Doug Fricke
English Department
Member of the Faculty, 1987–2016
Stroll. Amble. Meander. Stride. When we think of Doug, he is always walking with steady purpose—never haste—seeking out two things: good company and new experiences. Young and old alike marvel at his 500-mile walks across Spain’s Camino de Santiago, but with postal regularity Doug takes to the hallways between classes, always popping in to his colleagues’ rooms, a story, a recipe, a follow-up comment on the tip of his tongue. Just the other day, he walked to Cambridge to join former students for dinner, a trip he has made dozens of times by as many different routes as possible. That love of people and experience, to say nothing of his lifelong scholarship, led Doug to Milton, where his students have basked in his warm traveler’s spirit for the past 29 years.
If you ask him where his teaching journey began, Doug will take you back to his public library in Rhinebeck, New York, where he, at age 10, was a daily fixture after school, so much so that a gentle librarian passed him new books until he was reading two a week. From then on, he says, he knew he loved words. In high school he didn’t have Class IV English, but he had Mr. Kelly, one of those magnetic teachers that stand as templates for the future teacher hatching inside the smitten student.
Tenured as a professor of English literature at Bowling Green State, Doug came to Milton at 44 for a new life chapter for himself and his children, David and Anna, then 15 and 11. The School, he remembers, struck him as smart, funky and traditional, with a slouching ease. All the staircases creaked; everyone was friendly; “I loved it,” he remembers. Wolcott, Robbins, Faulkner and Hathaway: A slate of dorms benefited from his two decades of faithful, warm service and humor. Always there, always ready to play his role, he made his dorm charges feel known and cared for. And wonderfully, Doug met Anne Neely at Milton, their partnership blossoming into marriage in 1992, and years of work, home building, and travel together.
In the classroom, three decades of students have come to know Doug’s masterful way around a book: frank, deeply researched, and obsessional about craft. To Doug, a book is not an idea but a thing, a construction that asks to be enjoyed, deconstructed, and then enjoyed anew. Without pretensions, Doug might start a discussion by asking, What’s happening here? What’s going on with this guy?—be that guy Faulkner or Shakespeare. So naturally connective with his students, Doug quickly tags kids with nicknames and telltale anecdotes.
And generations of students have flocked to his playful candor. Doug once joked, “Henry James is boring? No, you’re boring!” With freedom from collegiate pressure, Doug taught what he knew so well and what posed pedagogical challenges. Like the hiker seeking the steeper route, Doug volunteered to revamp a sophomore course by teaching the oldest literature in the world, like The Ramayana and Tang Dynasty poetry. After 50 years in the classroom, he somehow has become more adaptive and risk-seeking.
I can count on one finger the teachers who would tackle in high school tentacled monsters like Joyce’s Ulysses. But in his Three Writers course, Doug went for it, concluding the venture with a dress-as-your-favorite-character dinner party. Of course, the party’s success brought the same group of students back ten years later to reprise the dinner and raise a Guinness as thanks to their warm, intrepid literary guide.
For the English department, Doug’s parting tugs hard, as he is nearly the last of a generation of teachers with distinctive expertise. We don’t want him to go. But he is ready to go. If any were planning to stand on the shoreline and wave white handkerchiefs as he sails out of view, Doug would probably tell us to do something better with our time. No moss growing on him now: Doug soon will be on a Madrid-bound plane, and thereafter the possibilities stretch on and on. Of course, he will stay well-read as ever, and there’s talk of food projects, perhaps something fermented or distilled (I’m voting for kimchi, which we mutually adore), and moving with Anne between Boston and Maine, where he can be found cooking, clearing brush like a biblical force, and walking to his heart’s content.
Tarim Chung
English Department Chair