Mary Jane Roach Masters Memoir - University of Illinois Springfield

founded Sangamon State, he died, and then I think Gordon Millar took over and then Bob Ban.
We had an excellent competition for the Master Plan. We had Hellmuth. Obata and Kassabaum,
(HOK) and we had the Gropius Group from Boston. We had an excellent competition. Joe
Murphy had done his homework best. He really did present the best plan.
Q. Was it to be constructed the way it is today?
A. Pretty much. Pretty much.
Q. Over the years you've watched teachers come and go, whom do you remember best for their
excellence at Sangamon State?
A. The people from whom I got a great deal I think were particularly Judy Everson who is a
superb pedagogue, a really wonderful teacher and from her I got a good deal of contemporary
American literature and Norman Hinton from whom I took Viking Literature and Linguistics. I
found him very interesting and also there was a guy named David something or other who taught
Japanese art which was very tough and very challenging to me. It was tough because I had no
framework to build it on. The history of the Orient was not at my fingertips. If it was anything
connected to Europe, I could put it into place, but I had to memorize the Shogunites and it was
hard-going. (chuckle)
Q. You also took Chaucer.
Q. I did. I took Chaucer from Norman Hinton and loved it.
A. How did you happen to have taken it so late?
Q. I regretted not taking it at Washington University. I took Anglo-Saxon instead but one of my
classmates, one of my fellow students, took Chaucer from Philip Jelliner who was excellent and
I'm sorry I didn't take it from him but I was really filling up an omission when I took it from
Norman Hinton and of all the characters in history that I would like to have gone back and been,
Chaucer comes first. He led the ideal life.
Q. The ideal life?
A. Mm. Everything went just right for him. (Chuckle)
Q. What about linguistics?
A. Oh I loved that. To this day I'm fascinated by linguistics. That was kind of a difficult class
for Norman Hinton to teach because we had a lot of Vietnamese veterans who were doing the
best they could with their opportunity to go back to college, and some of them had no
background whatever in linguistics. I remember, Norman and I entered into some discussion