The Thomas Jefferson Hour; #0421; Ed Albers

Welcome to the Thomas Jefferson Hour, your weekly conversation with our third president of the United States, Thomas Jefferson. Today's program was recorded in May 2004 and it is about Ev Albers, the founding father of this radio program. Please join us as our producer and host for the day, Janie Guil, speaks with Humanity Scholar Clay Jenkinson. Welcome to the Thomas Jefferson Hour. My name is Janie Guil and I'm the producer of the program, seated across from me is Humanity Scholar Clay Jenkinson. Clay, good day to you. Good day to you, my friend Janie Guil. Clay, today is a special issue. We're recording this on May 8th, 2004 and you recently lost your best friend and your mentor, Ev Albers, to pancreatic cancer. So this program is not just dedicated to Ev, but it's about Ev Albers. It certainly is. Everett Albers died on April 24th a Saturday at 9.12 a.m. in his home in Bismarck, North Dakota under hospice care and I was there at that terrible time and Everett in dying left of his

family, satan and filled with grief and a large community of friends who will miss him just desperately. But he also had built two other constituencies in the course of his life and they will miss him. First of all, he is one of the most creative public humanities administrators in the country. He had been for more than 30 years the director of the North Dakota Humanities Council in Bismarck and in that work, which we'll talk about, he had helped to change the face of the public humanities in the United States. But he also, when he was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer 18 months ago, I think it was September 20th of 2002, Everett began a website journal of reflections and he wrote virtually every day from then until a few days before his death in April of 2004 and that journal gained

its own constituency and people who had never met Ev and some who had never heard of him, turned in every day to his website to read his reflections on his life and his work and particularly on how one dies. Okay, thank you. I would like for you to just start off and give us who was Ev Albers and then afterwards I'd like for you to go into who was Ev Albers to you and how you met Ev. Let me start with who was Ev Albers. He was the executive director of the North Dakota Humanities Council. He was the husband of Leslie Albers who survives him and two children, Albert Albers and Gretchen. Gretchen's a graduate student at the University of Nebraska at Lincoln and also an employee of the University of Nebraska Press and Albert is a computer genius who is working for a medical related provider in Madison, Wisconsin at this time. Everett was a farm boy. He was

born on a farm near Hanover, North Dakota which is in the center of the North Dakota Farm District. He comes from very strong German stock. He grew up at a farm and he suddenly at some early point in his life fell in love with literature and it really was the pivot on which his life turned and he became a college professor and then the longtime administrator of this public humanities program in North Dakota. Everett was a larger than life figure. He was a he was a big man. One time a newspaper in North Dakota called a Meshaggy Buffalo of a man. He had a huge spirit. He was a he was a man who loved to laugh and maybe my fondest memory of all my memories of have is that when he would become delighted by something and he was very easily delighted. He would and you were in his presence he would put his face

about one inch from yours and laugh and it was such a wacky invasion of your personal boundaries that it made me highly and everyone else who who experiences highly uncomfortable but then the laugh would be just so infectious in his spirit which is bleed out of him and into you and you would find yourself a laughing and I have never let any other human being have get that close to my face with laughter but that was his routine and he was just he had he was a man of great passion huge vitality and deep deep fund of creativity and he believed that the thinking out of the box was not only desirable but it was really the only way of life that he wanted him and he barely thought in the box and he was he was an eccentric but he was a a man of almost unbelievable capacity for for I guess you'd have to call it Jouada Veeve just joy in living. How did a literature professor become the

head of the humanities for North Dakota? Well it's not so not so uncommon back when the National Endowment for the Humanities was created in 1965 then there was a long period of trying to decide what it meant it's happened under the Lyndon Johnson administration and it was clear that this new federal agency was going to have a presence in every state and eventually some of the territories Puerto Rico and Guam and the Mariana Islands and so on and there was all this money that was was thrown at this by the Congress of the United States and at the time no one really knew what to do with it and the idea was that somehow it would create a relationship between the public and the academy and the theory was that if you took humanity scholars that's professors of philosophy and literature and history and linguistics and law and so on and brought them out of the university into the actual communities of America that something magical would happen for both sides that's the theory and ever it

was then the director of an experimental humanities program at Dickinson State College in my hometown in Dickinson and he was a humanities professor and this this program that he ran there was a the county program that he spent the rest of his life developing but it was a it was a kind of interdisciplinary humanities-based program in Western civilization and I as a high school student actually was so bored with high school that my parents let me take a college course and I happened to wind up in this course taught by Evelbers but he was there and the State Humanities Council was formed I think in 1972 or 1973 right in there somewhere and they were sort of shopping around for a staff and a vision and Everett was asked to apply for the job and he got the job and he was a he was not precisely the only director of the North Dakota Humanities Council there was one person who was kind of an early temporary

interim director before the permanent staff was hired but but Everett then ran the show from 1973 until his death in in 2004 thank you Clay and so we now know how you met Ev you met Ev because you took one of his classes but how did you meet the real Ev what is it that brought you two together I mean you hear you the age difference had to be a decade or more it's at least that maybe 15 years I'm not quite sure he was 62 well it's at least 12 years I'm 48 and he's 62 so 14 years but Ev at the time it seemed like an immense difference not it seems like a virtual identity of ages that's what that's what aging does for us but let me start by explaining to our audience why we're having this discussion I mean not only has my closest friend died but Everett was the was the father of this program the Thomas Jefferson Hour is a direct result of the work that Everett asked me to do on his behalf portraying Thomas Jefferson this

actually happened a long time ago about almost 20 years ago now and Everett had asked me to take on the role of Thomas Jefferson for a project of his and I did it with some reluctance and then I sort of have been doing Jefferson often on ever since and at a certain point about I suppose 10 years ago I had a chance to take Jefferson to radio and I jumped at the chance and we've had a radio presence in one form or another ever since and so the Thomas Jefferson Hour which is I hope admired by everyone who's listening certainly listen to by everyone who's listening the Jefferson Hour is a direct manifestation of the ideals of public humanities discourse that Evelvers was promoting all of his life so that's that's why we're talking about him and and I just have to say in very blunt terms if there if there were no Evelvers there would be no Jefferson hour and there and I would not portray Thomas Jefferson I was on my way to becoming either a journalist or a English professor and this was not part of

my life's plan I didn't dream of portraying the dead I didn't portray a dream of taking on historical characters this wasn't something that I that was part of my life before I met Ev I met Ev and I and I I guess you have to say I fell in love with him as as one of my beloved mentors and and and maybe the greatest of them and I admired him so deeply that I let him I sort of placed myself like a thing of wax in his hands and then he began to shape that wax into what he thought was an interesting public career and I let him make those determinations and I'm not sorry that I did at all but I certainly would never have become a historical impersonator a Jefferson impersonator a Jefferson scholar or a radio host if it hadn't been for Evelvers so this is his his doing and I think I regarded him as my beloved mentor and I don't mean any blasphemy by this but

there was a long period in which he regarded me as his beloved disciple that I was he invented all these ideas but he didn't take them into the field he asked me to take them into the field and I did them for him with him as an active friendship and and because I thought it was an interesting set of ideas and I've been at it ever since so I'm the Jefferson hours of product of Evelvers and many many regards I'm a product of Evelvers and and so it's very appropriate that we that we talk about him this one time at just after his death at the age of 62 of pancreatic cancer after a long long difficult struggle with that terrible form of cancer and he said to me once early after he had been diagnosed you know what the five-year survival rate is for pancreatic cancer and I said no and he said zero so he said I have up to five years if I'm a wild optimist to say whatever I want to say and to get my affairs in order and to to make sense

of this and and he did he but he only lived about 18 months Clay thank you you're listening to the Thomas Jefferson hour where today we are dedicating the show to Evelvers Clay's mentor and we're also talking about Evelvers the show is about Evelvers Clay can you go through and explain to our listening audience what Shuttakwa is and how Evel got involved in the Shuttakwa methodology yes I can and I will answer your question about how I got to know Evel as a human being as opposed to a college professor but let me start by talking about Shuttakwa the Thomas Jefferson hour is a portrayal of Thomas Jefferson on a series of themes or current events or questions this idea was invented by Evelvers back in 1976 during the the first bicentennial the bicentennial of the American Revolution the humanities council in

North Dakota was just a little child just starting and they had a couple of hundred thousand dollars per year to play with and they weren't really sure what to do with it and Everton is dear friend and my friend Warren Hanky of Bismarck were sort of scheming I wasn't part of this they were scheming about what to do with this money and how best to use it and Warren is a student of American history and he said what about the old Shuttakwa movement and there'd been a is everyone I think knows there was a Shuttakwa movement in the United States between 1874 and around 1930 it began at Lake Shuttakwa in New York State as a permanent pavilion where there was Sunday school training for lay ministers and Sunday school teachers and then it became sort of more ecumenical and eventually it sort of jettisoned the religious training all together and became a kind of popular cultural series at Lake Shuttakwa which continues to this day and then every every state had a permanent lakeside Shuttakwa the one in Colorado was at Boulder and there are Shuttakwa parks and Shuttakwa legacy buildings all over the country and then in 194 a

couple of men from Iowa a Methodist minister in an entrepreneur decided to launch 10th Shuttakwa and they thought a Shuttakwa is so great why have it in just one place in each state why not take it on the road and so they bought tents and they took Shuttakwa on the road and Shuttakwa featured poetry and electrocution and dance and children's instruction and tips for housewives on how to can pickles and so on and so forth and it became really the the continuing educational movement in the United States in the post-Civil War period up until World War One and it was wildly successful and Theodore Roosevelt always to be dependent upon for a quote like this said that Shuttakwa was the most American place in America and Clarence Darrow gave talks in Shuttakwa and William Jennings Brian who was sometimes called the great Shuttakwa and gave his Prince of Peace talk about Jesus's character maybe 20,000 times in Shuttakwa tents and he used to show up on the train and be

driven over to the Shuttakwa tent and he would speak for two or three hours to 2,000 people in some place in Nebraska or some place in Iowa and he would insist that there be a basin up on the stage on a table and a huge block of ice in that basin and he would put his hands on that block of ice to cool himself as he talked and he could there was no loud speaking system at the time he and he could talk to 20,000 people he had this he was a he was a brilliant magnificent orator with a huge mouthpiece of huge voice so this was the old Shuttakwa and it died around 1930 and then the word Shuttakwa kind of surfaces from time to time in American culture including for example in in Robert Piercing Zen in the art of motorcycle maintenance which was kind of a famous cult book in the 1970s and in it Piercing wants to engage in a series of discourses with the American people about excellence and he says he's going to call them Shuttakwa's well so this is all sort of in the air and

Dr. Hanky Warren Hanky and and Evelbers met and decided that they would recreate Shuttakwa so they bought a little tent and they still have it and it's it's about 24 feet square it's brown canvas just a teeny little tent the kind you might see at a funeral or something and they and they sent that tent around North Dakota and they put traditional lecturers in it so you might go to the Shuttakwa would be two nights in a town you know 20 people would show up sometimes two and there would be a lecture on Sir imagery in Hamlet or Chaucer's Troilus and Crusade or is Plato still relevant things like that and so these were traditional humanities lectures but under an open air Shuttakwa tent and I was part of that I was aroused about I was along with a really extraordinary human being named Ed Salstrom one of the one of the most amazing people I've ever known Ed and I were the rouse debuts and we drove a station

wagon around North Dakota to 28 towns per summer in 1975 and 1976 and put up that tent 28 times and lured you know innocent North Dakota into that tent and then had these traditional lectures and the scholars would come out from universities and it was not successful because it was pointless you know why throw up a tent to have a traditional lecture that could have occurred in a high school auditorium or in the library but at least this was the start and we got the bug the tent show the magic of a tent show the idea of putting up a tent and it really we could see the germs or something better and then ever it said well what if we took Steve Allen's meeting of the minds I don't know how many of our listeners remember that but Steve Allen used to have a program called Meeting of the Minds where you'd have actors portraying Jesus and Gandhi and Socrates and Plato and Abraham Lincoln and there'd be a kind of round rob and discussion between Plato and Gandhi and this was very successful television in the 1950s and early 60s and then there was Hal Holbrook's famous Mark Twain

tonight and he's really the Dean of Chautauqua in a certain kind of way and so these two strains came together the tent on the one hand and the recreation of the old Chautauqua movement and then this sort of Steve Allen like or Hal Holbrook like portrayal of characters and when that marriage occurred that was Chautauqua as we now understand it and since then the North Dakota Chautauqua has been in continuous form since 1976 the Great Plains Chautauqua has been in existence since 1981 and now I think more than 20 states around the country have Chautauqua's of one sort or another and every state has Chautauqua activities where scholars portray characters the way I portray Thomas Jefferson and all of that that whole national movement the second National American Chautauqua movement is all dependent upon one individual and one individual only and that is Everett Elbers I was one of its early field guys but Elv was its inventor. Wow Clay we have one minute before we need to take a break how did you end up going from being aroused about to Thomas Jefferson. I'll start by

saying how I met Elbers I was in his course and I greatly admired him he gave these bizarre lectures he talked about the dark side of the Enlightenment and talked about the fact that Russo had a had a problem with his his general organs that made it impossible for him to urinate and Voltaire was essentially irrational and crazy and he tried to show that I mean what here was one of the themes in Elbers life that the irrational that the human condition is powerful and no matter what you do the human condition will out that we are basically crazy self-divided self-destructive imperfect human beings right to the core and so that's and I took this course from and there I met him and and and then I did some publicity I was a Dickinson press photographer and he noticed my my work as a as a public relations photographer and he asked me to do some early PR work for the North Dakota humanities council and so that's he he actually pulled me out of my little obscurity as a press photographer and asked me to do more

serious work for this new agency and I did it Clay thank you very much we need to take a break we will be back in just a moment welcome back to the Thomas Jefferson hour I'm Janie Will the producer of the

program and seated across from me is Clay Jenkins and the humanity scholar who portrays Thomas Jefferson today's program is dedicated to Ev Albers the father of the Thomas Jefferson hour and the founder of what is today's current Shatakwa movement Clay you've been telling us about your relationship with Ev how you met him in in a class that he was teaching but how did you end up in tights in a way well I asked myself that question Janie almost every day of my life and sometimes more acutely than other days sometimes when I am strip search to airport security I think how did this happen I was on my way to being a mild-mannered English professor my father wanted me to be the chairman of a department of a small liberal arts college somewhere and suddenly I've spent a lot of my life dressing up as not just Jefferson but Mary with her Lewis and Jay Robert Oppenheimer and John Wesley Powell and Jonathan Swift and soon Toyota Roosevelt and ever didn't do all of that but he launched it he did

Lewis and he did Jefferson and I wouldn't have been a Jefferson scholar or a Jefferson pretender or Lewis and Clark scholar or pretender if it hadn't been for us so this is all his work and here's what happened it's a it's a ridiculous story some people will remember this from before but I I was going back and forth to Oxford I was teaching at a small liberal arts college in Southern California called Pomona College and every summer I would fly off to Oxford to work on John Dunn on on my doctoral work on John Dunn and I actually was in the Los Angeles International Airport about to fly from LA to London Heathrow when I got one of those white courtesy telephone pages and it said Clay Jenkins and please pick up a white courtesy telephone so I didn't I thought oh my god you know my my mother's dead or something terrible has happened you know why do you get paged on a white courtesy telephone who knows I'm here so I picked up the phone and it was Ev I don't know how he found me I

mean I literally he must have called my parents and they must have known something but he calls me in Los Angeles Airport I'm about to board this flight and he said I'm writing a grant to the National Endowment for the Humanities to do this this Chautauqua on Jefferson's agrarian dream and I want you to portray Thomas Jefferson and I said okay sure and got and hung up and got on the plane because I thought chances that this occur about 1% this is another one of Everett's hairbrain schemes it would pass like like a summer thunderstorm and I would never have to think about it again but now I've pleased him by saying sure sure I'll do that so I spent the summer in Oxford working on sermons by John Dunn you know investigating theological concepts and talking about the history of the Anglican movement and the via media and and you know Dunn's capacity as a rhetorician and questions about the dual nature of Jesus and and the Augustinian origins of 17th century divinity and you know what what is original sin and and so on and so forth and I got back in August

and there was a letter waiting for me saying from Ev saying we got the grant and I'm expecting you next summer to be Thomas Jefferson from June 1st till September 1st where you shocked I was I was so sorry that my best friend had done this to me because I'll tell you this Janie I can tell you a bunch of things about this number one if I had known he'd get the grant I wouldn't have said yes number two if if he hadn't called on a white courtesy telephone and caught me off guard I probably would have said no number three if I had known that I'd still be Jefferson 30 years 20 years later I certainly would have said no number four if I had known then what it takes to know Jefferson I would absolutely have said no I mean I thought Jefferson would take you know it'd be worth a summer's study of some sort and then that would be the end of it if I had known that Jefferson wrote 65 volumes of letters if I had known that Jefferson is this this paradoxical being who's who says one thing and it's the

best thing ever said but does something a little bit less noble that Jefferson is a problem is a historical and biographical problem and that in a sense you can never actually figure out Thomas Jefferson and then I read Merrill Peterson's great study Thomas Jefferson and the new nation which is still my favorite biography of Jefferson and he had he'd spent 25 years working on Jefferson and then he wrote the preface to it and he said after all this time of writing this biography of Jefferson I have to admit that I find him impenetrable I thought oh my god you know if the best Jefferson scholars find Jefferson impenetrable and I an English major whose actual field is 17th century literature in Shakespeare and Milton how am I supposed to understand Thomas Jefferson and if I'd known any of that I would have said no and if I'd known that this career was going to take me into so many sort of bizarre situations I might have said no I'm not sorry but he caught me off guard and you know Theroux says somewhere in Walden how many a man's life has been revolutionized by the

reading of a single book and I get we know we could talk about that theme but I think my life was revolutionized by an individual calling on a white courtesy telephone and really that was where the road diverged in the wood and and there's sort of my life is before that call and after that call would you say that you took the pathless less trotten dot I wore the tights less traveled in I don't know what metaphor you want to use yes I took the pathless travel down and it's been a crazy path you know I'm not a tenured English professor I basically abandoned my academic career I don't deserve an academic life at this point I've been a popularizer you know and people like the way I popularize ideas but I've been a popularizer and I've taken on these characters and I you know I have no interest in drama Janie when I was in high school we as like all high school students we sneered openly at the Thespians and made fun of them and thought that they were the geekiest strangest people in our schools and you could not have dragged me with with a

with a gun with a with a meat hook on into a theater production when I was in school I have no background in this I love to read Shakespeare but I don't want to be Malvolio or Romeo or Lear and so this is completely foreign to my native temperament I know this will sound odd but I mean you'll affirm this I'm an extremely shy person you know almost painfully shy and so no part of me wanted to be in public on stage one of the people that I worked with early played this crazy character who was a kind of a narrative wealth semi-fictional cowboy and this was in the nineteen late nineteen seventies and he actually on several occasions portrayed this cow poke having dropped acid having taken LSD and now I know why it's the only way you can actually do this without smirking at yourself but Clay I've asked you to portray Thomas Jefferson for one summer one summer one summer and here you are 20 years later still in tights

in a wig still portraying Jefferson saying I can't blame Ev any longer I'm saying that what happened that you then mastered well it's far from clear that I've mastered anything but what happened was that Ev kept calling me and saying now that I you know you know you got you got your legs under you I've got this plan I'm going to send you to this national conference and I want you to come be at this event and and so he started shipping me on the road during peace time you know there'd been the the Chautauqua and most Chautauquins have their summer and then they you know they rush back to their more traditional lives and and they remember it fondly but distantly but I never it never gave me that chance and he kept finding me new opportunities and I kept doing it then suddenly the bicentennial of the Constitution occurred in in nineteen eighty seven and some I got calls to talk in every state in America and suddenly because it was Jefferson and because of Ev and because of the bicentennial of the United States Constitution I the phone rang off the hook and I just started doing it

and at a certain point about six years later so in the in the early nineteen nineties I realized oh my god it ceased to be a hobby and became kind of a career path that's not all that I've done I mean I still have maintained some kind of an academic life and I've taught and written and consulted and etc. but I realized at a certain point I could no longer legitimately call it a mere hobby any longer and around this time you then adopted the Thomas Jefferson hour or was this much later when did you and Ev conceive this idea and how did this idea it all you know everything in my life is an accident I'm a passive person and I just I wait for the universe to speak and of course it usually is absolutely silent but what happened was that I I was invited as Thomas Jefferson by somebody to go to the Bohemian Grove in Northern California which is this really interesting club of man and I mean males who go to the this Redwood forest and and say farewell to care for a short time every summer and

it's a much lampooned business but it's actually splendid in its own patriarchal way and I was invited to come give a talk as Thomas Jefferson for the Bohemian Grove and a man came up afterwards and said you know you know if you ever thought about doing radio and I said well not really you know and he said well I want you to do radio and so he actually started it and I called Evans as is this a good idea and he said it's a it's a capital idea and it's kind of a theater Roosevelt I'm delighted and so then I started down this and have helped and then when it took off and became something that was sort of popular in a number of different venues on public radio then I've said well let's do a website to go with it and we'll have webcasting and we'll have if you mention a letter we'll post it and if you think of a book we'll link to it and if you want to have comments they'll be there and you can take listener questions from it and so I didn't invent the idea of the radio program but he's immediately realized what is obviously the case that that public

radio that radio is an ideal humanities mechanism because now instead of having to to fly to Omaha and Tampa and Houston and San Diego and Seattle and Tacoma you can broadcast and be in all of those places radio is a is an art of the imagination unlike television and so it's a perfect vehicle for the humanities and so it was a nice fit but it was something that actually came from an independent source thank you you are listening to the Thomas Jefferson hour this is we are recording in May of 2004 shortly after the passing of Ev Albers due to pancreatic cancer Clay Ev was an interesting man and he did believe in miracles and he did believe in magic and how did that impact your impressions of him and how did that impact his career and just his entire life well you know that was such an amazing man I would and I mean this with great respect but I would call him an imprecise genius he was a genius I think I've only known a couple of geniuses in my life I think he was clearly a genius and by

that I mean somebody whose powers are just extra ordinary I mean I know lots and lots of very bright people I mean thousands of them and I know a lot of great intellectuals but Ev had something more and you could just feel it in him and it was a was a was a deeper capacity for something and but it wasn't as careful as my father was one of the was a was a fastidious fussy sort of proofreader sort of guy and he and Ev became friends and it drove my father crazy because Ev could could in a weekend produce an 80 page tabloid on Alexis to Tocqueville but then he would maybe misspell Tocqueville throughout the whole tabloid and my father would think whoa this can't be that I mean my so my father came from the sort of the precision end of the spectrum but but he didn't have a lot of creativity and Ev came from the creativity end of the spectrum and he had a few lapses in precision so what Ev all of his life needed was an adequate proofreader and and my father was served as one of them I've tried to serve as one lots of

people have but this I mean he there was a certain I don't mean sloppiness but there was a certain dispatch in Everett that he was doing so many things so fast so grandly learning how to do graphic arts before people even had computers in the humanities and building websites before there were even widespread use of websites and you know at one I remember once when the Bill of Rights was being commemorated he talked to grocery store chain in North Dakota and to printing the Bill of Rights on all the grocery store bags and so this was like the whole country thought what is this you know why what kind of what kind of a humanities program is it that has the Bill of Rights on grocery store bags but it's fabulous it's a great idea and so as always inventing something and doing something really highly unusual and so I knew him and loved this quality and I mean nobody like with everyone else I mean it's sort of slightly drove one crazy but Ev had this capacity to keep reinventing himself and and thinking of something brand new and when he invented Chautauqua literally everybody thought it was a stupid idea everybody and now Chautauqua is one of the most beloved of American public humanities

institutions and there was another instance where there was this there was this group of filmmakers and they wanted to produce a black and white they got money from the North Dakota Humanities Council to produce a black and white documentary on something called the nonpartisan league which was an agrarian radical movement in North Dakota between 1912 and 1922 so they got this grant and they were going to produce a 30-minute film and they but they they kept finding more and more interest and they decided that they would produce what's called a docu drama sort of like it's historical fiction it's a drama but it's documentary in base and they came back and they kept helping them and helping them and eventually the budget swelled to more than three hundred thousand dollars and they produced this film called Northern Lights and it could never have happened without ever it and the film went on to win the Cannes Film Festival Golden Camera Award for best documentary film I mean this is this could never have happened without ever it it took some other really talented people but ever it was the one who who kept lifting it and tell it succeeded and he's the one who kept the Chautauqua tent up and tell everyone gained respect for it and he did this with a whole range of different

things so he had this kind of enormous capacity and I learned a lot about creativity from Everett and and what and here's here's what he had that I think is so important he had a deep humanity he understood that human beings are what Hamlet said they were they're crawling between heaven and earth you know we're part of us is angelic and and we're the the epitome of of of of of of of of aspiration you know Hamlet says what a piece of work is a man how noble and reason how infinite and faculties inform and moving how express and admirable in action how like an angel in apprehension how like a god part of us is that and Ev knew that and he loved this exaltation of the human spirit Jefferson's palladium architecture and the the poetry of North Dakota's greatest poet Larry Wyowdie or the the dramas of of Euripides or Shakespeare's sonnets he just adored this the exaltation of the human spirit but then Ev knew that we're

also the three stuages that on the other end we're falling down you know excuse my language but I was fascinated by flatulence that you know at the same time we're spouting Hamlet someone somewhere farting and it man there in all the school children are laughing and ever found this this this quality of humans that were angelic and were bestial and were were comic and were divine and were were noble and were pathetic and silly and self-divided he found this to be delightful and he laughed you know and what and what I loved most about ever is that he had the capacity to laugh at the human condition including his own foibles and I would say he had a well-developed tragic and a well-developed comic sense but you know so did Shakespeare but Shakespeare was essentially a comic writer and I think ever it was essentially a comic man and that's what made him so glorious I don't mean comic in the sense of you know friends or phrasier I mean comic in a huge big sense with a capital C like the divine comedy of Dante and ever had that capacity to laugh at the human condition so that's one thing the second thing that he had that's so amazing is that he

really believed it you know every humanities administrator in the country if you go from from North Carolina to to Washington state to Guam they all say the same thing that the humanities belong to the people but they don't really mean it most of them are elitists most of them are executives most of them don't trust common people ever did I'll never forget this one experience I he was he was taking me around North Dakota to do a series of talks and we had to go so fast that he hired a private plane and so this little awful rickety Cessna was carrying us from Devils Lake to Williston and so on and the the the the pilot was the sort of working class guy who who had a really broken English and was missing some teeth and you know dressed pretty shabbily and so on we would get to these towns and the the hosts would come and they were basically the hosts of the kind of the country club set and they came to greet us and they would take us out for dinner and everyone said well he's Niels coming too and this guy this pilot would come and and the host would say you sure you want to bring him candy get dinner somewhere else and I would say no

no he's with us and but for ever it was automatic that this guy was with us that I mean you don't get to a place and then create a class system and say the elites will now go to the steakhouse and and the the pilot will go off to Denny's everd's view was that all humans are intrinsically equal in dignity and equal in in in ridiculousness and that if you start creating these divisions between the halves and the have-nots and the intelligentsia and the and the great unwashed and so on that you're corrupt and so he was a true egalitarian and he believed the humanities belong to everybody and and he believed it deeper in his heart than anybody I've ever known and because of that it's made I mean he changed my life because I'm I'm a little less certain of that some of those principles than he is but he taught me to have a deeper respect for many things that are of fundamental importance and he saved me from a lot of error. Clay thank you very much it's time for us to take another break please visit our website www.th hyphen jefferson.org we will be back in

just a moment. Welcome back to the Thomas Jefferson Hour my name is Janie Guil and on the

producer of the program seated across from me is Clay Jenkinson the humanity scholar behind Thomas Jefferson but today's program is not about Thomas Jefferson it's about Ev Albert's who's the founder of the Thomas Jefferson Hour Clay you've explained to us how Ev impacted your life how he taught you to laugh what else has Ev taught you here's the most important thing he taught me the comedy of life and I remember once he gave this lecture Janie on the three stooges and said that that Mo Larry and Curly were really ego-id and super-ego from Freudian psychology and it's true and you realize it's true and then I mean there was this night once when we were in Montana it was under Chautauqua tent and we there was a crisis summer for Chautauqua 1981 and we were in Lewiston Lewistown Montana and the tent was up and the people had gone away because the program was over and then we had the first meeting of what

ever it invented something called the lunar society or had been in England in the 18th century something called the lunar society in a group of savants Erasmus Darwin the grandfather of Charles Darwin and Jefferson's mentor William Small and and what the one of the inventors of steam power all these these savants these luminaries would meet under the full moon in Birmingham England and they called their club the lunar society and Everett had decided we should create our own lunar society and Erasmus Darwin was this this huge wonderful larger-than-life intellectual so another kind of Ev Elbers and so Ev said we would we would create this this program in the first meeting of what he called the sons of Herman chapter of the International Lunar Society would meet under the Chautauqua tent in Lewiston Montana and we met and Everett gave this this there were about 20 of us there including my parents and we listened to Everett and he gave this introductory lecture on Erasmus Darwin and his world and it was so it was one of the greatest nights of my life there were coyotes howling and the moon was shining over the the river

there and the tent was up and we were we were all seated around in this sort of somewhat eerie landscape and talking about ideas under the tent that Everett had invented and he gave this lecture but he was so amused by his own lecture that he couldn't he couldn't deliver it he kept descending into uncontrollable giggling and there would be long periods where he was just he'd be crying he was laughing so much at his own the humor of Erasmus Darwin and and it was just it was it was one of those nights that you remember for the rest of your life as when you were most completely alive and most in love with the world and and you had your friendships were the deepest purist and most promising and I mean I'm sure everyone listening can think of an analogous moment in their lives to something like this but it was Everett and he had created this whole world all the plates there were plates that he was spinning and so he had this capacity to bring delight and energy to whatever he did and so that so important the vitality the last thing that I would say is that the big lesson that I learned from Everett is that is that the humanity

scholar is not a political being she or he is not there to opinionate or not there to say well this is what we should do about Iraq or that's what we should do about the national data this is what we this is what we should do about race relations that the scholar is not there to opinionate it's not as if the public is saying come and tell us how to live that's not it at all and when the scholar behaves that way the scholars betrayed the humanities the public comes not to hear how they should live they come to hear about how the humanities help clarify questions of this sort so the humanities don't tell you whether you should go to war in Iraq the humanities tell you what war has meant in Western civilization and how different types of individuals have responded to the problem of war and what what the great texts tell us about war maybe one of the great texts is Clauswitz's lectures on war or maybe one of the great texts is a Chinese masterpiece on the art of war or maybe one of the great texts turns out to be Tolstoy's war in peace or or Mark Twain's the

war prayer or or Stephen Crane's the Red Badge of Courage but but that the humanities the humanities scholar is not there to preach at you the humanities scholars are to deepen your understanding of the human condition and that when the scholar does that this is marvelous it but when the scholar says I think we're we're heading in the wrong direction in this country or I think that every every person who who has ever called a woman a gal should be taken out and shot I mean that kind of opinionation from the ex-Cathedra opinionation ever absolutely hated and every time he heard it in anyone including in myself he said that's not the humanities that's not what the humanities do and he drilled that into me so deeply that it's actually caused me a lot of opportunities in my life because not everyone agrees with him and some people think that if you don't opinionate that you're not doing responsible work as a scholar I'm on the other side I think that at our best we all have to fight this but at our best we're there to deepen to talk about texts to to work on

nuance to to examine perspective to to contextualize to clarify but not there to say this is true and that is wrong and this is right and that is that is preposterous and so I got that in a really big way from ever and I would say that that is that is probably the deepest and most important lesson of my entire life and I and I think I'm actually a much better scholar certainly and even a much better human being thanks to that lesson and I would urge everyone to adopt it and ever it's I this is my recapitulation of it but it's ever it's ever its philosophy and and and I boiled it down to one sentence judgment is easy understanding is hard and that's my motto as a humanity's color judgment is easy understanding is hard and that's why we shouldn't do judgment we should do understanding the real work is in understanding and by

understanding I mean investigating with an open mind and being willing to be convinced and and not being predetermined on questions and keeping our own opinions out of it I mean nobody wants to hear what I think about the world but a lot of people want to hear what Jefferson thought about the world Clay thank you very much Clay how did your relationship with Ev change over the years you said that at one point it was very clear that he was the mentor and you were the apprentice what has happened since that time well I never really changed I mean I I still looked up to him from a very much lower plateau even even at the very end but but it is the case that the this is where the this is where I mean I'm going to now play of Elbers for a moment the mentor apprentice relationship can't go on indefinitely because it becomes poisoned if it does that that's the nature there's a certain allegiic even tragic notion at the center of mentoring because at some point you have to release and I in one of my books I say that you have to

catch and release it's like fishing you have to catch and release if you can't release you can't be a good mentor and ever knew that I mean he was he was maybe the most generous person that I ever met in the whole course of my life although I'd I'd put you in there somewhere but he he realized that I that he had trained me and that I had learned what I was going to learn and all my imperfections were my own and and and that you know I was going to follow somewhat my own path just as he followed his own path and we never parted company and we never we never we never lost that that really deep abiding respect and love and we were still collaborating at the very end of his life you mean my little chapbook I did on Lewis and Carcane North Dakota was something we invented together and and my newest and I think most important book of Aston open playing the edition of Lewis and Carcane North Dakota was something I cooked up but he and I then presented to the State Historical Society and and they were you know they would already been planning similar things and so it was a nice fit but again it was we were still collaborating

and and still deep friends right up to the end but there was a change and the change came I suppose about seven years ago when I started to turn some business his way and and and and hired him to do certain things for me to run my websites and to to do graphic art to work for me and so on and I think that was a sign I mean when that I was no longer dependent on him he wasn't certainly ever dependent upon me but I was beginning to turn the tables a little bit and start to redirect my love and affection back at him by way of championing his work and I think when that happened there was a kind of release and we became we became more true equals but we became there's a necessary diminishment of the intensity of the relationship of the apprentice and the master and when that happens it's a everybody I wouldn't speak forever I would

never dare to but but I think there is a certain bittersweet feeling that each person feels in that that something important happened because that's that's how this has to come out otherwise it's not right but the fact that it does eventually change into something different makes each person in a certain sense long for that golden period when it was so intense and so there was a purity to it that that can't the can't be sustained forever and I think I don't I don't believe by any means the only one of ever it's mentees I mean there were lots of people whose careers he made better and people who he lifted I certainly don't want to claim any primacy but I can only speak for my own experience and it was it was an absolute extraordinary but I you know I wouldn't go back to that period because I was a young man then but I but I miss some parts of it when he and I used to travel around the country together and we

were just we were like Yin and Yang or Mutton Jeff or Lewis and Clark and there was that sense of that I was in some sense that I had been chosen to bear a certain responsibility and he was training me how to bear it and I I take that very very seriously and and so one of my goals now is to spend a lot of my energy for the rest of my life celebrating and clarifying and promoting the legacy of Everett because I think his legacy is so important to have continuing presence in the public humanities not just in North Dakota but elsewhere and I I think there's some danger that his legacy would not have the respect that it is owed without real champions trying to preserve that legacy. Okay thank you we have just a few minutes and we had made the decision to always include a letter on the program so what letter of Jefferson's would you like to include on this program that's dedicated and about of

albers. Well actually I'm going to read a letter and then just quickly paraphrase or quote one sentence from another Janie but the letter today's letter is written to John Adams Jefferson's dear friend from Monticello on November 13th 1818 and and Jefferson had read in the in the papers that Abigail Adams had died and Jefferson wrote this incredible letter to his friend John Adams and I'll read it in its entirety. The public papers my dear friend announced the fatal event of which your letter of October the 20th had given me ominous foreboding. Tried myself in the school of affliction by the loss of every form of connection which can rive the human heart. I know well and feel what you have lost, what you have suffered, are suffering and have yet to endure. The same trials have taught me that for ill so immeasurable time and silence are the only medicine. I will not therefore by useless condolences open to

fresh the sluices of your grief nor although minglings sincerely my tears with yours. Will I say a word more where words are vain but that it is some comfort to both of us that the term is not very distant at which we are to deposit in the same ceremony our sorrows and our suffering bodies and to ascend in essence to an ecstatic meeting with the friends we have loved and lost and whom we shall still love and never lose again. God bless you and support you under your heavy affliction. That's one of I think Jefferson's single most beautiful letters written to John Adams about loss and grief and I read it to all of Everett's friends around the country and the world. I think Jefferson is absolutely right. Time is the only answer for grief but then I want to turn to and I want and what I'll quote from the other Jefferson letter is the last Jefferson letter ever to James Madison in which he said just a few weeks before his death friendship which is now subsisted between us

for 50 years has never known a single moment of disagreement and then Jefferson says take care of me when dead and I'm excuse me I'm pledging to take care of Everett's legacy now that he is dead I'll be his Madison although not as qualified as Madison and finally let me quote this little poem by a writer that both Evan I love John Nighhart this is from his lyric poetry I love this poem unfortunately this isn't quite how it turned out but this I remember sending this to have when he was first diagnosed it's called let me live out my years let me live out my years in heat of blood let me die drunken with the dreamers wine let me not see this soulhouse built of mud go toppling to the dust of Acan Shrine let me go quickly like a candlelight snuffed out just at the heyday of its glow give me high noon and then let it be night thus what I go and grant me when I face the grizzly thing one haughty cry to pierce the gray perhaps well let me be a tune swept fiddle string that feels the master

melody and snaps we will all miss you have and we loved you and your work has changed the face of the public humanities in the United States and all I can say is that is that the work that you have done is exactly what Thomas Jefferson had in mind because he said enlighten the people generally and every form of tyranny both the body and mind will disappear like the fog when the sunrise is in the morning I think that's exactly the kind of person that Evelbers was and I say in the words of our beloved poet Walt Whitman my dear friend Hale and farewell Clay thank you very much please tune in next week for another Thomas Jefferson hour good day I should just add for everyone who's listening that there is a memorial fun set up for Everett see Elbers and if you would like to contribute to it it's a scholarship program in the humanities that will go to a promising young North Dakota born if possible farm born and farm raised young intellectual at Dickinson State University if

you're interested in contributing to that scholarship fund in the name of the Thomas Jefferson hour or Everett see Elbers you write to Ken Glass North Dakota Humanities Council box 2191 Bismarck North Dakota 58502 that's Ken Glass North Dakota Humanities Council box 2191 Bismarck North Dakota 58502 and make it attention Everett Elbers Humanities scholarship thanks so much we'll see you next week the Squall Valley Congregational Church a short drive from Reno Nevada is sponsoring a dialogue between John Adams and Thomas Jefferson on the topics of war and peace this will occur on July 17th 2004 please call 530-581-4011 again the number is 530-581-4011 and ask for extension one Jane Carlson for ticket information thank you for listening and we hope you join us again

next week for another entertaining historically accurate and thought provoking commentary through the eyes of Thomas Jefferson