OK, folks, pay attention; this could get complicated.
Brunch today (and much of the afternoon to follow) was spent in the company of BARBARA and JOHN BOYLE in their wonderfully welcoming San Francisco pied-a-terre.
Both BARBARA's and Heidi's fathers were on the faculty at Wheaton College when the two were youngsters in Norton, Massachusetts.
BARBARA later married JOHN, whose academic career eventually took him into the East Asian History Ph.D. program at Stanford University in the early 1960s. When Lee was considering which university to attend for his Ph.D., we got in touch with the Boyles at their home in Palo Alto for their assessment of the program at Stanford.
JOHN's words of encouragement (tempered by an admission that the major faculty figure in the program was personally somewhat distant -- to say the least!) helped convince Lee to take Stanford's admission offer (and the promise of a National Defense Foreign Language Fellowship) over those of Harvard, Yale and the University of Hawaii (sans scholarship aid).
Several months later we two landed on the Boyle's doorstep fresh off the plane from Thailand. They (and their two young children, Tommy and Martha) graciously took us in and under their protective wings as we gradually made our readjustment to life in the United States and as a graduate student couple living in married student housing on the Stanford campus.
During the ensuing four or five years we became fast friends and spent a lot of great times together before JOHN, Ph.D in hand, accepted a faculty position at Chico State College (now, University) in Northern California.
In 1969, a scant year later, JOHN was awarded a Fulbright Scholarship to conduct research in Japan and invited Lee to take over his instructional responsibilities at the university in his absence. Once again we invaded the Boyle household, this time living in their home in Chico for a full academic year, taking care of their cat Homer, and overseeing BARBARA's mail-order psychological testing service.
That year of teaching experience gave Lee a leg up a year or so later when he himself was applying for a permanent university position. It also helped him through the oral defense of his dissertation several weeks after he began teaching when a member of his Stanford committee asked how he might teach the material uncovered in his research (a consideration Lee had given much thought to as he prepared for his initial classroom instructional experiences at Chico State with JOHN's helpful lecture notes close at hand). Thereafter Lee kept the committee focused on his curriculum plans for much of the time, likely avoiding a good many probing questions concerning the validity and proof behind his actual dissertation thesis statement!
All these experiences -- and many more -- are well documented in letters Heidi sent her parents in Massachusetts during this period. This cache of correspondence recently turned up in the back of a file cabinet drawer down the basement in our Shaker Heights home. References to shared experiences with the Boyles therein are quite frequent, so common in fact that Heidi began to mark them with post-it-notes in anticipation of today's visit!
We spent much of the afternoon, therefore, listening to Heidi read these excerpts aloud, historically documenting in written form episode after episode none of us could recall today for the life of us! Nonetheless, we laughed a lot; and occasionally a light bulb would blink on as we did, in fact, remember (however dimly) an incident long buried in our collective memories.
All this while, as well, we basked in the spectacular view out their floor-to-ceiling wall of windows overlooking Alcatraz and sunny San Francisco Bay all the way west to the Golden Gate Bridge.
To be sure, laughter is good for the soul, as this afternoon so amply demonstrated. So, too, is spending a day with such good friends, sharing with them all those (hazy but golden) memories of times long past.
Both BARBARA's and Heidi's fathers were on the faculty at Wheaton College when the two were youngsters in Norton, Massachusetts.
BARBARA later married JOHN, whose academic career eventually took him into the East Asian History Ph.D. program at Stanford University in the early 1960s. When Lee was considering which university to attend for his Ph.D., we got in touch with the Boyles at their home in Palo Alto for their assessment of the program at Stanford.
JOHN's words of encouragement (tempered by an admission that the major faculty figure in the program was personally somewhat distant -- to say the least!) helped convince Lee to take Stanford's admission offer (and the promise of a National Defense Foreign Language Fellowship) over those of Harvard, Yale and the University of Hawaii (sans scholarship aid).
Several months later we two landed on the Boyle's doorstep fresh off the plane from Thailand. They (and their two young children, Tommy and Martha) graciously took us in and under their protective wings as we gradually made our readjustment to life in the United States and as a graduate student couple living in married student housing on the Stanford campus.
During the ensuing four or five years we became fast friends and spent a lot of great times together before JOHN, Ph.D in hand, accepted a faculty position at Chico State College (now, University) in Northern California.
In 1969, a scant year later, JOHN was awarded a Fulbright Scholarship to conduct research in Japan and invited Lee to take over his instructional responsibilities at the university in his absence. Once again we invaded the Boyle household, this time living in their home in Chico for a full academic year, taking care of their cat Homer, and overseeing BARBARA's mail-order psychological testing service.
That year of teaching experience gave Lee a leg up a year or so later when he himself was applying for a permanent university position. It also helped him through the oral defense of his dissertation several weeks after he began teaching when a member of his Stanford committee asked how he might teach the material uncovered in his research (a consideration Lee had given much thought to as he prepared for his initial classroom instructional experiences at Chico State with JOHN's helpful lecture notes close at hand). Thereafter Lee kept the committee focused on his curriculum plans for much of the time, likely avoiding a good many probing questions concerning the validity and proof behind his actual dissertation thesis statement!
All these experiences -- and many more -- are well documented in letters Heidi sent her parents in Massachusetts during this period. This cache of correspondence recently turned up in the back of a file cabinet drawer down the basement in our Shaker Heights home. References to shared experiences with the Boyles therein are quite frequent, so common in fact that Heidi began to mark them with post-it-notes in anticipation of today's visit!
We spent much of the afternoon, therefore, listening to Heidi read these excerpts aloud, historically documenting in written form episode after episode none of us could recall today for the life of us! Nonetheless, we laughed a lot; and occasionally a light bulb would blink on as we did, in fact, remember (however dimly) an incident long buried in our collective memories.
All this while, as well, we basked in the spectacular view out their floor-to-ceiling wall of windows overlooking Alcatraz and sunny San Francisco Bay all the way west to the Golden Gate Bridge.
To be sure, laughter is good for the soul, as this afternoon so amply demonstrated. So, too, is spending a day with such good friends, sharing with them all those (hazy but golden) memories of times long past.
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