LSA (Lit, Science & Arts) Building, University of MichiganDear George,
My favorite professor in grad school was Guy Swanson. He was the head of the Soc Department at Michigan and taught a core seminar in our social psychology program. Swanson was extremely well-read, articulate to the point of being flowery, and readily able to span the gamut from macro-societal phenomena to the intricacies of everyday social interaction. I wrote down everything he said in class and emulated his style of thinking as much as I could.
Curiously my most memorable experiences in Dr. Swanson’s seminar didn’t have to do with academic content, but with other classroom happenings. One of these occurred in late November 1963. Swanson had just started discussing distinctions between Georg Simmel and Charles Horton Cooley when one of my classmates, Rich J., came into the room and announced that President Kennedy had been assassinated in Dallas. The class was stunned. Dr. Swanson commented on what a terrible tragedy this was, paused for a few seconds, then analyzed the remarkable capacity of social institutions to maintain equilibrium in the face of catastrophe, and finally returned to his comparison of Simmel and Cooley. The students just sat there in silence. Finally Dave B., one of the more mature members of my cohort, politely expressed to Dr. Swanson that he didn’t think that class members were able to go on. Reluctantly, Swanson conceded. I ran to a pay phone and called Katja who was working at her part-time sales job at Faber’s Fabrics. Katja had already gotten the news and she was crying uncontrollably over the phone. We didn’t recover for a long time.
A few weeks later Dr. Swanson had moved on to Talcott Parsons and the critique of structural functionalism. The room was stuffy, and because I was seated at the end of the table, he asked me to open the window. I did so, but after a while it got too chilly, and he asked me to close it. The window didn’t come down easily, so I stood up on the windowsill and applied more force. As the window started coming down I jumped off the sill. My wedding ring, however, got caught on the window latch, and, as my body dropped to the floor, my hand stayed caught on the latch. The ring stripped away a big chunk of flesh from my finger, and only then did my hand come free. Blood started pouring out all over my clothes and the floor. Swanson sent a class member to the department office to notify his secretary to call for medical help. The secretary did so and came back to the classroom with a vial of smelling salts which they kept in the department office for just such occasions. I was in a state of shock. The main thing running through my mind was that, since I would no longer be able to type with my left hand, my scholarly career was all but over. Soon the ambulance arrived, and the paramedics carted me off to the emergency room at the U. of M. Medical Center.
The medics stopped my finger from bleeding. Then the task was to get my wedding ring off so they could patch up the injury. Because there was a lot of stripped off flesh in front of the ring, they couldn’t pull the ring off my finger. One of the residents started using a small metal file to cut through the ring. Thirty minutes later he hadn’t even made a dent. After some brainstorming, the staff transported me to dental surgery. There a doctor cut through my ring in no time at all with a diamond drill, bent the ring open, and pulled it off. I was taken in a wheelchair back to the emergency room, where they sewed me up. Thankfully the tear, though it nearly circled my finger, was a flesh wound, and none of the muscles had been severed. The doctor told me that they dealt with this sort of injury nearly every day, nearly always with men who’d been wearing their wedding rings while doing manual labor. I was their first case from a classroom seminar.
I took my severed wedding ring home, and Katja said she would buy me a new one. I just shook my head. I explained to Katja what the doctor said and that I wasn’t going to be wearing a wedding ring or any other sort of ring ever again. She was disappointed about that, but I think she eventually came to terms with it. I still have the scar which encircles my ring finger. Just looking at it is unpleasant. Swanson, though, remains my favorite professor.
Love,
Dave
grt
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