Interviewer:	Oh, I have a lot of questions that came out from what we talked about last time. One of that, well it had to do ... Now I forget his name. Was it Mr. Shero? What?
Helen North:	Shero.
Interviewer:	Shero, Mr. Shero.
Helen North:	Lucius Rogers Shero. He was the-
Interviewer:	Right and you said two things that I wanted to pursue. One that he helped the college institute the honor system, right?
Helen North:	Well, he was one of the professors imported by Aydelotte when he became president and decided that he would make Swarthmore as much like an Oxford college as possible. He very carefully chose people for each department where there was an opening. I suppose he couldn't just fire people because some of the old-timers lingered. But he got people who had themselves gone to Oxford or Cambridge, or had the kind of background that he wanted here. One in Greek, Mr. Shero, and one in Latin. Mr. Shero, well he was a very gifted man in many ways. He played the organ for years. He played the organ for the college. He played the organ at commencement and we had what was known as collection. Every Thursday morning, students were obliged to come to an hour's meeting and there would be, sometimes it was just college business that everybody was supposed to know about, but very often it was a speaker from the outside. 
	For example Aydelotte himself, the only time I ever saw or heard him, he came to speak at collection. We would do a lot of hymn singing, this was interesting to me. Many students objected to coming and something was worked out by Courtney Smith that if the students had what seemed to him to be a legitimate cause for not wanting to go to collection, they could be excused. But then they could never go to any other collection. If somebody was coming that they really wanted to hear, they couldn't come.
Interviewer:	Oh. They took attendance?
Helen North:	Not very many people took advantage of that.
Interviewer:	So everybody went basically.
Helen North:	Everybody went, yes. The faculty did not by any means have to come. But again, in my first year or two I found it very interesting because I learned a lot and I went oh, I would say about 2/3 of the time.
Interviewer:	So they took attendance for the students? How did they work that out?
Helen North:	I beg your pardon?
Interviewer:	They took attendances? They-
Helen North:	Yes. Somebody, yes you're absolutely right. Somebody took attendance and I don't know who it was. I've forgotten whether it was a job that was assigned to a student or whether somebody in the registrar's office was supposed to do it. But one of the first things that was got rid of after the end of the '60s, when things around here changed a great deal, was compulsory collection. Then for a while, it was used only for some special occasion and then it just died out. Except they use the word collection quite a lot and younger students don't know what it means. But I think they have a collection at alumni reunions or something like that. Once in a while, they will have it. I think they have something called first collection, don't they?
Speaker 3:	I think for the [crosstalk 00:04:17].
Helen North:	In the outdoor auditorium for the entering freshmen.
Interviewer:	They're trying to reintroduce it, right? Didn't they?
Speaker 3:	Well, they have that Friday lunchtime spot is for, I think they call those collections. For example for Martin Luther King's birthday, they have a gathering at lunch. I think that's considered to be a collection. I don't know if it's conducted in any special way.
Interviewer:	So that-
Helen North:	Well, I think the term itself is probably of Quaker origin. If I knew more about the goings on in the meetinghouse, I might know the origin, but I don't.
Interviewer:	So what, in connection with Mr. Shero, we were talking-
Helen North:	He played the organ.
Interviewer:	Oh, he played the organ.
Helen North:	The other great thing that he did that people long since of course forgotten, he was a very gifted comic actor. He and the man who was the chairman of the Greek department at Haverford in those days used to put on Greek plays, really Greek plays. They had to be in Greek. It wasn't simply a translation. Lucius was really just terrific. Then in the faculty plays that I think I was talking about that we did every other year, he almost invariably had a part. He had a great booming voice, and wonderful diction, and just had one of the best comic instincts that I ever saw. You never saw that in his teaching. This was not part of it at all, but it was part of his acting, and I'll never forget his bringing down the house.
	We did a play once in which I happened to be the ... I think I had the leading woman's role. At a certain point, I was supposed to be eloping with, it was a college play, a member of the faculty. Mr. Shero played a member of the board of trustees. He saw me coming across the stage with my suitcase, ready to elope. I was married to the hero. He pulled himself up and he said at the top of his booming voice, "What kind of a woman are you?" That simply brought down the house because the students of course knew us all, and identified us with the roles and so on. But he was really marvelous.
Interviewer:	Why didn't his teaching was not like that? Was he popular among the students?
Helen North:	I don't think that it was anything except a sense of decorum. I was always interested in students' comments. One woman told me once, was some alumna, that it did her a great deal of good. She was taking a course with him and I think it was something like ancient history, or Greek literature in translation, or something, our bread and butter courses. She said that knowing that what he cared about was what he was teaching, and not about the students, was a very sanitary thing for her. I don't know what her background was. I really never knew her very much. It may have been after he died that she told me that. 
	But he was not a wildly popular teacher, but he was a very very reliable person. He spent a great deal of his time doing things that are never really acknowledged because they're on the whole ... Well, like I'm thinking of his reading manuscripts both for books that were being published and especially for various publications. He was one of the people that was completely relied on for that. Since nobody knows who reads these things usually, nobody said, "Isn't Lucius doing a great job?" I always felt that he didn't get the kind of gratitude that he deserved.
	When they did, a few years ago, that North American classicist book. Did you ever run across that? I had the job of writing very short articles about several people. I of course did the one about Lucius and put that in because I thought it was time he got. He wrote a wonderful historical account of the Philological Association. He was the president at one time. Before that, he had been secretary treasurer, going through the whole bit. So he's somebody that always deserved more credit than he ever got.
Interviewer:	Right. One of the other things that you said that struck me is that there was a whole generation of people like that that maintained Classics Departments during the Depression by doing more than their share perhaps.
Helen North:	Well, not only that, but by do ... Now of course, teaching overloads, we always took that for granted in those days even when things were better. But keeping the importance of a Classics Department a matter of common knowledge in a small college that otherwise might've gotten rid of the Classics. Well, I saw this in bigger institutions too. I always, again, I thought these are people that we owe a lot to and nobody really remembers them. 
	But if you're interested in something that is really quite funny as I look back on it. Quite early in my teaching here, things were hard for Classics all over the country and I kept worrying about our department. Well, for one thing I proposed certain new courses that turned out to be extremely popular. Nobody had ever taught mythology as a course and Lucius was a master of mythology. It was one of the things he knew the most about. So I got him to teach a course in mythology, and the time came when we alternated it with Greek literature in translation and so on, and things got a lot better.
	But the thing that I had forgotten about this and I wish I could remember more about it because it's a kind of product of a particular period in our history. I thought that I was always aware that we needed to be known by the students and it was to some extent a help that I was a head resident in dormitories for so many years. People knew me in one context if not in another. But I had several friends as it happened in the biology department at that time. One of them, they were several of them very distinguished biologists, and published a lot, and their names were famous and so on. But they mentioned to me that their students did not do as well as they should've done on examinations to see whether they are fit to go into medical school. A lot of the kids did go onto medical school.
	There was a part of the exam that everybody had to take in those days that I think it no longer exists, that they didn't do very well because they just didn't know anything and they couldn't even spell words. So a friend of mine and I, a friend who was in the biology department, devised a course that was open only to biology students who might be pre-med students. It was not given for credit because I wasn't really capable of doing a good job, though I was interested in it, and it was about the history of science in the ancient world. They would know who made the great discoveries, and hear their names, and be able to spell a lot of words they hadn't spelled before.
	It was listed I think in the catalog as Classics X because it wasn't for credit. But the students of course converted it to Classics Sex. It was extremely well patronized because it was obligatory. The chair of the department made them take this. Members of the biology department came and listened, and I did my best, and of course I learned a lot myself.
Interviewer:	The members of the biology department came to listen?
Helen North:	Oh yes. Oh yes. They would point out to me very often when I was mispronouncing something or when I had misunderstood something, so it was as I say a learning experience for us all. I think that may have gone for two or three years and the biology department was quite happy because the grades the kids had in that particular section of the exam got to be notably better. I even got a paper out of it that I read to a local Classics association and told them it was something we could all do.
Interviewer:	Right, that's what they call the outreach. Now they call it outreach.
Helen North:	If you were interested enough in ... Well, I was interested in the Presocratic philosophers. That's how it really got started. I had worked with Fred Solmsen of course who was interested in that kind of thing. He had dictated a couple of his books to me when I was in graduate school so at least he knew how to spell names and so on. Well, we got to the point where I couldn't really spend the time anymore because we got more and more students coming, taking things like Greek literature, ancient mythology and so on.
Interviewer:	When you first came, there was no mythology? There were no courses in translation at all?
Helen North:	Oh yes. Mr. Shero regularly gave Greek literature and translation, which he was very happy to shove off to me when I came. I was very happy to do it, but it was obvious that there were many other possibilities that we were not developing. One of them of course was Latin literature in translation, which everybody agrees is very very hard to do because Latin literature doesn't have the originality of the Greek does. No matter what kind of translation you're reading in Greek literature, the stuff is so new. Not just for the students, but for the Greeks themselves that it's always exciting. 
	But both Mr. Shero and Ms. Cobbs said, "No, that will never go over." So I said, "Just let me try it," and I did it for several years, and got the enrollment up to 30, which was quite good for us in those days. In fact, one of the students who came to the 50th reunion had taken that course, and remembered it, and said ... She started to tell me, I couldn't hear the rest of it because somebody else came. But she said, "In that course, I learned that what is important is what the teacher is interested in." She said in effect, "We all knew that you didn't like Latin as well as you liked Greek and so on. But you were doing this, and you made it interesting, and so on."
Interviewer:	So where did you start? How did that start? Can you describe it?
Helen North:	Well, we had complete control over what we gave. We just decided that one year, I would do Greek lit in the fall and Latin lit in the spring. That left to Lucius for a year to do ancient history and that's why of course when Lucius retired, we got Martin. Although he was perfectly capable of doing any of the things as you know, we just depended on him to build up the history component.
Interviewer:	The history.
Helen North:	And philosophy too of course. Until we got-
Speaker 3:	When you say we, was there anyone else in the department?
Helen North:	I beg your pardon?
Speaker 3:	Who was in the department? There was you, and Lucius Shero, and then-
Helen North:	Only Ms. Cobbs.
Speaker 3:	And Ms. Cobbs.
Helen North:	She taught one course a semester if she had time. Ms. Cobbs was the Dean of Women who had a PhD from the University of Chicago, but she was hired as the dean. She loved teaching and as I was saying, last time looking back on those days, I'm aware of how hard it was for people, for a generation, because there just were not enough jobs. There aren't enough jobs now but there are a lot more. Well, the people at Chicago wrote back to her teachers. She went to Randolph-Macon. She was a Southerner and they said, "That Ms. Cobbs of yours, she knows everything." She really did. But she had very little chance to teach one course a semester. But she did a great job. She loved Plautus, which nobody else did at that point so she filled in a need too. Then gradually we were able to persuade the president that we had something that enough students wanted.
	He would never, I think, have done away with the Classics Department. Neither of the first two presidents that I knew, they were themselves people of very good judgment about what was important. But they couldn't give us additional help unless we proved that we had the enrollment. For several years, I worked very hard on that. Fortunately, the students were wonderfully responsive.
Interviewer:	So it's nothing new that Classics has to struggle to stay alive.
Helen North:	Oh no, it's always been a struggle. 
Interviewer:	But the Classics Department at Swarthmore must have been instituted when their institution first began, right?
Helen North:	Yes. But it never was a large department. People I think didn't really begin to take the Classics very seriously until things got a little bit easier. But-
Interviewer:	What do you mean just-
Helen North:	Courtney Smith was also a very very conscious person. When it began to seem to him likely that we could survive if we had a third full time person rather than two people with Susan whenever she could help us. But to test this, she said we could have a visiting professor and see how things went. God was merciful to us. What we got was Russel Meiggs.
Interviewer:	He was the first visiting professor?
Helen North:	Yes, yes.
Interviewer:	How did that go?
Helen North:	How did it go?
Interviewer:	Yes.
Helen North:	Oh, it went wonderfully. We had him for just one semester. Actually, he was the third person that we invited. I didn't know anything about Russell Meiggs. I may have heard the name. In fact, I'm sure I did. But I had some other ideas and got polite letters of refusal from them. Then we went to Russell, and he was of interest, and decided to do it. He came early in January in those days as in the days when I was telling you about the faculty plays. We had that time between Christmas and the beginning of the second semester, which wasn't until February. So he came early and we had a very snowy winter. Martin didn't know him either. We were both so nervous. I remember we went into 30th street to meet him. He got that far on the train himself. We picked him, and brought him back to my apartment, and took it from there. Well, he borrowed swimming trunks from a member of the philosophy department who was not nearly as big as Russell was. He went snow, what would we call it? He popularized the sport of rolling in the snow banks. 
Interviewer:	In swimming trunks?
Helen North:	Yes, just in swimming trunks. It happened to be as I say a winter when we had well, we probably had as much snow as we had this last winter and great banks of snow. You would see Russell rolling around in the snow bank. The students who were preparing for their exams were only too happy to have something divert them. They stood around and watched the new Classics professor. Then they went and got their own bathing suits, and they did it. For a whole month that was the vogue in Swarthmore, to roll around in the snow.
Interviewer:	Roll around in the sense the way you roll downhill horizontally or-
Helen North:	No, you roll around. You plunge into the snowbank and you roll around in it.
Interviewer:	Oh, okay. That was that only that one year.
Helen North:	He never did it again as far as I remember. We had him four times. He was such a tremendous success. A couple of times, we had him for a full year. But the first time and the last time, I think we had him for one semester was all he could spare. But it was here that he finished his Ostia book that he had been working for many, many, many years. He was such a devoted teacher. I think this was his reputation at Balliol, and of course he was master of Balliol or something of the sort, and he had a lot to do with running the college and so on. He really gave everything to Balliol. But when he got a chance to be on leave of course, like the rest of us he would get some work done. The first thing that he worked on was the book on Ostia. He finished that here. His second book for which he is I think even better known is the one on Athenian politics in the 5th century. He wrote that almost entirely here.
Interviewer:	The Athenian Empire?
Helen North:	Beg your pardon?
Interviewer:	The one on the Athenian Empire?
Helen North:	Yes. 
Interviewer:	Yeah, that's-
Helen North:	Then in his last year he had begun working, he hadn't really finished it here, the book on Trees and Timber in the Ancient World, which is a marvelous book. I remember visiting him once when I was visiting Oxford and I didn't really see what the point was. We were on the bus coming in to Oxford and he started telling me what he was gonna do in every single chapter. I realized how essential a look this gave us into Roman history in all sorts of ways. That, he largely did here but was still working on just a year he became ill and died.
Interviewer:	But when he first came, Martin must have not been here for very long.
Helen North:	No, he was here for only one semester. He was Courtney's trial to see if we could. What we were pushing really was ancient history and that was his field, one of his many fields. He had enormous classes. He taught a seminar and he taught a class for his students that were not interested in the seminar or couldn't take it. He also did something, which was much appreciated by the students. He had breakfast, in fact most of his meals in the college dining room and would welcome students to come and sit with him. He was always willing to listen to their troubles and to give them advice. He was the most sympathetic person you could imagine. He just did us a powerful lot of good. After that semester, the spring semester that he was with us, Courtney said, "Okay well, go ahead. Get your three." 
Interviewer:	But how long had Martin been there by then?
Helen North:	Well, my memory is not very good for that. Martin came in '58 and it was sometime in the early '60s that Russell came. The second year, the second time he came, Paula his wife came who is a very interesting person herself, was an English historian, and published a book on Charles II, and was much respected by the history department here. Who was I think I told you tended to be afraid of Russell because he was just bringing people in. It wasn't just a popular thing. It was something that was extremely solid.
Interviewer:	But how is it possible that somebody who arrives is such a magnet immediately for the students?
Helen North:	Because somebody did what?
Interviewer:	That somebody can just have big classes after arriving only for one semester.
Helen North:	Well-
Interviewer:	Because he was famous?
Helen North:	If you were rolling in the snow for a month and everybody knew you, and everybody talked about you, and the student newspaper ran articles about you, everybody was eager to take courses with you and they did. He took all comers. He was a-
Speaker 3:	You're the new guy.
Interviewer:	So you're the rolling in the snow guy.
Speaker 3:	That's not my thing, no.
Helen North:	No, but he really-
Speaker 3:	It's okay, I can totally picture it.
Helen North:	He did us an enormous amount of good and opened up horizons for the faculty as well as for the students.
Interviewer:	So then after that, you could just hire the third person?
Helen North:	Yes.
Interviewer:	Who came?
Helen North:	Oh, he was absolutely wonderful. He had been at Harvard, and then he went to Cornell, and he worked on Latin literature, and on Roman history mainly. Well, I'm so ashamed of myself not to be able to remember his name because of how we grieved when he left us. He went to Brandeis and then he became provost at University of California, one of the universities of California, in Los Angeles, and died at his desk. We always said that if he had stayed here, he wouldn't have died like that. But actually, his father had died in the same way. He had the same just about the same age. Isn't this terrible? Think of people that you can remember from that generation as just absolutely gone.
Speaker 3:	We'll look it up.
Interviewer:	We'll give him proper [inaudible 00:32:41].
Helen North:	Beg your pardon?
Interviewer:	We will give him proper [inaudible 00:32:45].
Helen North:	Oh, absolutely. 
Interviewer:	What was he working on?
Helen North:	What was he?
Interviewer:	What was his specialty?
Helen North:	His specialty. He was working on ... I know that it was Latin literature of the empire. He did some work on Augustine also. He had done a lot of work on Medieval Latin. When he took the job at Cornell, we offered him a job because by then we knew we could have our third person. But he, well I mean Cornell was a place where he could teach graduate students of course, and that was the big attraction, and he himself had been there after he finished at Harvard. But exactly, well I shouldn't say exactly six months later. But at the meeting, it was in Baltimore as I remember that year at the Christmas meeting of the Philological Association, he came up to me and said, "Ms. North, I have made a terrible mistake. Could I still come to Swarthmore?" So of course, I embraced him. He just couldn't stand the weather anymore. By this time, he was married and I think his wife didn't like the winters. I never forget. But we were delighted to have him under any circumstances and we had him for three or four years. He taught Latin to Carolyn in her freshmen year.
Interviewer:	Oh really?
Helen North:	We were talking about him when she was here. Isn't that terrible? We're both having trouble remembering names and we fastened on him. 
Interviewer:	Then after that, he went where? He went to Stanford you said?
Helen North:	He went to Brandeis.
Interviewer:	To Brandeis.
Helen North:	His wife was a Brandeis alumna and he did that for several years. But Brandeis of course never had an endowment. They depended entirely every year on donations and when there would be crises in Israel, that's where the patrons gave their money. After struggling with that for a couple of years he said, "I just couldn't stand it anymore," having to raise money. So he got then this other offer at UCLA and did a wonderful job. He's a very very judicious, very kind person. If you listen to Carolyn talk about him, you'll see how much.
	She wrote in fact when he died a beautiful obituary for him, which she gave to me, which I tried to get published in the Alumni Magazine, but it was too long. [inaudible 00:36:26] do it. But he was our number two. Then he, like Russell and of course like Martin, had been so successful that the Classics Department became more prominent. The next thing we were able to do was to get not only number three but number four, and we got Tom Mitchell and Gil Rose. 
Interviewer:	Oh, right. Oh, so Tom Mitchell, let's talk about Tom Mitchell. How long was he here for?
Helen North:	He was here for 10 years. I had known him not very much, but I knew him at Cornell. He had done his graduate work, all of it I think. Or did he get a ...? He had gone to the University of Galway when it was new, one of their first Latinists and did brilliantly. Then he wanted to study with Solmsen, but he had the bad luck to come to Cornell the year that Solmsen left. Solmsen went to Wisconsin and Tom stayed on. He had a very distinguished career there. It was where he met Lynne, his wife. She's a girl from New Jersey who was in all of the sciences, but she was very gifted at drawing. She used to do drawings for the people in the sciences and so on. They got married while they were there and they had their first child when they came here. 
	We got Tom for one year because he already, when he got his doctorate at Cornell, had an offer from the University College Cork. He had accepted that, but it wasn't until the next year, so we got him here for a year. We had a great time getting people, trying to keep them and so on, and sometimes we were very lucky. Tom was here for us just that one year and then he left. I remember that year very well because it was the year that my mother died. I had come home from Rome. When I was able to go back to Rome late in the spring, I stopped in Ireland for a week and I went down to Cork to visit. Tom said, "Helen, I made a terrible mistake. Could I come back?" Well, I don't know how we were so lucky as to have vacancies when we needed them. But I think that there was some kind of power watching over us that we made only very temporary appointments on those occasions. If we couldn't get the person we wanted very very much, we didn't settle on anybody else.
	Of course, I welcomed him with open arms and then he came. He was here for 10 years, and he developed our Latin program and our history program very very well. It was his idea and I think Gil's, who came the year after he did, to offer a beginning Latin course that required more courses, more classes, but gave you more credit. A lot of that took hold. 
Interviewer:	Oh, the one credit and a half tradition?
Helen North:	Yes, so that spread to other language departments too. It was a very good idea. Tom, he was also the kind of person who has a great impact on the faculty. He very quickly, always noticeable, was appointed to various committees and was doing all sorts of things. I in fact began to be afraid that he might go into administration. But luckily, as long as he was with us, he was teaching. I can see him now down at the front of the Parish Hill teaching football to little boys. They had three little boys before they left here and they were a couple who were very very influential on the faculty.
	But the time came when not Cork, but Trinity College had an opening. Tom went to be invited to [inaudible 00:41:56] study in very great detail. My, they really wanted to know an awful lot about him, but they offered him the job. I knew at once that he was leaving us because I was in my office in Parish the day he got back and he came leaping up the stairs. He handed me a brown paper bag with a bottle in it. I opened the bag and it was a bottle of potcheen. Now, do you all know what potcheen is?
Interviewer:	I don't.
Speaker 3:	Well, I've heard of it.
Helen North:	Potcheen is Irish whiskey, but it's illegally made and it's notorious because it's so powerful. Tom had a sister whose husband had a traveling grocery store in County Mayo and he used to make trips all through the hills. The people who made potcheen [crosstalk 00:43:04]-
Interviewer:	How do you spell that?
Speaker 3:	P-O-T-S-
Helen North:	P-O-T-C-H-E-E-N.
Speaker 3:	H-E-E-N.
Helen North:	Really, it's an Irish word. It's something made in a pot, pot whiskey. We call it potcheen. But I opened it, and looked in, and I saw it was actually a rum bottle that had been reused for potcheen. I said, "Tom, does this mean what I think it means?" He said, "Yes, I've got the job." So off they went.
Interviewer:	So it was bittersweet.
Helen North:	Yeah. About five years later, he became provost of Trinity, which was election by the faculty. It's very very hard to get and he held that office for 10 years. He's now retired as provost, but he is doing all sorts of things. He runs. He's in charge of the, oddly enough, the best teaching hospital in Dublin, which belongs to Trinity. He has been reorganizing it and so on, and doing all sorts of things. He was a great addition, he and Gil at the same time. I remember again very well when they were up for tenure, the college was still smaller and we knew people. I had an office on the second floor in Parish and there was a ladies' room at the far end of Parish. When I walked down to go to the ladies' room, either the president or the vice president would very often have his door open and call me in to tell me something or sometimes ask me something. But Ed Cratsley was the Vice President then and he said, "You can't have them both tenured. You've gotta choose."
Interviewer:	Wow.
Helen North:	I said, "No, I won't choose." I didn't choose, so we got them both. 
Interviewer:	Oh, I cannot believe that they told you something. Because obviously it had nothing to do with the merit of the people, it had to do with ...
Helen North:	Things were done quite informally.
Speaker 3:	It's funny that Ed Cratsley, I mean the Financial Vice President, it's odd that he would be involved. 
Helen North:	It may have been the year after Courtney died. I think maybe it was.
Interviewer:	So he was acting president.
Helen North:	Because he was sitting in I think that open door as I picture it was Courtney's office. Because I had seen Courtney carried out on the stretcher the day that he died and held the door for the stretcher bearers.
Interviewer:	Oh, he just died on the job suddenly? 
Helen North:	He had a stroke. When the admissions office had been occupied and we were having oh, for about let's see, several weeks we had daily or nightly faculty meetings. I happened to be secretary of something or other so that I was the one who recorded things. Courtney said at one point, "I'm not going to have faculty meetings that go on until 2:00 in the morning because it's so hard on the older members of the faculty." In fact, a number of older members had stopped coming because it was just too tiring. The only one who died was Courtney himself. 
Speaker 3:	These were meetings to discuss what was to be done about the student occupation?
Helen North:	About the demands, too complicated to go into here and not really very relevant I suppose to us. But Frank Pierson had been the chairman of a committee, which presented a recommendation to the faculty specifically about increasing the number of African American students. He presented that early in December. When the admissions office was occupied of course by people from off campus, they presented a demand, a set of demands, which were almost identical with the ones in Frank's proposal. It was the same day that they also occupied the admissions office in Brandeis, making it look very much as though two extremely liberal colleges had been made the victims of this. 
	What to do to satisfy these people and to do it in the way the college thought it should be done, that was what we were talking about. I remember I used to feed Courtney bars of ... There was a chocolate bar called Irish Coffee that you could get only in Ireland. It was so good. Mary and I always got some when we came back. I had had some and I used to feed it to poor little Courtney. It was my job to write on the blackboard the things that were being discussed and so on. It was quite a time.
Interviewer:	He felt sick while this meeting was going on?
Helen North:	Beg your pardon?
Interviewer:	He felt sick while this meeting was going on?
Helen North:	Yes.
Interviewer:	Oh. 
Helen North:	Well, no. We were having the meetings in the evening and he was in his office in the morning. I was in fact meeting a student in my office and the phone rang. It was somebody telling me that Courtney had just had a heart attack or a stroke, they didn't know what and to come simply because I was on all these committees. I went to his office and he was already dead. I don't mean to harrow you all, but it's harrowing to think of it.
	I remember standing there in the corner, and as I say they brought him out on a stretcher, and they covered him with a blanket so we knew that he had died. I held the door open for them to get out the second floor of Parish and looked down, could see the top of Courtney's head, all the hair that turned gray in recent years, not just this occasion. Then Susan Cobbs, and Ed Cratsley, and I stood there, and Susan and I of course were crying our eyes out. Poor Ed Cratsley, he would pat Susan on the shoulders and then he would pat me on the shoulders. He'd pat Susan, pat me, and so on. It's in a way funny to think of it after that. Then we had a meeting in the Quaker meeting and we then had a Catholic chaplain. He said mass there for Courtney and everybody went to communion, people who were practically no Catholics.
Speaker 3:	Was Courtney Catholic?
Helen North:	What?
Speaker 3:	Courtney Smith was Catholic?
Helen North:	Beg your pardon?
Speaker 3:	Was Courtney Smith Catholic?
Helen North:	No, oh no.
Speaker 3:	Oh, so why? So-
Helen North:	Because this was a way of doing honor to Courtney and the Quakers were ... He had become a Quaker after he took the presidency, or not the first year but he did become a Quaker. But they had nothing to offer at that point. Whoever we had roped in as a chaplain came and said mass. I remember marveling, and seeing all these people going up to receive communion. It was beautiful.
	Anyway, Courtney did a great deal for us, but he was a man that was hard to persuade. But once he agreed he would stick with you and not expect unreasonable results but let things go on. I think his help had a great deal to do with the growth of our department because he made everything as easy for us as he could financially. He himself of course had been to Oxford. He was in charge of the Oxford or the Rhodes Scholarship Program, and he knew Russell or knew about Russell. To get him here was in, I saw later a real triumph for him, and to make Swarthmore something that was so important in Russell's life. In fact, I read an obituary of Russell after he died, which spoke particularly of how beloved he was at Swarthmore and how much he enjoyed being here that he came again, and again, and again. It wasn't just a temporary affection.
Interviewer:	Do you think that the connection of Swarthmore to Oxford was especially true in the case of Classics?
Helen North:	And Greek.
Interviewer:	Yes, I mean in the case of Greek and Latin. It was not like a college-
Helen North:	Well, Mr. Shero of course had been to Oxford. He was as I say a Rhode scholar. I don't think Ms. [Brewster 00:54:27] had actually been to Oxford, but she studied in England, and in Rome, and so on. She was a person of a good deal of experience, though she started out in Bryn Mawr. I think that, though I had never heard this discussed at all, it would've been a shame on the part of Swarthmore if it had done away with the Classics. It never was even suggested. It was just my own concerns because I saw this happening all around and not just then. But we really had some strong supporters and of course Ms. Cobbs was a great help also.