Eulogy for Elmer Maas

May 14, 2005, NYC

By Marta Daniels, his student, Juniata College

I am honored to be here today representing students, professors and administrators from my college—Juniata—that recently honored the work of students and professors (including Elmer Maas) for their civil rights witness 40 years ago. On March 19, 2005, a month and one week before Elmer died, the college celebrated him and others who went to Montgomery in 1965, during the gravest civil rights protests of the era. [Tomorrow, coming full circle, the commencement address at the school will be given by Yolanda King, daughter of the Rev. Martin Luther King.]

I am also honored to be here among so many valiant peacemakers who have been jailed for their witness for disarmament and a more just and nonviolent world.

I'm a writer, musician, peace activist and former felonious, criminally mischievous cellmate of Elmer Maas.' I also lived for 10 years at the Community for Nonviolent Action in Voluntown, CT, where Elmer died.

I am here today because I was his student at Juniata College in Huntingdon, Pa in the sixties. And it was as a student that Elmer influenced me the most. I'm sure I would not be so nearly disturbed about the world as I am today, had I not known Elmer then. He taught us to be fully aware.

If he drove a car in NYC today, its bumper sticker would read: “If you're not outraged, you're not paying attention.”

Elmer Maas had a reputation as a strange professor—one who would step inattentively into wastebaskets during his lectures. “But,” [as one student of his ( Gary Rowe ) speaking for all of us said,] “for those of us who got to know him, to truly discover the intense genius of the man, he became a hero. “

Elmer taught at Juniata from 1962-68 and changed the world on that campus several times in the course of those six short years, challenging us and others to become more than we ever thought we were capable of becoming. And so, too, the college.

This small Brethren school with its Dunkard roots of no dancing—but also no war-making—theoretically offered the ethical and moral belief in pacifism that matched the philosophy Elmer embraced with his whole being. It was a philosophy he expressed by opposing the violence of the racist south, the militarism of the unending war-making nation, and the economic violence of structural poverty and despair.

At the time, the college would have preferred not to be reminded of its roots, and certainly not to have its roots planted on the front page of the New York Times and Life Magazine in the single most important civil rights protest action of the day—the 1965 Selma-Montgomery voter registration drives, which produced some of the bloodiest beatings and largest jailings of the civil rights movement.

The Juniata participation in this seminal event, landing the college in the news and causing some students to be expelled from school, was led by three professors: Elmer Maas, Don Hope, and Galway Kinnell, visiting poet-in-residence. All three took a lot of heat for their leadership. But their influence and calls to action were compelling, and we students responded. {Today, I would like to introduce to you the family of Professor Don Hope. Don was Elmer's best friend at Juniata. His wife, Ellie, and their three children – Abbey, Theodore and Miranda—are here with us today.}

As his former student (Chuck Lytle) recalls, we were often thrown together with Elmer as he led us to new and strange places—like the office of the SCLC (Southern Christian Leadership Conference) in Selma, the summer of 1966—to do voter registration work, after the glare of the cameras and focus of the news media were gone. “It was intense and grueling and very dangerous,” wrote Chuck, “and Elmer was a rock: focused and unwavering. This may surprise those who didn't know him well, and who may have only seen his outwardly gentle demeanor. Underneath that soft exterior was an iron will and dedication to always do right, regardless of the personal cost. One couldn't do better in life than strive to be like Elmer.”

Another student (Gary Rowe) recalls how students “adopted” Elmer. “He became our mentor and we quietly withdrew from the college curriculum every Wednesday evening to meet in his small apartment for real study—the books, the music, the art, the great ideas that authentically animated our interests as we discovered a larger world than we ever knew with Elmer as our navigator. One time we spent eleven weeks studying Paul Tillich 's The Courage to Be …We became immersed in a dialogue about the very essence of what it means to be human. That Elmer would lead such a mission of discovery occurs in my memories of him as purely logical. That is what he was all about.”  

In addition to civil rights work in the south, Elmer also led every anti-Vietnam war protest march and Pentagon action we had, organized our contingent of the Poor People's Campaign encampment in Washington, and helped form SCORE – the Student Committee on Racial Equality—which worked locally on anti-poverty issues in central Pennsylvania.

Elmer was profoundly influenced by Martin Luther King's April 4, 1967 speech linking poverty and racism to the war in Vietnam and militarism. In that speech, King said “The greatest purveyor of violence in the world today is my own government.” Elmer took this to heart and vowed to commit his life from then on to opposing that violence. His last activity on campus was heading up the anti-war campaign of Eugene McCarthy for President in which his apartment was turned into a chaotic, smoke-filled, pizza-carton-laden, voter canvassing headquarters, where tens of thousands of neighborhood addresses were typed onto 3x5 cards for get-out-the-vote efforts, and where Elmer and another faculty member, (Sarah Clemson,) inspected us all for our “appearance”—can you believe this?— our “Clean for Gene” appearances!!

To give you some idea of the chaos surrounding Elmer's life, one faculty colleague (Betty Ann Cherry) recalls the story of Elmer's telephone problem: “Elmer cannot understand why his phone is not working. Under his bed were at least 50 copies of the NY Times Sunday magazine section, in which a mouse had made a wonderful nest—and said mouse had also chewed right through the phone wire! No one could call Elmer and no one would believe that it was a mouse in the house that did it. He took a lot of kidding for that one.”

But “Clean for Gene” or not, the McCarthy Campaign in '68 was Elmer's last campus activity. That year his contract was not renewed for reasons never made clear. (Don Hope's had not been renewed the year prior, and Galway had long since left the campus.) Despite major student protests to the Board of Trustees, Elmer Maas left town the summer of 1968, not to return until this past March—37 years later—when he was honored and celebrated for the very activities that had been the source of his campus skewerings. It was a very sweet moment for Elmer. The college is to be commended for this historical setting right.

Despite his departure, his widespread inspiration on campus had laid the intellectual and moral groundwork that led other faculty, students and administrators to form one of the first academic peace studies programs in the nation, in 1971. Juniata's Peace Program (PACS) is today one of the nation's outstanding, inter-disciplinary courses in higher education focused on the elimination of war as an option for solving human conflict, turning out activist peace-makers and non-violent conflict resolution providers. In our opinion, it is one of Elmer Maas' legacies.

Whether through his teaching or his activism, he was a lightning rod for the times, yet belied by a demeanor Emily Dickinson called “...a little beyond…” as all who live from an original source seem to those who don't live that way. The absent-minded professor for sure, but Elmer was one of the most mindfully aware people we had ever known, and we quickly understood we were in the presence of someone who could imagine new worlds in ways only original thinkers can.

Elmer had a refined commitment to right thinking and thus, right living, which, if you were ready to receive it, would change your life. As Abby Hope, the daughter of Prof. Don Hope , said, “his life force vibrated at a higher frequency than that of most other people.”

It also made it tough to be Elmer. The world was only too ready to resist him—to call him a dreamer and a romantic.

But as historian Howard Zinn says, “To be hopeful in bad times is not foolishly romantic. It is based on the fact that human history is a history not only of cruelty, but also of compassion, sacrifice, courage, kindness. And if we do act, in however small a way, we don't have to wait for some grand, utopian future. The future is an infinite success of presents, and to live now as we think human beings should live, in defiance of all that is bad around us, is itself a marvelous victory.”

Elmer Maas lived in victory. He was victorious every day.

He was also a specialist in the GRAND THEORY OF UNITIES. In his mind, everything was connected, no matter how disparate. In that sense, he was a poet, someone who made comparisons of one thing to another, insisting that all things are related and comparable, and in the end making an assertion for the unity of all life.

One of my greatest memories of Elmer as my teacher is sailing out of his legendary Great Epochs in World History lectures, or his 3-hour seminars in text analysis, with my notebook filled with his intricate drawings of Plato's “Allegory of the Cave;” (“The price good men pay for indifference to public affairs is to be ruled by evil men.”– Plato); my ears ringing with his text analysis of Mozart's “Eine Klein Nacht Music;” and my mind's eye filled with images of T.S. Eliot's poem, “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” with Prufrock walking the beach, his pants rolled up, asking: “Do I dare and Do I Dare? / Do I dare disturb the universe? / Do I dare to eat a peach?” Each of these texts shared one common theme and led inexorably to Elmer 's own “overwhelming question:” What is the meaning of life and what is right action for living it?

Elmer longed for understanding, for placing life within a context that could explain where we were and what the hell we were doing about it. (This, BTW, friends, is the basis for, and the source of, his unfinished seven-year curriculum.) For Elmer, it was the thought that “The hottest fires in hell are reserved for those who remain neutral in times of moral crisis.” [Edmund Burke]. In the late 20 th and early 21 st centuries, those times are every single day .

I think he was so mentally present that he had no choice but to find the most meaningful and morally consistent ways to live and to act. And, in times of universal deceit, telling the truth, as Orwell said, was a revolutionary act.

Elmer was a revolutionary in the best sense of the word. He was a brilliant, insightful man, whose genius found expression not only in direct action at the tip of a nose cone, but also in his art—his inspiring and original musical compositions. The same hands that hammered swords to plowshares hammered elegantly on pianos keys to make extraordinary and beautiful music.

All of us who were his “activist” students participated in the production of his musical comedy that he co-wrote with Prof. Don Hope, called The Insurance Company, A Cantata in Illumination and Mime, which opened and closed on one day—May 15, 1967—on the Juniata campus. For the chorus, it involved members of the black community from Mount Union, and required the participation of all the musicians the college could muster. Some students walked out in protest over the politics; others stayed and vowed allegiance to the politics. No matter what, the political dye was cast for Elmer Maas.

Elmer, who was only 31 when he composed the music and scored it for full orchestra, played selections from that musical satire this past March during the Juniata Selma reunion. We were all reminded once again of his skillful piano playing, the lyrical intelligence of the score, and the forceful, focused nature of the words put to music satirizing and condemning militarism, exploitation and racial oppression. I hope the play will one day be resurrected.

“One of the most fun times I had with Elmer,” wrote a former student (Chuck Lytle), “was the night at his apartment when we played a version of the old Tonight Show , ‘Beat the Band,' with a couple of us giving Elmer a song title to see if he could play it. I really got into it, but to no avail. It didn't matter whether it was the late twenties' Austin High Gang number ‘Big Noise from Winnetka,' or Thelonius Monk's ‘Dinah,' or Billy Strayhorn's ‘Lush Life.' Elmer knew them all.”

Sadly, Elmer died before finishing his latest musical piece, “The Dusk Leaves,” originally written in the 1980s while in the Montgomery County Jail for an original Plowshares action, on “only the white keys” of a broken prison piano.

Like the curriculum he developed, comprising a seven-year course of study focused upon the “American national nuclear security state," utilizing the 4,000 books he had personally accumulated for the purpose, the syllabus for it will be left unfinished. In a very real sense, he had been developing that curriculum since his Juniata days, and it is sad that fate's miscarriage will leave these projects undone, since he alone could only have completed them.

Happily, Elmer Maas crossed paths in the sixties with Galway Kinnell. Galway, who went on to win the National Book Award and a Pulitzer Prize for poetry, was an activist, but wrote of the messenger role of poetry: “What troubles me,” Galway said, “is a sense that so many things lovely and precious in our world seem to be dying out. Perhaps poetry will be the canary in the mine-shaft warning us of what's to come.”

Elmer Maas was such a canary. We need to recognize and honor him for his canary service.

Galway also said, “Maybe the best we can do is do what we love as best we can.” I believe Elmer Maas did the best he could do, and died doing what he loved as best he could.

Elmer is gone, but we are left—a unique and committed community. We are here because of Elmer Maas. His death has brought us together now, but his life will always do so. We will remain joined—and forever changed—because of Elmer .

Poet Jane Kenyon says that in loss we can find solace. In her poem, “Let Evening Come” (from her book, Otherwise ) she writes:

To the bottle in the ditch, to the scoop
in the oats, to air in the lung
let evening come.

Let it come, as it will, and don't
Be afraid. God does not leave us
Comfortless, so let evening come.

Our comfort in Elmer's loss is found in this extraordinary community of people gathered here today because of him. Even in death he has provided our comfort. We share a part of him, and we will leave this place, carrying that special part with us, making us more than we could ever have imagined ourselves to be.

We say goodbye and thank you to Elmer now somewhere in what Galway would call “Paradise Elsewhere.”

Marta Daniels, 122 Middlesex Ave., Chester, CT 06412/T: 860-526-3406/

E-mail: marta.daniels@snet.net