Memorial Service for John Spielman

Memorial Minute for John P. Spielman

John Philip Spielman, Jr., Audrey Dusseau Professor of the Humanties,  emeritus,  died on April 25, 2009, at The Quadrangle, the nearby retirement community. John was born in scenic Anaconda, Montana, on June 16, 1930, and after graduating high school in nearby Butte, matriculated first at the Montana School of Mines, where his father was then dean, before transferring to Montana State University, earning his bachelor's degree in 1951.

But while always a son of the west, engaged by its mountains, streams, and not least its legends, John's young imagination was never constrained even by the generous boundaries of his native state.  As an isolated only child, he early began a lifelong habit of collecting stamps, tiny windows into the languages, culture, and history of distant places. And after college he earned one of the first ever Fulbright grants, to study in faraway Vienna, before returning, in 1952, to begin graduate study at the University of Wisconsin.

It was at Wisconsin that John met Danila Cole, a Swarthmore graduate from Bucks County, also on her way to a PhD in history. While they had arrived from markedly different backgrounds, when East met West the  twain found among other things a shared interest in the early modern period, Hapsburg Empire in his case, Tudor-Stuart England in hers.  A budding romance was interrupted by the draft, which called John shortly after he won his Master's.  Army service in Germany further exposed him to the culture of his Spielman ancestors, but one imagines this was slight consolation for separation from Dani, and the two were married in September of ‘55, shortly after his return.

John earned his PhD in 1957, and after a stint as instructor at Michigan began his distinguished Haverford career as Assistant Professor in September of 1959. Over the next decade a smooth ascent up the academic ladder was interrupted twice, first by a second Fulbright to Vienna, in 1963- 4, next by appointment as Dean of the College, in January 1966, following an unexpected resignation by the legendary William Cadbury.  While serving two years with distinction, John never abandoned either scholarship or teaching, his real loves, and on appointment to full professor in 1969 returned fulltime to the faculty.

John's publications ranged across three languages and as many genres.  Together with Madelyn and Marcel Gutwirth, in 1971 he edited a selection of Sources et Reflets De L'histoire de France for classroom use.  His biography of  Leopold I of Austria, the unassuming Hapsburg monarch who served as linchpin of the allied effort to prevent France's Louis XIV from dominating the continent, followed in 1977.  In 1981 he published the first English translation of the classic 17th century German antiwar novel The Adventures of Simplicissimus.   And finally in 1993 he used architectural records for a study, in effect, of urban social history: The City and the Crown: Vienna and the Imperial Court.

John's own tastes were late Hapsburg:  his was the city of Mozart and Haydn rather than Mahler or certainly Shoenburg. And his manners were distinctly Victorian.  The very soul of courtesy, perhaps the last faculty male to abandon tweeds and tie as classroom attire de rigueur, the formality of his diction would have done credit to a mid-Atlantic version of Henry Higgins, while longtime colleagues can recall only a single use of one of George Carlin's seven forbidden words, a sheepishly pronounced and somewhat misapplied reference, on the occasion of his appointment as dean, to a certain organic substance hitting the fan.

The Spielman virtues, however, were timeless. That appointment as dean, in recognition of his steady good sense – the same qualities that led some colleagues to refer to him as“Uncle John” – put him on the front lines of the college's contested refusal, during the Vietnam War, to release the records of class rank to draft boards eager to send students overseas.  The faculty recognized his wisdom in repeatedly electing him to the Academic Council, and then as Clerk of the Faculty.   He was an originator of what was long the History Department's most famous course, the Junior Seminar on Evidence, including physical objects, and we could count on his practical understanding of the tangible world of nuts and bolts, bootspurs and branding irons. During the 1970s and 1980s, too, a time when the History Department often attracted more majors than any other, and its then basic course on Western Civilization was routinely oversubscribed, John's love of teaching, and capacity for hard work, led him to offer extra sections on his own.

And if hospitality is a virtue, too, then he and Dani possessed it in abundance. They often collided, figuratively as well as literally, in what she called their little ‘one-butt” kitchen, on 745 Millbrook Lane, but warm and wonderful things flowed out of it on the frequent occasions when dinners, or classes, were held there. While the Spielmans never had children of their own, nephew Jonathan Hansen '84 and niece Alexandra Warren'91 both graduated as history majors. Meanwhile generations of other Haverford and Bryn Mawr students served as surrogate sons and daughters, beneficiaries of the Spielman hospitality as well as of an abiding interest in their adult careers. That hospitality even more famously extended to the log cabin that John's father and grandfather had built, during the 1930s, in federally protected pine woods northwest of Anaconda. That forest refuge, where he had grown up and they spent their summers, was later equipped with amenities such as running water and electricity, above all a guest house open to any visiting Haverfordians taking the overland route to the coast. Those acquainted with John only in his more buttoned down Eastern personna knew less than half the man.  Although never a hunter – he did not shoot things – he was in younger days a horseman, always a hiker, woodsman, mushroom and wildflower collector, expert flyfisherman, magician with a trout and skillet.

John retired in 1996,  but while Dani  had adapted to life in the west as well as he to the east,  toward the end her final illness kept them away from Anaconda. John's devoted care for her was buoyed in part by the community of the Episcopal Church of the Redeemer, where he came to serve as vestryman.  But shortly after her death in the fall of 2006, he followed her into the assisted living facility at The Quadrangle.  Friends were impressed, as always, with his uncomplaining cheerfulness.  And they were pleased, as well, by the fact that often, in his mind, he returned to that sylvan cabin where he had grown up, that next to Dani he loved more than anything on earth, and where last summer their ashes were jointly buried.

-Roger Lane

The memorial service will be held on Saturday, September 26 at 11 a.m. at the Haverford Friends Meeting House, 855 Buck Lane, Haverford, PA.  A light luncheon will follow the service.