Hi, Bruce O. We probably saw each other around, but who knew? Did you ever hang out between classes at Howard's Restaurant or the Coffee Corral on The Ave?

An aside and a bit of thread creep:— I don't know what all Prof. David C. Fowler taught, but two of his more interesting courses were "The Popular Ballad" and "The Bible as Literature." He was in the papers a couple of times when one or two churches in the Redmond area (sometimes lovingly referred to as the "Redmond Rednecks") raised hell about the University of Washington letting one of its professors "teach religion." Prof. Fowler made no religious interpretations during the course and, in fact, discouraged any actual religious discussions in class. He treated the Bible as a group of short stories, novellas, and poems, and we talked about it in those terms. I think the big objection these churches had to the course was that we didn't deal with disconnected individual verses, we read whole books all the way through. Then, when someone tried to bamboozle anybody who had taken the course by quoting verses out of context, we could haul the discussion back on track, put the verses back in context, and wax eloquent on what the quoted verses really meant. In short, reading it the way we did for the class, we wound up knowing too much about what the Bible said. They wanted to get the class pulled, but as I recall, the U. of W. backed Prof. Fowler all the way. Heck of a good teacher all around.

Sandy Paton. He was living in Seattle when I first got interested in folk music around 1952. I knew him for about a year or so, then he left for back East. He came back in summer of 1954, then left again as fall approached. I particularly remember a big "going away" party. Lots of singing. Next time I saw Sandy (sort of) was when I was pawing through the folk music records at Campus Music and Gallery and suddenly there was Sandy smiling up at me from the cover of "Many Sides of Sandy Paton." This was about 1958. He had been to the British Isles since last I'd heard. Then I ran into him at the 1960 Berkeley Folk Festival where he was one of the featured performers. A couple of good gab-fests. He dragged me off to a party, and after we'd been there for a few minutes, in walked Peggy Seeger and Ewan MacColl, who were also featured performers at the festival. Lots of amazing singing that night, too. Haven't seen him since, though, although we've e-mailed a bit.

Just thought I'd toss that in. Okay, back to F. J. Child.

Don Firth