A letter to the editor responding to the article in the March 2010 Coloradan about Howard Higman (Art’31, MSoc’42)
Letter from Maxwell D. Epstein (Soc’54)
The first thing that comes to my mind when I think of “HH” is that there is hardly a day when I do not think about him—something he said or something he did. The reason he had such a profound effect on my young life is that he put into words what I thought and lacked words to say. Here I was, a young Jewish boy from Denver with a businessman father and a Southern Belle mother, suddenly exposed to a powerful, iconic radical, who spoke fearlessly in golden tones, and let the arrows fall where they may.
When I met Howard by attending one of his classes, I was a business major who thought he might go into his father’s cap-manufacturing business. The first time I made an excuse to visit Howard in his office, hoping to get acquainted, he greeted me by leaning back in his chair and putting his feet on the desk, almost in my face. I assumed this was some sort of test of my mettle, and so ignored the intended insult and carried on as if nothing had happened. If it was a test, I apparently passed, because we did become acquainted.
Howard was a professor of sociology at CU-Boulder, where he was generally regarded as the greatest lecturer on campus. He was also the founder, in 1948, and dictator, of the greatest conference of its kind (if there was any other of its kind) in the world. This is a claim I hope to demonstrate.
He was also a world-class drinker, who put away a bottle of vodka per evening, and remembered everything the next morning, which gave to such a competitive man an advantage over his sparing partners. He live to be 80 years old, which might seem to be a miracle unless you knew his mother who lived to be 98, and so might he have, if it weren’t for the quart of booze he consumed nightly.
For years my late sister Ruth told me she blamed Howard for my then-heavy drinking. I did not understand how she came to that conclusion until I pressed her to explain, and she told me that Howard “made it seem fashionable to drink a lot.” That now seems possible.
If my goal was to get a doctorate in sociology, and apparently I chose the wrong adviser when I chose Howard. In the first place, his highest degree was a master’s in fine art. Second, he was not especially interested in doctoral degrees, for himself or his students. I cannot blame Howard entirely for never getting my degree (in fact, after my bachelor’s I spent two years as a graduate student, and never got my masters degree, though I passed every requirement except for the dissertation). For years, after I accepted my first professional job, as foreign student adviser at Iowa State University, I tortured myself with the thought that I should not be going to a movie or a party—I should be doing my research. Finally, one day I woke up and told myself, “Max, you are not ever going to do that degree, so get on with your life, your wife and your three children.” With that burden out of the way, I did go on, and retired as dean emeritus of international students and scholars at UCLA. In a peculiar way, this is an honor, because no one else at the University of California, as far as I can ascertain, has ever retired as “dean” with a bachelor’s degree. But this is supposed to be about Howard, so enough about me.
As a physical specimen, Howard was a slender young man in his thirties when I met him, and he gradually became obese as he aged. He also began to look and sound like Orson Welles. As a personality, he ranged from a sensitive, considerate person to a raging bull who insulted everyone, depending on the time of day. At his funeral, in 1995, one of his daughters said of him, “He was like the sun — a blazing mind, but if you got too close, you got burned.”
Howard liked to distinguish between a “drunk” and an “alcoholic.” Alcoholics were those who sneaked a drink before giving a lecture, and drank at any time of the day. Drunks, by contrast, were those who never drank during the day and never drank before a lecture, but allowed themselves to drink all they wanted at the end of the day when their work was done.
One night when Howard had consumed his usual load of hard liquor, he was stopped in his car by a Boulder police officer. When he presented his license, the officer became apologetic and wanted to forget the whole thing. Howard was, by that time, a well-known professor. On the other hand, he wanted no special treatment. He informed the officer that he was drunk, and that he wanted the usual ticket, which the officer then had no choice but to write. At least one night per week, or more, Howard invited the members of the “Birthday Society” for drinks, scuffles and more drinks. The name was derived form the fact that by coincidence, there was a group of colleagues and their wives who happened to have been born in the same month—April, I believe. There were faculty members who resented being excluded from these soirees, thinking, probably correctly, that being excluded meant missing out on some of the conversations which result in promotions. Marion often absented herself from these parties, and she complained to Howard that his entertainment schedule would lead them to the poor house. These were not “cheese and crackers” evenings. Howard was a superb chef, and he enjoyed entertaining his friends royally.
The Conference on World Affairs
And now, having told of Howard and his society, I can turn to what I regard as his greatest accomplishment: The Conference on World Affairs, held for one full week every April. I call it the greatest conference in the world based on these factors: The quality of the speakers, the size of the audience, the audacity of the topics, the accessibility of the speakers to the local community and the length of the run, beginning in 1946 and continuing to this day, though without Howard, I suspect it is no longer comparable to what it was.
Taking each of these factors in turn, I begin with the quality of the speakers. For example, during my tenure, in the early 1950’s, I met at parties at Howard’s house Buckminster Fuller, Eleanor Roosevelt, Margaret Mead and many others. Fuller, by the way, was Howard’s mentor, as recognized by both men.
Howard expanded the audience by opening it up, not only to the entire campus, but to the community of Boulder and even some from Denver. In the early years, Howard was told by the engineering college that stimulating as the conference appeared, engineering students would not be able to attend the conference sessions because their course load was too heavy to allow for any missed classes. This required a “Higmanian” solution, which Howard was only too happy to provide. He worked with the office that scheduled classes and managed, miraculously, to put his sessions in spaces where classed normally met, leaving the engineering students with cancelled classes and therefore the opportunity to attend conference sessions, some in their very classrooms.
When it came to topics, there were two exceptional factors at work: Nothing was considered too controversial. There were sessions given by Communist government officials (recall this was during the McCarthy days) and speakers who, by normal standards, would be considered “anti-American,” and there were others, equally provocative. Howard and his committee used a unique method of selecting topics in which they would first become familiar with what each speaker knew best, and then assign him or her a totally different topic, on which, on very short notice, they had to put together a talk.
In my case, one of the years I was invited as a speaker. Despite the fact that I was well acquainted with international education, I was assigned to speak on the difference between Japanese and American art. It seems I had told Howard I had been to Japan. To prepare, I ran to Norlin Library, where I read How to Wrap Five Eggs. I also used my observation that in Japan they speak of a 500-year-old bridge, meaning that the form is that old, while individual boards are replaced as needed. In America, we treasure the individual pieces, not the form, so we claim that we have the “London Bridge” in Lake Havasu, Calif. because we took it apart in England, shipped it to California where it was re-assembled. This technique of Howard’s assured that no one could get away with delivering a canned speech from a previous lecture.
In addition to the appearance I made as described above, I attended one other conference as a speaker. That year, Howard scheduled me to open the main plenary session with a celebration of the fact that as a student I brought student participation to the conference for the first time. I was honored both times to appear as a speaker at my favorite conference.
Another contribution to the extraordinary spontaneity of the conference was the fact, unbeknownst to the audience, what they were hearing was a slice of week-long arguments which were carried on in the homes of the faculty hosts who provided housing for the speakers. All of the speakers were required to live in the home assigned, and none could stay in a hotel. It is also significant that all of the speakers paid their own way to the conference and none were paid to participate. When the university recognized that this conference it was a way of putting Boulder on the intellectual map of the world. At the time the President offered Howard $50,000 to help offset expenses. Howard politely refused on the grounds that money form the outside would damage the spirit of the event.
To add to their accessibility to the students, speakers were encouraged to attend fraternity and sorority meetings and to drink beer with the students at Tulagi, the main local beer bar.
A key to conference success
One key to the success of the conference was the way it was organized. The day after one conference closed, the planning committee began work on the next year. This committee, over which Howard ruled with an iron hand, was composed of five or six faculty members from a variety of fields, not all in the social sciences, and as of my year, one student representing all students. Their task was to follow a process in which speakers names were nominated and topics were thrown in and somehow, matches were made. It took the whole year, meeting every week!
Along with the conference, we students organized our United Nations Week, for which we lined the main campus walkway with flags of the nations, scheduled newsreels on world events and for our crowning glory mounted our Model United Nations. Model UNs were not unique, but my year I not only persuaded Howard to make it a part of the Conference on World Affairs week, but I designed it so that the foreign students were representing their own countries. This added a strong note of authenticity to the proceedings.
Years later, when I worked first at Iowa State University, then at UCLA, I produced mini conferences on world affairs, with Howard’s permission to use the name, and invited him as a speaker. Unfortunately, he was beginning to fade, certainly by the time he came to UCLA, and the man upon whom I had heaped such praise turned out to be somewhat of an embarrassment. Still, if I thought being part of my conference pleased him, I would do it again.
As mentioned, Howard was generally considered the best lecturer on campus, partly because of his topics and partly because of his take on those topics. For example, he would draw two sets of concentric circles on the blackboard and label one “Communism” the other “Catholicism.” He then challenged us students to find any difference between the two. He was, I might add, equally at home in political science, psychology and biology. It was from him I first heard the theory that life on Earth emerged from a sea of riboflavin. Surprisingly, Howard never published, and, as mentioned, his highest degree was a masters in fine art, but those facts did not prevent his serving terms as chairman of his department.
At this time, Howard had a student whose name was Marilyn Van Derbur (Engl’60) who was reporting to the FBI on whatever Howard was saying (she was the recent Miss America). This plan lasted until the Denver Post exposed it. For this and other reasons, Howard expected to be denied a passport when was planning to visit Europe, and he told us he was disappointed when he received it with no problems. That trip to Europe, by the way, was an example of Howard’s grand extravagance. He took his wife and their three daughters for a three-month tour of the continent.
With this introduction of Howard as professor and founder of a world-famous conference, we have time for a quick look at some of his other skills.
Renovating a home
For three years, I, along with my three roommates, lived in an apartment below Howard’s house. This was a sexy, dark green and black two bedroom, den, living room, bathroom and kitchen apartment, with delayed-action switches used to control the hidden lights. Before our time, when Howard lived there, he could open the front door from one of several switches around the living room.
According to Howard the house was built by his carpenter father before Howard was born, and he was raised there. At about the age of 18 he began excavating and bracing the space which was to become his home under his parent’s home, and he lived there until his father died, at which time he moved upstairs and rented the apartment to favorite students. Until she died, his mother had her own small apartment in the main house, and Howard used to amuse us by telling his mother that he knew where she hid her key, and he was going to sneak in and take all of her things. The game also amused mother.
As the years went by, Howard systematically made the house and grounds into a villa. This included a walkway between the house and the garage, a distance of some 50 feet. The floor was paved with old bricks. The ceiling was entirely composed of skylights, and the walls were entirely glass in the form of windows which could be opened. This was important because the walkway was also a hot house, where Howard cultivated ferns, a variety of gorgeous orchids and other tropical plants, including gardenias. I recall those gardenias blooming even in winter in their Higman-made environment, and I recall the wonderful fragrance all along the walkway. Along the way there was an antique wall fountain of brass, which served as a convenient source of water.
Arriving at the end, the garage was a different experience. Here the floor was polished black concrete, the walls were used for paintings and books, and the furniture included several overstuffed chairs in outrageous colors. Over all of this was a gigantic chandelier with some 50 small bulbs. As with all of his rooms, this one had a telephone, and it also had a stereo with advanced speakers. This so-called “garage” offered a wonderful place to escape, to think and to relax.
Between the house and the garage there was a gently sloping lawn surrounded by greenery. On one wall there was a large fountain imported from Italy, and over all, there were those small white bulbs one sees at Christmas time.
For the most part, Howard, who was strong as an ox to the end, did his own work, save an occasional assist by a grateful student helper. The design was all Howard, and in fact he was called upon by friends to design their homes and interiors. The electrical work and plumbing was also done by Howard, who was somehow expert in all these fields.
I have already made a brief reference to Howard’ cooking. Let me add that dinner at his house was always memorable. He had a library of cookbooks, a penchant for experiment and the patience of Job when it came to cooking. Whether it was an intimate dinner for four or a feast for 100 conference speakers scattered throughout the house, the result was a gastronomical masterpiece. His style was many courses, each very small so as to tease the palette and each enhanced with just the right wine. Looking at Howard, one would not suspect such subtlety, but it was always there.
There is much more I could write about Howard Higman, who lived from 1915 to 1995, but I hope what I have provided will serve to introduce a great man, the memory of whom will live as long as those who knew him and longer for those who read about him.
Maxwell D. Epstein (Soc’54)
Santa Monica, Calif.
