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In this age of specialization, the Renaissance person has become an endangered species. Stephen Dunning, who died this spring at the age of eighty, was one of this vanishing breed. In the years before he joined NCTE, Stephen was a band leader and saxophone player in college, a booking agent, and a member of the US Army Air Force in World War II. During the half century he belonged to NCTE, he served as NCTE president, became a published poet and fiction writer, coauthored a secondary English methods text, edited several poetry anthologies, and provided the spark that lit up innumerable workshops. The recollections that follow were written by colleagues and friends.
-Henry B. Maloney and Laura J. Roop
The Pied Piper
Edmund J. Farrell
I first met Stephen Dunning (he answered to Steve but preferred Stephen) in the early 1960s and liked him immediately. He had Pied Piper charm: graduate students, workshop attendees, passersby hung on his words. I recall the remarkable poetry festival that he ebulliently helped organize and that William Stafford chaired at the 1966 NCTE Convention, a festival that featured readings by W. S. Merwin, Gary Snyder, Carolyn Kizer, Galway Kinnell, May Swenson, Robert Bly, and others.
In 1966 Stephen, Edward Lueders, and Hugh Smith coedited Reflections on a Gift of Watermelon Pickle . . . and Other Modern Verse (Glenview: Scott Foresman, 1966), a breakthrough book in artistically wedding photograph to poem. When Hugh Smith unexpectedly died, Stephen and Ed retained Hugh's name as coeditor of Some Haystacks Don't Even Have Any Needle (Glenview: Scott Foresman, 1969) so that Hugh's widow could share in royalties.
Snapshots: Stephen, an early-morning runner, racing at 6:30 a.m. through our home in Urbana, front door to back, waving merrily to my wife, Jo Ann, and me as he passed through the kitchen. Spending a memorable evening in Ann Arbor with Stephen, discussing problems within the profession. Stephen, postretirement, laying over with the Farrells in Austin. After doing a superb poetry workshop, entertaining his hosts with late-night anecdotes about his sax-playing days.
In 1973 he told me that he wanted to be an NCTE president who mattered, one who left his mark on the council. He did: SLATE is his legacy.
Snapshot: At the NCTE...