My correspondence with Professor Norton Bagley ’41

by Peter Jarrett ’66

Norton Bagley’s life reads like the script for a Hollywood movie: a poor boy with a genius IQ and a severe stuttering problem dreams of going to college and becoming a teacher. With the help of an unlikely champion—a respected college president—he overcomes faculty skepticism and is admitted to college. After a few years of teaching and serving in World War II, he furthers his education on the GI Bill and returns to his alma mater as a professor, becoming a beloved educator, administrator, and ultimately, a campus legend.

I reconnected with Professor Bagley at PSU in May 2006 during my 40th reunion. Shortly afterward, I wrote a letter to him, acknowledging him for touching my life. He wrote a lengthy letter back and we started a correspondence that lasted six years. His letters made me feel like I was having a conversation with my favorite professor, and I quickly came to view him as both friend and colleague. I saved his letters—35 in all, totaling 150 single-spaced pages—sensing they were both social history as well as an uncommon autobiography.

The Gifted Professor
“As I speak to you, I may get stuck on some words, so bear with me …” This was how Professor Bagley started his address to my classmates and me at freshman orientation in September 1962. In those first few words, I think we sensed that if he could deal with his stuttering problem in such a public way, we could surely deal with our insecurities about college.

I took Professor Bagley’s child development class on the third floor of Rounds Hall. His teaching style projected both a matchless mastery of content and a sensitivity to people. When, in an autobiographical piece, I wrote that I was floundering with some of my beliefs, he wrote a comment in the right-hand margin: “Try the Unitarian writers like Thoreau and Emerson.” In my senior year, I signed up for another class with him and took a risk by writing a satire instead of the serious paper that was expected of me. Anxious that I might have offended him, I was surprised to find out that he had the paper copied and handed out to the whole class because he liked the way I had clarified some ideas. Even after graduation he was supportive, driving three hours round-trip to Hampton one night to meet with some of us who were starting a Seacoast alumni chapter. His presence always made a statement.

A Life Unfolds in Letters
In the first letter I received from Professor Bagley shortly after we reconnected at reunion, he began sharing his life story:

“I was bullied often because of my small size and stuttering. I created an extensive fantasy world to retreat to. Using a pile of bricks behind my house, I created castles and worlds that only I dwelled in … I stuttered as soon as I could speak due to the turmoil in my home.”  

Despite a difficult home life, Bagley excelled at school and skipped second grade. To overcome his fear of public speaking due to his stutter, he would force himself to raise his hand in class whenever possible and even entered speech contests. “I wanted to make something of myself,” he explained. Interestingly, he was very comfortable onstage, acting in school plays. “I did not stutter. I was someone else,” he wrote.

His knowledge of history was so great that his 8th-grade social studies teacher would let him substitute teach on occasion. “It was during that experience that I knew I wanted to be a teacher,” he recalled. The teacher, Viola Brown, was asked at her retirement party who her brightest students were. “Norton Bagley and Alan Shepard,” she replied. Professor Bagley said this was his favorite compliment.

The Happiest Years
In his senior year at Pinkerton Academy in Derry, Bagley had an admission interview with the president of Plymouth Normal School, Ernest Silver. “He was interested in helping people with disabilities enter teaching,” Bagley recalled in a letter. President Silver was blunt, saying to the young aspiring teacher, “You will be my personal guinea pig,” and overruled the school’s faculty who expressed reservations.

There was no tuition then and Bagley received 30 dollars a month from the National Youth Administration, an agency created by Franklin Delano Roosevelt as part of the New Deal. The program helped more than 4.5 million young people find work, get vocational training, or, like Bagley, get an education. He also took a variety of odd jobs to pay for his room and board since his family had no money.

In 1937, there were 200 women and only 10 men at the Normal School. In one of his letters, Professor Bagley describes late-night bull sessions discussing philosophy, world affairs, and a peace movement that was developing at the time. He also met President Silver’s friend and former Normal School faculty member Robert Frost—by then a three-time winner of the Pulitzer Prize for poetry. Looking back on his experience at Plymouth Normal School, he commented, “My four years at Plymouth were the happiest of my life … I found acceptance.”

A Long and Fulfilling Career
Shortly after graduating in 1941, Bagley taught 8th-grade social studies in Pittsburg, NH, averaging 45 students in a class. When the US entered World War II, he enlisted in March of 1942. In an eight-page, single-spaced letter he described his experience as a clerk typist in a medical corps and his brief stint in an artillery unit. He was involved in the invasion of North Africa and Italy, and recounted a harrowing experience when German planes repeatedly attacked his landing craft. “It is difficult to dig a foxhole on the hull of a steel ship, but we tried,” he wrote. He earned a Bronze Star for his service.

Bagley got his PhD through the GI Bill and began teaching in the early 1950s at Plymouth Teachers College. He would weave back and forth between administrative and teaching positions throughout his 32-year career. Along with being a professor of education, he served as chair of the education department, dean of instruction, and dean of students, and worked closely with President Harold Hyde throughout his presidency, which spanned from 1950 to 1977. “He would tell you he wanted you in a certain role—he did not ask you,” Bagley wrote. He watched President Hyde’s leadership style change from authoritarian in the ’50s and ’60s to more democratic in the tumultuous ’70s. “Hyde wanted to grow the College and he was successful at it,” Professor Bagley noted.

I loved his sense of humor. In one class, a student asked him how candid he should be in an autobiography. With a slight smile, Professor Bagley said, “Don’t include anything I could hold against you.” Describing his decision to retire he said, “I knew it was time when the students stopped laughing at my jokes.”

Professor Bagley retired in 1982 and immersed himself in studying his ancestry. He traveled to Europe as well as throughout the US. Additionally, he did intensive transcription work at local cemeteries for the NH Historical Society. He read vociferously and was an avid gardener. He was also a caregiver for a friend with Parkinson’s disease. He moved to the Taylor Community in Laconia, NH, in the 1990s where he died on February 23, 2014, after a long illness. Commenting on his particular branch of the Bagley family, he observed: “I am the last leaf on the tree.”

In one letter he expressed his life philosophy; the ideals that he lived by: “Put me down as one who always worshipped the Romantics and the Transcendentalists … and one who still believes in our youth … that the world is not going to the dogs and that the best is yet to be.”

Peter Jarrett ’66 was active as an undergraduate student, serving as student council president. He has been a lifelong educator, working as a Head Start director, social studies teacher at Portsmouth (NH) High School, director of guidance at Farmington (NH) High School, and manager of the Project Pride Program (for at-risk students). Jarrett is retired and living in Boynton Beach, FL, with his wife, Joyce, an artist.

 

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