Editorial

Editorial In 1990, I began to study the Middle English Dictionary in earnest. I was especially curious about the project's early history. I had sifted through all of the relevant documents in the MED offices, but I felt that I was missing something of the project's personality, an anecdotal perspective that only someone who had worked on the MED during the 1930s and 1940s could provide. Frederic G. Cassidy, known to me then only as a name in print, was the sole surviving staff member from that period. I wrote a letter requesting an interview, received an affable reply, and, on 10 January 1991, found myself walking briskly, with visible breath, along Madison, Wisconsin's residential streets towards Helen C. White Hall, on the University of Wisconsin campus. I had agenda for our meeting, but so did Fred: we spent the first hour or so touring the DARE offices, discussing the ways and means of lexicography; he introduced me to members of the DARE staff along the way, some of whom helped to compile the bibliography of Fred's work included in this issue of Dictionaries (pages 14-26, below), and I must have shakenJoan Hall's hand that day, little guessing that a decade later she would write in memory of the man who had brought us together , the most remarkable man that either of us would ever know. Fred had a healthy appetite and at noon we descended by elevator to the garage beneath Helen C. White Hall, picked up his car, and drove to a nearby Chinese restaurant. AsJoan Hall remembers in the account of Fred's life printed here (pages 1-13, below), Fred "had always liked to drive — and he liked to drive fast ... it could sometimes be more than a little exciting to be in the passenger seat" (12). But the real excitement accompanied the meal, as Fred told stories about his days at the University of Michigan, as a doctoral student and an assistant on the Early Modern English Dictionary in the 1930s and, in the summer of 1942, as a member of the MED staff. He recalled a summer afternoon when James Rettger, an assistant editor on the MED, took Fred and his wife, Hélène, boating on the Huron River; he still marveled at Rettger's generosity, unusual given the rigid academic hierarchy of the time. Hereward T. Price, who had been one ofJames Murray's assistants on the OED, worked as associate editor of the Early Modern English Dictionary throughout the 1930's, and served as interim editor of the MED in 1945, taught Shakespeare for the English Department: "When he thought of Shakespeare," Fred remembered , "tears came to his eyes." By contrast, he described Warner G. Rice as "the Great Stone Face," but praised Rice's course on Milton as the best of his graduate education. His favorite among the faculty, though, had been Howard MumfordJones, who directed Nell Gwynn's Company, a troupe of thespians whose unexpurgated performances of eighteenth-century plays delighted many, including die dean and the president. Fred was particularly proud of his turn as Lovewell, in Colman and Garrick's The CL·ndestine Marriage. While writing article after article and compiling dictionary after dictionary, Fred found time to edit Six Contemporary American Plays (1948), and he was a member of one or another play-reading group throughout his life (see page 12, below). Jones left Michigan for Harvard in 1936. Decades later he lectured at the University of Wisconsin, and inquired about DARE's progress. Fred explained that he was ready to publish, but lacked a publisher; Jones returned to Cambridge and convinced the Belknap Press that it should publish DARE. Fred's legendary generosity, his passion, his commitment to excellence as teacher and scholar, the open hand he extended to every new member of the profession, his durable friendships, all were reflected in the stories he told: he remembered others as so many others will remember him. He daily enacted a tradition of collegiality that, thanks to his example, will animate DSNA, the American Dialect Society , the American Name Society, and other organizations for successive generations. A decade ago, he...