Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, May 27, 1990 TAG: 9005250205
SECTION: CURRENT PAGE: NRV1 EDITION: NEW RIVER VALLEY
SOURCE: JUDITH SCHWAB SPECIAL TO THE ROANOKE TIMES & WORLD-NEWS
DATELINE: BLACKSBURG LENGTH: Long
The sandwiches were for the two of them. The Renaissance man had decided anyone using her lunch hour to interview an 82-year-old "in his anecdotage" deserved a meal.
Burke Johnston, retired Virginia Tech professor of English, is known as a Renaissance man because of his classical studies and because of his variety of artistic talents.
Not only a scholar, a teacher and a dean, he also continues to be a painter, poet and sculptor.
Johnston's reputation as "one of the academic greats at VPI," as former Tech President T. Marshall Hahn has described him, will soon be recognized in stone and steel.
The new student services building under construction on campus will bear his name.
It seems appropriate that a building for students - a place for them to study, meet and relax - should be named for this versatile man who considers himself, first and foremost, a teacher.
Sixteen years after his retirement, Johnston still is going strong, attending to the myriad skills for which he is known.
Words like "myriad" spring to mind after talking with Johnston, who exudes the classics and erupts into Shakespearean quotations with little or no provocation.
"I am a horrible ham," he said after launching into a portion of the graveyard scene from Hamlet which ends with a reference to the smell of old corpses.
Hamlet: Dost thou think Alexander looked o' this fashion i'th' grave?
Horatio: E'n so.
Hamlet: And smelt so? Pah!
Johnston's "Pah!" is accompanied by a grand nose-wringing gesture and a grimace that brings a laugh from the performer and his audience of one, while standing in the quiet of Johnston's living room.
"I do love the stuff," Johnston said, smiling.
World War II couldn't keep Johnston from teaching Shakespeare. Early in his academic career, with a wife, a child, and a Ph.D. dissertation (Columbia University) keeping him busy, Uncle Sam asked him if he would like a year of active duty.
He declined the invitation, but his polite refusal was totally ignored. Then "Pearl Harbor happened and one year turned into four."
Stationed in the Mojave Desert, where he practiced shooting anti-aircraft guns, Johnston started a Shakespeare class "after supper in the mess hall with a floating population" of soldiers. He later retired from the Army Reserve as a lieutenant colonel.
Back at Virginia Tech, Johnston weathered a teaching interruption that can sometimes seem greater than a war - he became a dean.
"I loved teaching better than I loved deaning," Johnston said, but he conceded the importance of being a dean. He was the first dean of Tech's College of Arts and Sciences, from 1961 to 1965. He spent the last nine years of his career back in the classroom as the C.P. Miles Professor of English.
Even retirement didn't stop his teaching. For six years after he retired, he taught Shakespeare at the request of a group of faculty wives. Johnston thoroughly enjoyed teaching with "no tests, no roll call" and plenty of ham-bone acting on his part.
Johnston's Blacksburg home on Gracelyn Court is what you would expect of a retired English professor, married for more than 50 years to Blacksburg native Mary Todd Lancaster, with four children grown and educated. It's dignified and attractive. And it's in the basement that you'll find the Renaissance man's lair.
Down there, behind the family room with its television set, books and comfortable chairs, is the utility room. And it's in there, with the water pipes and tools, old toys and general household stuff, that Johnston takes care of business.
His mahogany sculptures of Don Quixote and King Lear may grace the living room furniture, but it is here, next to the furnace, that he keeps his 1930s-vintage "grunt and groan" press on which he prints his own books of poetry.
He publishes under the name White Rhinoceros Press. The white rhinoceros was once threatened with extinction, Johnston said, and he wrote a poem that refered to the animal as "the living fossil of a long dead age."
Then he said with a broad grin, "I think that's rather appropriate for me, don't you?"
Johnston, like most poets, considers his soul revealed in his work, but rejection became easier to take through the years.
"I wrote one of my poems on the back of a rejection slip," he said with a laugh.
In addition to the press, his place is stuffed with his other work. Sculptures and paintings rest on window sills and share space with stacks of thick old 78 rpm records, lawn furniture, baseball bats, even an old coconut.
Seventy-five years of sculpting, 60 years of scholarly friendship with Ben Jonson English poet and dramatist, (1572-1637), decades of poetry writing, painting, teaching and learning, mingle in this room with Johnston's strong sense of family.
There are sculpted studies and drawings of his grandfather, whom he greatly admired, alongside paintings of his daughters - the eldest a professor of English at Randolph-Macon Woman's College in Lynchburg where she teaches Shakespeare.
There are neatly stacked copies of books he has printed himself, including one he wrote and printed for his grandson called "The Unbelievable Birthday."
The 7-year-old had announced one day, "I want you to print me a book, Grand-daddy, for Christmas."
"What was Grand-daddy to do?" Johnston asked. "I printed it - and he had to be in it along with his best friend."
The basement room may be filled with memories, but it is not a dusty old museum and Johnston is not resting on his considerable heap of laurels.
When the phone rings, Johnston has just enough time to chat quickly with the caller before rushing off to campus for a meeting. Retired deans are in demand.
"It is a problem," he said, heading for the door.
by CNB