Legend hangs 'em up after half a century at Oberlin

History Professor Geoffrey Blodgett, a member of the Oberlin faculty since 1960, has announced his retirement following spinal surgery that forced him to cancel his lone fall semester class, the Social History of American Architecture. He first came to Oberlin in 1946, three years before he would begin his own collegiate career. It was then that Blodgett began a love affair with the town and college of Oberlin that would last for the better part of the next 50 years. Recently, he sat down with the Review to discuss his remarkable career, his decision to retire and his plans for the future.

"My time in Oberlin has been a long time because I am an Oberlin graduate," Blodgett said. "I took my first trip to Oberlin in 1946, when I came to commencement to see my sister graduate. At the time, I thought that this was an idyllic village, a kind of Midwestern utopia. Three years later, when I was looking at colleges, I decided to apply to Oberlin."

The rest, of course, is history. Blodgett returned to Oberlin as a first-year student in 1949. During his undergraduate career, he was an all-conference-team football player, was elected to Phi Beta Kappa and, with the help of former Professor Robert S. Fletcher, won the Carrie C. Life Prize in American history. He also participated in the naval reserve training program, an experience that came in handy after his graduation in 1953, when he left the peaceful pastures of Oberlin for a rigorous, albeit brief, career in the Navy.

During his two-year stint in the armed forces, Blodgett toured the Pacific, spending time in Korea and Japan; it was around this time that he married a fellow Oberlin graduate, Jane Taggart. (The couple has remained together for the last 45 years.) As luck would have it for the newlyweds, Blodgett narrowly avoided a tour of duty in the Korean War. "The North Koreans signed a cease fire agreement the day I signed up for active duty," he said. "They must have known I was coming."

Following his years in the Navy, Blodgett spent five years doing graduate work at Harvard University with the aid of an Emerton Fellowship (1955-56); it was there that he earned his MA (1956) and his PhD (1961). Then, in 1960, he once again headed for the familiar fields of Oberlin, this time in search of employment as a professor. Because of the many positions made available by the baby boom, Blodgett found himself with several job opportunities at colleges throughout the country; ultimately, he chose to accept a position at Oberlin not simply because it was his alma mater, but because it was the best school to make him an offer. As he soon discovered, the life of an Oberlin professor was just as demanding as the life of an Oberlin student. "I enjoyed teaching at Oberlin," he recollects. "It was an intense place to teach, just as it was an intense place to learn."

After four years, Blodgett accepted a permanent position at the College; then, in 1969, he became chair of the History department, a position he would not relinquish until 1973. It was then that he discovered the greatest advantage of teaching at Oberlin, that most liberal of all liberal arts colleges.

"Perhaps the best thing about Oberlin from a professor's point of view is that if you do well at what you were hired to do, then you have the freedom to move into new fields on an experimental basis," he said. "For that reason, during the early 1970s, I began to teach an experimental colloquium in architectural history, a subject that had interested me for years. I was trained as a political historian, and I picked up intellectual history during my third or fourth year. It took me about 12 years before I could teach architectural history, but it's now considered my most attractive course. So if you do well at Oberlin, you can try new things. That's not the case at other colleges."

Since the 1970s, Blodgett has continued to excel in the field of architectural history and has gained a reputation as one of the most learned and accomplished of all Oberlin historians. In 1985, the College published his second book, Oberlin Architecture, College and Town: A Guide to Its Social History. (His first, The Gentle Reformers: Massachusetts Democrats in the Cleveland Era, was a more politically oriented work, published in 1966 by the Harvard University Press.) Later that year, the Journal of American History published his article on Cass Gilbert, the renowned architect who designed local buildings like Finney Chapel, the Allen Memorial Art Museum and the Cox Administration Building. Then, in 1986, Blodgett was rewarded for his efforts when he received the Western Reserve Architectural Historians Award.

Perhaps his greatest honor, though, came in March of 1988, when he was appointed to the Robert S. Danforth professorship of history by the board of trustees, which acted on the recommendation of the history department, the college and general faculty councils and then President S. Frederick Starr. The professorship was one of just four endowed by a bequest from Danforth, who was chair of the board of trustees.

"Students describe his lectures as crystal-clear and eloquent, and often funny to boot," Starr wrote at the time. "Professor Blodgett establishes a kind of master-apprentice relationship with his students, giving them more attention in writing their senior theses than many graduate students receive in preparing their PhD dissertations."

Current Chair of the History Department Michael Fisher recently professed his own admiration for Blodgett, whose remarkable commitment to Oberlin as a college and a community has always been evident during his lengthy tenure. Fisher was quick to add that Blodgett would be welcome to return to the classroom in the near future for an encore performance. "Geoffrey Blodgett has taught at Oberlin since 1960, but he was also an undergraduate at the college. So we're talking about a man who has committed half a century of service to Oberlin," he said. "He was going to retire on Feb. 1, 2000, which would have brought him into the new millennium. It also would have been his 40th year as a professor. He was going to teach his Social History of American Architecture course, which was to be offered this semester. He was going to go out with a great triumph. It is my hope that he can return to teach the course during the spring."

"He's much beloved both in and out of the history department," Fisher added. "I can't express how much of an impact he's made here over the years. But he'll be in town, and he will probably write for the alumni magazine, so he will still be a member of the Oberlin community."

Fellow History Professor Marcia Colish, who will be responsible for organizing Blodgett's retirement dinner, expressed similar admiration for her colleague and his vast knowledge of local history. "He is much beloved and respected within the department," she said. "He really is the leading historian of Oberlin, and he knows more about the town than anyone else. He will be missed."

During the upcoming months, Blodgett will continue to recuperate from his operation. And though he will no longer grace the classrooms of King with his eloquent lectures about the architecture of Frank Lloyd Wright and the utopianism of Edward Bellamy, he will hardly be idle. Instead, he will continue to work on his latest labor of love, a biography of Gilbert. Meanwhile, he has several writing projects in the works and will sporadically contribute articles to the Oberlin Alumni Magazine. (In addition to his two books, Blodgett has published nearly 100 articles and reviews in periodicals ranging from the Oberlin News-Tribune to TV Guide.) In this sense, Blodgett will almost certainly remain a strong presence in the Oberlin academic community despite his absence from the classroom.

"I'm retiring from the classroom, with the possibility of coming back every now and then, because I do enjoy classroom teaching," he said. "I'm going to be on campus and I've got a lot of writing to do. I'm writing a biography of one of the preeminent American architects, Cass Gilbert. I'm also going to be writing a book about Oberlin architecture for a series that's just starting. And then I want to do something about the history of Oberlin College. So I've got a million other things I need to do."

With any luck, an arrangement will be reached that will allow Blodgett to take time out of his suddenly busy schedule to teach his Social History of American Architecture course for one final semester. In the meantime, students and faculty members alike will mourn his departure - and with good cause. But members of the Oberlin community can always comfort themselves with the knowledge that, while Blodgett will no longer preach from the pulpits of King, he will never be too far away.

The man, the myth, the legend: Blodgett became a community mainstay as a student, teacher and friend. (photo courtesy College Relations)