Richard Bowen Wolf – 50th Reunion Essay

Richard Bowen Wolf

3752 S. Bainbridge Dr.

Bloomington, IN 47401

richardb.wolf@gmail.com

812-369-4034

Spouse(s): Donna Lippincott Wolf (1969)

Child(ren): Michael Maclean Wolf (1976); Alexander Lippincott Wolf (1978)

Education: Yale, BA 1969; University of Chicago, MA 1971, PhD 1976

Career: Eighth-grade English teacher, Eielson AFB (Alaska) for 1 year; English professor, Mississippi State University for 35 years.

Avocations: Art museum docent; playwright; patron of the arts in general; college athletics fan.

College: Pierson

At 70 I’ve mostly made peace with my flaws and failures. For now, at least, I’m willing to say that I’ve lived a satisfactory life and that Yale has played a significant role in the achievement.

My undergraduate literature courses led to a career in college teaching, while a stressful first semester at Yale provided lessons in empathy and persistence that were important in my 35 years working with students at Mississippi State. As a professor, I returned to New Haven periodically to exercise my alumni library privileges, taking advantage of Yale’s excellent 18th-century holdings. Meanwhile, the odd hours I spent at the Yale Center for British Art during those visits helped inspire my supplemental use of the sister arts in lit courses, leading to various honors and ultimately to retirement adventures as an art museum docent.

Yale social ties also have greatly enriched my post-1969 years. I’ve enjoyed some classmate friendships cultivated primarily at reunions, others recently rekindled on social media, and a couple (with Bill Russell-Shapiro and Bruce Weinstein) sustained over the years by mail and miscellaneous rendezvous. And although my spouse and best friend of nearly 50 years, Donna Lippincott Wolf, has no official Yale affiliation, our relationship grew out of a short-lived Pierson College partnership with Austin House, her SCSU dorm.

Since retiring from Mississippi to Bloomington, Indiana—a 90-minute drive from my boyhood home—I’ve been doing my own version of “exploring your passions” (a recurring trope in my 20 years of Yale ASC interviewing). With expanded free time, my choice of books and sporting events has broadened. I attend most Indiana University and Bloomington theatrical productions and many performances connected with IU’s well-regarded Jacobs School of Music. While riding my exercise bike and subsequently employing a heating pad, I’ve also become a fan of pre-1950s film and the song arrangements of 19th- and 20th-century British composers.

The activity I’ve invested in most fully in retirement—and one shared with my wife—is being a docent at IU’s Eskenazi Museum of Art. A volunteer extension of my teaching career, it allows me to research varied topics (West Mexican shaft tomb figures, ancient Anatolian metallurgy, ostrich egg cups, snakes of Papua New Guinea) and to conduct interactive tours for groups ranging from visiting computer science professors to four-year-olds. With the museum temporarily closed for remodeling, I’m currently engaged in tour alternatives such as second-grade classroom PowerPoint presentations (see photo).

Thus, for the moment, Dame Fortune smiles. The days of hands-on parenthood are well past, and, despite my innumerable mistakes, our two sons have turned out to be self-supporting and decent human beings. As retirees, Donna and I seem to have achieved an acceptable balance between mutual and individual pursuits, not to mention a workable division of household chores. If our luck holds, we should be returning to New Haven in 2019 one more time.