The Paperboy’s Secret

I was delivering the Columbia Missourian (by car, in the country) at about the same time Peter Hessler was delivering it in town on foot and bike. His essay references “a famous biologist [zoologist] who built the house at 504 Westmount”— that was Winterton C. Curtis. I lived in that house during my first three years, my parents rented Dr. Curtis’s upstairs while my dad finished his veterinary degree at Mizzou. Curtis’s fame was due to his having been one of the scientific witnesses who came to Dayton Tennessee in 1925 to testify at the Scopes “Monkey Trial”... as I've often noted. That connection, to the house and the man and the 19th century (Dr. C. was born in 1875, and I remember him vividly) has always been intriguing to me. 
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2026/06/08/the-paperboys-secret

Thorstein Veblen sounds like my kind of colleague:

“Once, administrators confronted him about the carelessness of his grading. “My grades are like lightning,” Veblen replied. “They are liable to strike anywhere.” The biography notes the same detail that captured my imagination as a child: Veblen went in and out of his basement apartment through a window.

As a graduate student, my father was mentored by a Chinese American sociologist named Peter Kong-ming New, who gave him some advice: Never accept an appointment as chair of your department. If anybody insists that you undertake some administrative task, do it so poorly that he never asks again.

My father followed this advice like the Gospel. He was a devoted teacher, and he liked research, but he refused to have anything to do with administration. In the various M.U. stories that he told, many of them funny and cynical, one of the ugliest words was “dean.” Other nasty names included “provost” and “chancellor.” In this respect, he followed a long tradition of social scientists who apply caustic commentary to their host institutions. At M.U.,Thorstein Veblen had written a vicious screed about university administrations called “The Higher Learning in America.” He told a colleague that the subtitle would be “A Study in Total Depravity.” Unsurprisingly, M.U. declined to publish it…”

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An old post on Dr. Curtis and his house on Westmount:

“The best life in America”

Feeling nostalgic for ordinary campus life, as we used to know it, I recall the way my first landlord Winterton Curtis concluded his “Damned Yankee” autobiographical notes:

…IT WAS [Mizzou] PRESIDENT LAWS who admitted publicly that he settled the competition between the various Protestant denominations for representation on his faculty, by choosing his appointees in rotation. If he needed a chemist, he chose a chemist who was a Methodist, if it was the Methodists’ turn. The Baptists had their chance for a place in the . sun when the next vacancy .occurred. Since the father of George Lefevre was a Presbyterian minister, he was razzed by his friends as being a Presbyterian appointee, even though he came to the University in 1899, and the administration of President Laws was only a memory. No such accusation was ever pinned on me, although my father was a Congregational minister, since Congregationalism was a denomination unfamiliar to most Columbians.

I MIGHT HAVE included here the story of how I built the house at 210 [later re-numbered 504] Westmount Avenue into which Mrs. Curtis and I moved in December 1906, but that account is reserved for another section of my autobiographical notes.

It is a thing to make life worthwhile to have lived so long in a home that one planned and built in part with his own hands on a street freshly cut from a cornfield , to have planted the trees and watched their growth until they arch the street, and above all to have lived in a university community. I think the best life in America is to be had in university and college towns such as Columbia.