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| Dr. Bainton and his trusty ten-speed in front of Yale's Sterling Memorial Library, one of the great research libraries in the world. He had been told he could keep his prestigious office on Sterling's fifth floor after he retired only if he published a book a year. So he did: Thirty-two books in his lifetime. In his 88th year, Dr. Bainton could no longer ride his bike (above, in front of Sterling), so he used it as a walker. |
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| Grossvater and Nipote having lunch at Jonathan Edwards College where Dr. Bainton was a Fellow. |
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| Dr. Bainton finishes sketching my image and tears it out of his pad to present as a gift, a gesture he made to thousands of students, faculty, and anyone he met. |
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Everywhere Dr. Bainton went, he carried a pocket sized sketch pad and drew sketches of those he met. Thousands of these sketches followed in his wake over the years. Here is one of me in 1976, my first year at Yale Divinity School.
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Roland H. Bainton 1894-1984
There is no question that Roland H. Bainton was a great man. The New York Times said as much : 32 books, 13 published since he retired; a world authority and international lecturer on the Reformation and Martin Luther ; and a virtuoso performer in the lecture hall who often drew standing ovations. That's what The New York Times said, and I believe The New York Times .
He was a month away from turning 90 when he died. More than 50 years separated us. And it may sound odd to some, but we were pals. Yes, Dr. Bainton and I were pals. But what about the "Generation Gap" with its capital G's, you say? That's a construct of the mind, the Generatlon Gap is. It's how people think. But the heart fills up such canyons with cement, and 50 years are spanned in the twinkle of an eye, a laugh or a cry, or the squeeze of an arm around a shoulder.
When I came to Yale Divinity School as a student in the 1975-76 school year, a recent graduate told me, "Yale doesn't address its Ph.D.'s by the term 'Doctor' but rather simply 'Mister' . But there is one man at Yale for whom that rule doesn't apply: everyone calls him 'Doctor' out of respect, and that man is Dr. Bainton."
He was always "Doctor" Bainton to me right up until the end when I saw him during a brief , hated, stay in the hospital a few weeks ago and left saying,"Bye, bye, Dr.Bainton,"almost choking on the deeper significance of those words. For four years he'd been signing his postcards and notes to me "Grossvater Roland" (Grandfather Roland in German) and referring to me as Nipote (Grandson). For he knew I 'd never had a grandfather and he joined in my fantasy of making up for that deficiency by pal-ing around with me as only a grandfather and a grandson can do. But despite our private arrangement, I could never bring myself to refer to him as anything other than Dr. Bainton.
The entertainer Jimmy Durante used to tell his orchestra to "shtop da musik" and he'd tell a little story for a smile and everyone would oblige and he'd say "I've got a million uv em." Well , "I've got a million uv em" about Dr. Bainton and I'd like to sift out a few to bring him back among us again.
You know, some of the ancient Greeks believed that's what immortality is: Living on in the memories of others. But I think they're only half right. It's my heart Dr. Bainton lives on in. And I suspect it's your hearts he lives on in too. A few weeks ago I asked him what his opinion was about life after death. And he said "Won't know till we get there." But I know and you know that our hearts are connected to more in this Universe than just each other. And that's why I want to share my heart-thoughts with you about Dr. Bainton.
Was there ever a man who treated old age with such insouclent defiance as did Dr. Bainton? Riding his bike till 89 and in the last months of pedalling, using it as a walker most of the time because he needed something to lean on.
Oh faithful friend, that ten-gearer!
He'd had it "feminized" to quote him, last year (had the middle bar cut off) because he couldn't swing hls leg over it anymore. I used to kid him that his bike was a Yale institution -- like the bulldog; and when he was gone Yale would mount it in a glass box. The artist Dean Keller has done that by including the bike in his oil portrait of Dr. Bainton in the Divinity School Common Room. Look closely at the bookcase in the portrait and you'll see it there.
Old age where is thy sting?
Flying off alone to Japan or Poland or East Germany or Hawaii when many in their eighties wouldn't walk beyond the television set.
And back-packing it too.
It was easier. No suitcase to carry when travelling. Just a back-pack bulging with the ever-present letters to answer, and a change of shirt, underwear,and socks. Like Harry Truman he'd wash them out by hand in the sink at night .
Back-packing was a half century old habit. When he was a young scholar, long before there were xerox machines, he lugged a typewriter with Greek and other defunct alphabets on it, tied to his back all over Europe,so he could copy the manuscripts he needed for research.
He loved the outdoors. In his mid-eighties he'd pedal his bike 20 miles to his cottage in Newtown,pick up a canoe, and heave it into the water for an afternoon's fun.
He'd put up little postcard-size signs at the Divlnity School announcing he'd be at the cottage on such and such a date and invite 6 or 8 students to sign-up to come out for a hike, a canoe ride and hamburgers and hotdogs Baintonized on an open fire. At 88 he confessed to me "I have to stay overnight when I ride my bike out now. I can only make 20 miles in a day." !
How he shared himself with others! The thousands -- llterally thousands --of caricatures he drew of students and others over the years, a post-dessert divertissement at the Divinity School Refectory or wherever else he happened to be.
Or his scholarly banter every time he talked with students.
How many untold term papers at the Divinity School must have been inspired by a dinner conversation with Dr. Bainton or a brief hallway encounter in which he would freely give the treasures of his scholarship to whomever it might benefit, no matter how green a student.
Or his anecdotal playfulness with the Bible.
Once he asked me where he could get a rain poncho: His yellow rubber suit was getting too heavy for rainy rides up Prospect Hill. I told him to try the Yale Co-op, and he could get it in fluorescent red to alert the careless traffic. The next time it rained I met him outside the Refectory in hls fluorescent hood and cape; and I joshed hlm about it.
He spread his arms like a spectre and annnounced, "I by Beelzebub cast out demons." I looked it up: Matthew, 12, 27.
He loved to entertain. Not only with the charming annual memorized performances of Luther's Christmas Sermon in the Divinity School Common Room, and his History of the Divinity School built around the portraits in the Refectory, but with homemade postcards, Christmas cards,and limericks. I have a postcard from Japan on which he drew a pagoda and watercolored it, subtitled -- or sidetitled, with a message in Japanese letters I have yet to uncode. The Dean's former secretary-- who loved lions--has several postcards of lions Dr. Bainton drew in various parts of the world. Or try this little limerick he wrote on a trip to Japan:
I am a teacher
I am a preacher
I do the best I can.
But I never preached
In bedroom slippers
Until I visited
Japan
Or this one from Uganda:
The crocodile sleeps with his mouth
Open wide,
In UUGANNDAA.
And the birds, they say, pick his
Teeth inside.
Of course,
It's never been verified.
Sometimes I think it was himself he was entertaining, some private self that felt the the weight of the accumulated years he seemed to the outside world to wear so lightly.
When tired he would lie on his office floor for a nap. Since there was no telephone in his Sterling Library office -- close the door and you were in the 12th or 14th or
16th century, just where he wanted to be -- those who wanted to reach him would have to come to 5th floor Sterling and peek through the nose-high window.
Once a student did so and saw him stretched out supine on the floor. "He's gone" Dr.Bainton recalls hearing the student gasp in the echo chamber of Sterling's hallway. Another time the Dean of the Divinity School was late for a meeting in his own office. Dr. Bainton improved upon the inconvenlence by stretching out on the rug for a snooze.
When he saw a group of people walking up Canner Street hill, he'd shift his bike into its smallest gear and pedal up the steepness sitting down. "I thought I'd give them a little show," he'd say.
The very first time I met him I was in his office on the 5th floor of Sterling. The back hallway --- which is almost never used --- has ten half flights of stairs to the first floor. We were going to lunch at Jonathan Edwards College. He looked at the stairs, then at me, and said, "I'll race you." As I tried to utter "What do you mean, race?" he grasped both handrails for balance, and literally raced down ten half flights of stairs. I was 31 and he was 82 and I couldn't - -and I mean couldn't --keep up with him.
When he was 87, I asked him to meet with two local high school students who were apprehenslve about college and help them feel relaxed about the hallowed halls of academia.
He took us to lunch at Jonathan Edwards, talked their language, sketched their caricatures and just plain made them feel comfortable in a world that had seemed so far beyond their grasp.
When he walked us back to Sterllng on High Street,Dr. Bainton walked slowly, with his arm cradled behind his back at complete right angles as only he could do. As he approached Elm Street on that beautiful spring day, Dr. Bainton had a twinkle in his eye. He was playing the old man, and it was clear he had something up his sleeve.
Dr. Bainton looked at the two 17-year-old boys, suddenly put his finger up above his head, testing the wind, and said, non-sequiturishly,"And if I have to catch a bus . . .", startling us by suddenly springing into a sprint across the street. The boys and I laughed with disbelief.
He'd injured his leg a couple of years ago and asked me to drive him to the office to pick up some papers. The fancy elevator was crowded so we took the stack-elevator up five floors, the see-through elevator that looks like a birdcage. The must from the books surrounded us all the way up. As we got out I remarked "You must have been smelling this must for 50 years."
"Ambrosia to the Gods," he declared.
This Christmas he sent me a color photo of himself with a Bainton trademark: Green-for-Christmas constructlon paper pasted to the back on which appeared a handwritten note. I told him how strong his handwrlting was on that card when I looked in on him at the hospital a few weeks back. "I'm not decrepit yet," was his reply.
Let us be frank. Dr. Bainton was a full human being, and like most of us could get angry; but, his anger was magnificent with control.I never heard him swear, but I once heard him describe an occasion when he cursed. It was during the communist-hunting days of McCarthyism, and a former student who then worked for one of the Government's secret agencies asked to visit him at home to discuss a problem. He arrived drunk, and Dr. Bainton gave him coffee and put him to bed. The next day he revealed that he had been sent by his agency to enlist Dr. Bainton to use his knowledge of foreign languages to spy on his colleagues at Yale.
The proposition was despicable.
And Dr. Bainton told the man to go back to his superiors and give them his answer. His answer was ---and I quote--- "They can go to hell !"
When he said the word "hell" his voice shifted to a lower register and was gravelly. His head shook a bit like a muffled earthquake.
This was not the porcine profanity of the streets.
It was a curse, and he could exegete it from Deuteronomy to Descartes to Dietrich Bonhoeffer.
Dr. Bainton was no plaster saint. He could reflect on his own shortcomings. When he thought my politics as a student too strident he took me aside and told me what one of his colleagues --- Douglas Macintosh -- had told him when he first came to Yale 65 years before. "Look here" Dr, Bainton said to me, "I'll tell you what Mac told me when I was a student: 'If you don't last at Yale Mr. Bainton it will be because of your truculence ' ".
Dr. Bainton lasted 70 years. Hls autoblography will be released this spring and is entltled Seven Decades at Yale. *
I paid attention to thls admonition because my parents had named me after Douglas Macintosh, thelr friend and former church youth-group leader.
That first lunch 8 years ago at Jonathan Edwards, Dr. Balnton told me how Macintosh's wife and baby both died in childbirth 60 years before. He told me that Macintosh was scheduled to preach in chapel the following Sunday and kept the obllgation, choosing as his text Habakkuk 3, 17:
Although the fig tree shall not blossom,
neither shall fruit be in the vines; the
labour of the olive shall fail, and the
fields shall yield no meat; the flock
shall be cut off from the fold, and there
shall be no herd ln the stalls;
Yet I will rejoice in the Lord,I will
joy in the God of my salvation.
Although the fig tree shall not blossom,
neither shall fruit be in the vines; the
labour of the olive shall fail, and the
fields shall yield no meat; the flock
shall be cut off from the fold, and there
shall be no herd ln the stalls;
Yet I will rejoice in the Lord,I will
joy in the God of my salvation.
Dr. Bainton was 82 and I was 31 when he sat across from me in Jonathan Edwards dinlng hall filled with students and told me that story of the man whose name I bore.
Dr. Bainton wept openly for one of the longest minutes of my life when he was through.
I sat with hlm and I looked deeply into his wet eyes.
We were pals.
I sat with hlm and I looked deeply into his wet eyes.
We were pals.
Paul D.M. Keane
Master of Divinity
Class of 1980
Yale Divinity School
February 19,1984
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Dr. Bainton's final gift to me:
Three months before he died at 89.
Submitted to Harry Adams Nov. 17, 1984
[Associate Dean of YDS for publication in Reflection]
This booklet reminds me of a sermon by Reinie Neibuhr. One came away feeling one had had a sound threshing [sic.] and came back the next Sunday for another. I call to mind a Quaker friend of whom it was said, "He puts the gadflies in your backsides." Paul's credo is expressed in his own words, "I believe that Spirituality is being in touch with ultimate truths and using your very Being for exposing sham and hypocrisy."
He puts me to shame because I have been so immersed in the abominations of the world's own yesterdays as to be ignorant of the present days enormities of literature and life. I was, however, heartened by the list of those who have been productive at an advanced age. My mother once wrote me on my birthdays, "The good die young. May you live to a ripe old age." I've sinned enough to make it. Some of Paul's strictures remind me of the Englishman who was driven by an American through the Berkshires
when the trees were at the height of their color. The Englishman was silent. At the end of the tour, the American turned to him and said, " Well?" The Englishman, replied, "Don't you think it's slightly overdone?"
I wish Paul could be a columnist for a journal willing to adminsitar [sic] some pungent pricks.
Roland Bainton
Dr. Bainton's review of my
Yale Divinity School occasional journal,(link) Holy Smoke, submitted to Harry B. Adams, Associate Dean of Yale Divinity School
(and later Chaplain of the University)
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 Dr. Bainton's last note to me, two months before he died, on a hand-made Christmas card, gently reprimanding me, (by implying the opposite) that a visit would be appreciated now that he was suddenly housebound as he approached 90. Photo: 1980, my graduation--Dr. Bainton (with cataract surgery eye patch), my mother, and a skillful shot of my left shoulder in academic blue. |
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Here I Stand ,
Abingdon Press's all time best selling book. |
*
(NB: This did not come to pass. The autobiography was over 400 pages long. His daughter would edit it down to 200 or so pages and the Divinity School published it as a memorial under the title Roly, I believe. A scholar needs to try to find and rescue the original text for posterity. PDK 5/17/13)
DR. ROLAND H. BAINTON DIES
DR. ROLAND H. BAINTON DIES;
RETIRED YALE DIVINITY
TEACHER
By WALTER H. WAGGONER
Published: February 14, 1984
The Rev. Dr. Roland H. Bainton, professor emeritus of
church history at the Yale Divinity School, died yesterday
at his Divinity School apartment in New Haven.
He was 89 years old.
church history at the Yale Divinity School, died yesterday
at his Divinity School apartment in New Haven.
He was 89 years old.
Dr. Bainton, a member of the divinity faculty for
42 years, was an authority and a prolific writer
on the Reformation and the life of Martin Luther.
He was the author of 32 books, 13 of them published
since his retirement as Titus Street Professor
of Ecclesiastical History in 1962. His autobiography
is scheduled for publication this spring.
42 years, was an authority and a prolific writer
on the Reformation and the life of Martin Luther.
He was the author of 32 books, 13 of them published
since his retirement as Titus Street Professor
of Ecclesiastical History in 1962. His autobiography
is scheduled for publication this spring.
Dr. Bainton continued writing and lecturing in the
United States and abroad until last fall, when poor
health also forced the cancellation of one of his most
popular performances, his annual recitation of ''Luther's
Christmas Sermon'' at the Divinity School's Christmas
celebration. A virtuoso performer in the lecture hall, he
often drew standing ovations.
United States and abroad until last fall, when poor
health also forced the cancellation of one of his most
popular performances, his annual recitation of ''Luther's
Christmas Sermon'' at the Divinity School's Christmas
celebration. A virtuoso performer in the lecture hall, he
often drew standing ovations.
White-haired and slender, Dr. Bainton was a familiar
figure on the Yale campus and the streets of New Haven,
riding a 10-speed bicycle from his apartment to his office
until he was injured in a minor accident last fall.
Book Sold 1.2 Million Copies
figure on the Yale campus and the streets of New Haven,
riding a 10-speed bicycle from his apartment to his office
until he was injured in a minor accident last fall.
Book Sold 1.2 Million Copies
His best-known work was ''Here I Stand: A Life of
Martin Luther,'' published by Abingdon-Cokesbury
in 1950 and winner of a $7,500 prize from the publisher.
It has sold 1.2 million copies.
Martin Luther,'' published by Abingdon-Cokesbury
in 1950 and winner of a $7,500 prize from the publisher.
It has sold 1.2 million copies.
Dr. Bainton was born in Ikleston, England, and brought
to the United States when he was 2. He grew up in Colfax,
Wash., and graduated from Whitman College in Walla Walla,
Wash., in 1914. He received a Bachelor of Divinity degree
from Yale in 1917 and a doctorate there in 1921. He was
ordained a Congregational minister in 1927.
to the United States when he was 2. He grew up in Colfax,
Wash., and graduated from Whitman College in Walla Walla,
Wash., in 1914. He received a Bachelor of Divinity degree
from Yale in 1917 and a doctorate there in 1921. He was
ordained a Congregational minister in 1927.
Dr. Bainton joined the Yale Divinity School in 1920 and
was named Titus Street Professor of Ecclesiastical History
in 1936.
was named Titus Street Professor of Ecclesiastical History
in 1936.
He is survived by three daughters, Olive Robison of Missoula,
Mont.; Joyce Peck of Chapel Hill, N.C., and Ruth Lunt of
Rochester; two sons, Herbert Bainton of Woodbridge, Conn.,
and Dr. Cedric Bainton of San Francisco; a sister, Hilda King
of Kennett Square, Va., 17 grandchildren and four
great- grandchildren.
Mont.; Joyce Peck of Chapel Hill, N.C., and Ruth Lunt of
Rochester; two sons, Herbert Bainton of Woodbridge, Conn.,
and Dr. Cedric Bainton of San Francisco; a sister, Hilda King
of Kennett Square, Va., 17 grandchildren and four
great- grandchildren.
Funeral services will be private,but a memorial service
will be held at 2 P.M. on March 4 in the Marquand Chapel
at Yale.
will be held at 2 P.M. on March 4 in the Marquand Chapel
at Yale.
photo of the Rev. Dr. Roland H. Bainton
