read here, is rumor, myth or inference.  He arrived at Fordham as a newly minted Columbia Ph.D.  He died in New York, probably in early 1963.  He seems to have been married and divorced without issue. Later there were rumors about a woman in his life spread invariably by people who did not know where he lived. But the back story was more consistent than other rumors.  After high school, it was said, he took a job as a coal miner and cured the mine owner's daughter of stuttering.  Mr. Kavanaugh was so grateful, he paid for three degrees and endowed the chair for him at Fordham.

Dr. Glasgow was one of God’s true eccentrics.  Imagining himself to have an ulcer, he lived on a diet of soft boiled eggs, mashed potatoes, coffee and chocolate marshmallow fudge, all purchased from Schrafft’s on lower Broadway.  He thought the coffee was bad for him but he loved the glass jars Schrafft’s delivered it in.  He had a large collection of them on his window sill which was culled every semester and returned for the deposit.  He drove the administration wild.  One spring, he decided to mount a student production of “Romanoff and Juliet” to which one of the  Deans objected because of a hot scene between the principals.  The objectionable scene took place with Romanoff on one balcony, stage left, and Juliet on another, stage right.  George dropped the Dean a polite note.  “In case you hadn’t noticed, the play is based on an older one with a similar title by Will Shakespeare.  However, if you still feel this threatens the chastity of our students, I will be happy to turn Romanoff into another girl.”  In the event, he cast a gay student in the role of Igor. He then proceeded to give the poor fellow intense Method Acting instruction in the art of kissing a girl. “Imagine you’re sitting on a hot radiator.”

He was an expert in several academic subjects.  One was public speaking which engaged him because it was (and is) the most common phobia in the United States.  Another was rhetoric which he saw as the bastard offspring of logic and semantics which, of course, it isn’t.  He was also a highly skilled phonetician (think of Henry Higgins) with an exquisite ear. He taught diction and dialect at the Actors Studio and developed a system of phonetics to enable actors to annotate scripts quickly.  He was a frequent consultant to speechwriters and their clients acting like a play doctor confronted with trouble in the second act.  Among those he consulted with was Harry Truman whom he considered a soulmate and Buffalo Bob Smith, the sidekick and voice of Howdy Doody.  In spite of his best efforts, Mr. Smith’s skills as a ventriloquist remained minimal.

Have I mentioned his eccentricity?  He was a master logician who believed that the proper foundation of a liberal education is the rigorous study of fallacy.  Modern logic, however, as propounded by Russell and Whitehead, was, in his considered opinion, a fraud.  He taught a course in semantics in which he argued that the first word invented by human beings was “No” and that all subsequent vocabulary consisted of unnecessary variations on “No” or words needed to shade the truth.  He was ready to concede that this might not be a universal law of nature but that it explained a great deal about the state of the world ever since our ancestors came down out of the trees.  He explained that there is very little truth to be had in this life and therefore truth is a precious commodity not to be squandered on the unworthy or the merely curious.

Which brings us to his obsession with General Semantics which had been a pretty big deal in the thirties having been pioneered by the Polish Count Alfred Korzybski,his students and acolytes including S. I. Hayakawa, Stuart Chase and C. K. Ogden.  The latter worthies became the authors respectively of such classics as The Smirnoff Brunch Book, The Tyranny of Words and The Meaning of Meaning.  A more formal approach was taken by the Harvard philosopher Willard Quine who is famous for insisting that, “To be is to be the value of a bound variable.” On its face, the idea of a “bound variable” is a contradiction in terms but there can be no doubt that language “binds” thought and thought is nothing if not variable.  For example, the word apple automatically excludes everything that is not apple.  It builds a fence between itself and berries, cherries, oranges, tomatoes and anything else you might find in a fruit salad.  By doing so, it channels thought and communication toward anything that is an apple, whether a McIntosh, Golden Delicious, Granny Smith or any other member of the genus Malus, including crab apples.  (Malus– Latin for evil – may have been named after the apple eaten by Adam and Eve.  Or not, sources differ.)

Academics who thought about such issues were certainly an odd lot and they bequeathed their oddness to the succeeding generation that included our man George Glasgow who took from them the notion that human knowledge is limited by the structure of language.  This, in turn, led him to think that what is called “truth” is an artificial construct, a sort of moralistic overlay on what we think our senses are perceiving.  But still we see the shadows on the walls of Plato’s cave.  Or, as Saint Paul had it, we see only through a glass darky.  We – or at least some of us – search for truth but, like Tantalus we will never be able to eat the fruit at our fingertips or drink the water at our feet.

General Semantics implied that language which is our most important invention also acts to amplify the limitations of our senses.  Which of course is true enough but is hardly the most important part of the story. Language, like mathematics (and music for that matter) allows us to focus our thoughts.  It needs no defense and requires no scholarly analysis.  The relationship between a word and its referent or a sentence and its meaning is imperfect but adequate for bringing us as far as we have come.

Like all academic conceits, General Semantics began to wane after a decade or so but, in the aftermath of World War II, it helped give rise to deconstructionism and other fanciful academic fetishes even if Jacques Derrida had never heard of Count Korzybski.  The notion that every text contradicts itself and that it is therefore impossible to know what any author means is a virtual corollary of the proposition that most uses of the verb to be are misleading.

Anyone who spends a lot of time worrying about such things is likely to wind up an incurable killjoy. Dr. Glasgow, however, didn’t seem to worry about anything except his ulcer.  The world amused him but never surprised him.  To him, academic fashions were playthings, pastimes to keep intelligent people occupied and out of trouble.  Otherwise, the value of an idea is measured only by its usefulness.  It is called Pragmatism and, in the half century since Dr. No passed to the multi-colored lands of the west, it is sorely missed.