photo by Sally McCay
HONORING THE 'PROVERBIAL PIED PIPER'
On his sixty-fifth birthday, Professor Wolfgang Mieder’s friends and fellow faculty surprised him with a gift and event that was both professional tribute to one of the world’s leading folklore and proverb scholars and personal celebration of a man who has been a warm, collegial presence on the UVM campus for nearly forty years.
Mieder was feted in Waterman Building’s Memorial Lounge, where President Daniel Mark Fogel presented him with a book produced in his honor, The Proverbial “Pied Piper,” a festschrift edited by Professor Kevin McKenna and published by Peter Lang.
The festschrift is a tradition of the academy, a celebratory book reserved for only top veteran scholars. Self-confessed instigator of a year-long web of white lies designed to keep the project a secret, McKenna drove the Mieder collection from start to finish.
“Wolfgang is no dummy,” McKenna said, describing the challenge he knew he’d face in pulling off the surprise. McKenna swore the volume’s twenty-three international contributors, many of them on the UVM faculty, to secrecy. He even concocted the ruse of his own lecture on “The Role of the Russian Proverb in Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s Fictional and Publistic Works” to lure Mieder into Memorial Lounge at 4 p.m. on Tuesday, February 17.
Mieder thought he was there to introduce McKenna’s talk. But as he launched into his comments, McKenna stepped up and revealed the day’s true intent.
McKenna suspected (and worried) that the surprise would have a strong emotional impact on Mieder, a sentimental man. Though he pushed up his glasses and rubbed his eyes, the professor handled the moment with good humor. Following tributes from a number of colleagues, Mieder took the microphone. “Would you like me to give my introduction for Kevin now?” he quipped. Mieder then thanked those who had made the day and paid tribute back to those who honored him. “When you work someplace you want to be, it makes you a happy trouper,” he said. “UVM is a damn good place to dedicate a life to.”
In making the special volume possible, McKenna cites the support of the president and provost’s office; Joan and Eugene Kalkin ’50; Jerold Jacobson ’62 and Gertrude Holle-Suppa Jacobson; Douglas Smith ’85 and Stephanie Ellis-Smith; and the Knight Vision Foundation.
Summing up what the celebration and the event meant to him, Mieder called the festschrift “one of the joys in the academic tradition. For a little professor like me, it is about the ultimate thing.”
Thomas Weaver
