“Why Major (or Minor) in English?” by Beverley Finney ’68
December 2007
The recent email from English Department Chair Dr. Noel Kinnamon to English major alumni of Mars Hill College invited us to answer the following questions:
- What is your current employment?
- Or what are your future career plans?
- Are you in graduate school?
- Have you published any books, articles, stories, poems, etc.?
- What would you say to encourage students to major or minor in English?
Psychologists tell us the deepest human need is the need to be understood. I can vouch for that personally and in my observation of others. That’s why I say the short answer to the final question is that the study of language and literature is a portal into the human experience. Whatever your chosen path, a background in English will enhance your understanding of the people around you and your appreciation for their lives, pains, fears, hopes, and dreams. It will also strengthen your skills in communicating in a manner that is articulate and effective in all your relationships. Nothing in all my life and career has been more important to me or more influential in my success than my affinity for the human experience and my use of language to reach people and achieve goals. I am on my way out, so I have a long perspective. At the end of January this year, I retired from my second career—this one in the electric utility business. Mine has been a curious, yet oddly predictable, path from my double major in English and elementary education at Mars Hill College, where I graduated in 1968.
As it turns out, I taught only one year in the public schools in Ashe County immediately after I finished my master’s degree in English at Appalachian State University (ASU) in 1970. It was junior English—America lit—which I experienced with mixed feelings and results. During that year, I often recalled a poem I wrote to introduce Dr. W. Amos Abrams, then executive director of the North Carolina Association of Educators, in chapel at Mars Hill one morning. In the poem I dreamed, starry-eyed, of teaching, of opening the world to eager young minds desperate to take in every word, every experience.
There may have been one or two of those “eager young minds” in that junior class, but I came to realize just how idealistic—and green—I was at that tender age with so little experience. I will, however, always remember James, the quiet average student who embraced Walt Whitman for reasons I never learned, making his best grades of the year on those few assignments. And there was that tall skinny boy, clearly under-challenged, who buckled down and voluntarily moved from the front row to the back of the room, away from his giggling friends, when I offered him an independent study in American literature. It was nothing short of a metamorphosis.
I’d never even thought of going on to post-graduate work. Only with the near—no, sheer—insistence of Betty Hughes did I apply to graduate school at ASU and then follow her suggestion that I consider teaching in the new community college system. That is where I spent the next twelve years of my career following my brief high school experience. My first assignment was to put together what they were then calling “developmental English,” an 099 course in the parts of speech and basic punctuation for those who hadn’t paid proper attention to their grammar lessons in high school. I was flattered when ASU later asked the community college to share that program. Although literature was my first love, I enjoyed teaching the fundamentals as I began to equate basic sentence structure to math formulas and saw students follow the analogy. While I was at it, I learned the actual rules of grammar and punctuation myself.
Being a restless sort, however, within three years of joining the community college, I moved into the continuing education division to head up the learning laboratory, high school diploma, GED, and adult basic education programs. In the usual one-thing-follows-another pattern, I eventually became the college’s first full-time public relations coordinator. I’ve always said that opportunity came to me for two reasons: I knew the institution intimately and I could write complete sentences. I found both were pleasing to the persnickety local newspaper editor with whom the college hoped to mend fences and build a solid relationship.
Sometime during the six years I was in that job, I worked with a director of communications at a local utility company to put together a slide program promoting the community for economic development purposes. I loved my work and the college, but when my project partner asked if I’d ever considered leaving education, I was intrigued with the idea of seeing what else I might have in me that needed exploring. Shortly afterward, he resigned his position to move to a larger market area. I applied for and got the job, in part because I’d taught a letter writing class once for some of their managers.
When I shared the good fortune of my new career with Mrs. Hughes on the Mars Hill campus some time later, I sensed she was a bit disappointed I’d left teaching. Of course, she was much too polite and kind to say that in so many words, but I have always had a knack for reading body language. If there was anybody at Mars Hill I hoped to make proud, it was Betty Hughes. I’m sure she would laugh about the incident with me today and still say she was disappointed that I didn’t continue teaching. I am equally sure she would tell me she was proud of me anyway.
I attempted to smooth the edge of that treason by explaining that I had gone to work for an electric cooperative, a not-for-profit consumer-owned organization providing electric service to the nation’s hinterlands since the 1930s. The appeal of joining this grassroots enterprise was the same one that led me to major in English and education—romance and idealism. I came to see this new career as a mission, a calling to minister to the needs of the rural people in the northwest North Carolina mountains. And so it was for the next quarter of a century that I fully embraced this opportunity.
My utility career began in 1982 with writing and general communications, then grew to encompass photography and marketing. Within seven years, I joined the executive management staff as VP of Marketing. I saw my new post through the prism of my college majors. Management, first and foremost, was about people. It was about mentoring and coaching—teaching, if you will—and I found my understanding of my colleagues and my ability to communicate well very effective in leading and getting positive results from productivity to teamwork. Marketing in a not-for-profit environment, like teaching, was about communicating in ways that reached my audiences, both internal and external. Critical to effective communication, again, is an understanding of human nature and the art of storytelling, the very things I found most intriguing in the study of language and literature. I came to value my degrees in English and education more and more as the years passed by.
In my final role as a senior executive, I oversaw public relations, marketing, economic development, community relations, and human resources—all at the same time when the cooperative reorganized to lend resources to its new fuels subsidiary. My specialty was the “people stuff” they said. But I also learned a great deal about energy, finance, strategic planning, engineering, law, and politics. I had opportunities to lead, facilitate, speak, represent, lobby, and pursue my dream of developing a leadership institute to encourage the co-op’s employees to grow in their careers and to become future leaders of the company. I’m not bragging here, I’m evangelizing. I was just so passionate about my work that I sometimes had—and still have—difficulty containing that fire in my belly for helping people grow and achieve their dreams.
Language has become important to me in other ways, too. In 2001, a young man I hired introduced me to his father who was visiting for a few days. What began as a matter of courtesy became another seminal event in my life with letters. Over the years, I’d written a bit of poetry from time to time and had always remained an avid reader. My ten-minute introduction to Julian Scheer lasted some ninety minutes. He was a writer with experience from NASA to politics to children’s literature. He had worked for years with a group in Chapel Hill to encourage and support southern writers such as Lee Smith, Ann Tyler and Larry Brown. “What advice would you give to someone with the itch to write?” I asked him. He said this was a very personal question for every writer, but in the end he’d advise me to “write.”
So it was the very next day I began to write short essays of personal experiences and observations. I haven’t met the test of writing every day as he’d suggested, but I do now have hundreds of essays in my files. I hope retirement gives me more time to write and to ponder publishing at some point, mostly for the challenge and experience of it. I have no illusions about what it takes to get published, at least I don’t think I do. In November this year I attended my first North Carolina Writers’ Network conference where I learned a thing or two about writing and publishing from the pros. I wrote on my evaluation that I’d finally found my own kind.
Julian had said publishing was nice, but writing for posterity was equally important, lamenting that he had neglected to preserve the experiences and memories of his seventy-five years for his children and grandchildren. National Public Radio host Garrison Keillor has said, “How will they know us if we do not write?” I read that always thinking of Julian and of what my journals might some day mean to grandchildren or great-grandchildren in understanding where they came from and who they are. Oh, what I would give to have had such a resource from my ancestors! Fate, it seemed, had declared that I meet Julian that afternoon. About two weeks after my conversation with the author of the children’s book Then Rain Makes Applesauce, a runner-up for the Caldecott Award in 1965, I received a copy of his second children’s book The Thanksgiving Turkey. Inside the flyleaf was an inscription expressing his hope the book “inspires you” to get on with my own writing. The package arrived only two days after Julian died. Getting it off in the mail to me must have been one of his last acts. Writing now is also my way of honoring him for his time, interest, and encouragement.
I don’t know what might become of my writing from here, but I can say I love this part of my life. Scratching that itch in this way is most satisfying. Even if I do not achieve my ambivalent publishing dreams, someday someone is going to know me very well and to see these times through my eyes. That’s often the stuff of history. Storytelling and art are the vehicles through which mankind has recorded observations and experiences since the onset of conscious communication. I’ve also found that expressing myself in words is personally enlightening, therapeutically cleansing, necessarily disciplining, highly effective, and just plain pleasurable.
All of us, as we reach this later stage in life, tend to look back over the people and experiences that have made us who we are. About two years ago I became a certified facilitator of Stephen Covey’s The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People. I’d read his book with my staff and then used his son’s teen version in the early leadership classes I facilitated for employees at the cooperative. In the introduction to the program, Covey talks about what it means to become a “transition person,” someone who changes the course of things. As I look back for a personal example to share with the class, I think of Betty Hughes. Her vision for me and belief in my potential pushed me to graduate school at ASU. She even negotiated a graduate assistantship for me to help with my tuition. She was the first to suggest teaching in the community college system where my career got on its eventual path. My post-graduate education and master’s degree have opened many doors for me. I know my life would have taken a different course without them. I’m sure I have never properly thanked Mrs. Hughes for the positive impact she has had on my life or told her how very often over all these nearly forty years I have thought of her warmth, smile, easy laughter and the love I felt she had for me and many of her other students. Perhaps this little essay will find its way to her at some point. For now, I’ll make a contribution to the Mars Hill scholarship in her name.
I review Dr. Kinnamon’s questions. Have I answered them here? Or have I merely rambled? In either event, my life has been enriched by the study of language and literature. Words strung together in meaningful and melodic ways, connoting or denoting, subtle or direct, fancy or plain, have made all the difference for me. I have read them, written them, edited them, and spoken, prayed and sung them. They have carried joy, passion, encouragement, reverence, sympathy, concern and opinions. I like to think they have also been part of a positive legacy I’ve left to others along life’s way.
I write this essay with a little trepidation about sharing it. It’s been four decades since I graduated from Mars Hill. And while I can’t say for sure, I am fairly certain that I’ve forgotten too much. I’m certain, however, some of the rules have changed since I studied language and literature there, rules such as that pesky comma before the conjunction in a series. But at my age, I beg for—no, expect—mercy if not indulgence. Surely, I chuckle, Dr Kinnamon does not expect old English majors to answer these questions in a straightforward and succinct manner. That’s the job of news journalists. English majors need leeway for nuance, storytelling, literary devices and expression of feelings. We need time to establish relationships with our readers, to create context, and to clarify our thoughts. We also crave the singular beauty of the written word, those neat black characters marching crisply across the page in our favorite font. And we bask in the satisfaction of having connected with our own thoughts and with those of our readers. At least, we hope that is what we have achieved. Be generous. Suffer us our delusions.