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Chapter one DUAL BEGINNINGS Edgar Odell Lovett said or wrote very little about his parents or his childhood in the small northeastern Ohio town of Shreve, population 1,200, where he grew up. He once remarked that “I come of a race of teachers and preachers,” but he said no more of that inheritance, except that his paternal grandfather “was widely read in our beautiful science [mathematics].” His mother’s great-grandparents had immigrated from Alsace, France, in the early nineteenth century and settled in Wayne County, Ohio, where they became staunch “Northern Republicans.” His father’s parents, who had emigrated from Virginia to Ohio, remained determined “Southern Democrats.” That little, and nothing more, was the substance of his autobiographical reflections. Edgar was born the first son of Zephaniah Lovett and Maria Elizabeth Speng Lovett on April 14, 1871; three years later his brother Guy D. completed the family. Zephaniah was a surveyor and lumber dealer, and at one time he operated a grain warehouse, but he had no known proclivities for higher education. According to family tradition, Maria, a prize-winning quilter, was a severe taskmaster, but Edgar seemed quite close to her. Young Edgar must have shown marked ability in mathematics at an early age, and, after a childhood infatuation with becoming a surveyor too, in his early teens he envisioned attending Ohio University to study engineering. But his devout parents had other thoughts. His Methodist father and his Lutheran mother each wanted him to attend a school of their denomination, so they compromised on a small church-affiliated college in nearby Bethany, West Virginia, in that tiny sliver of the state that protrudes northward between Pennsylvania and Ohio. Bethany College was a liberal arts college established by Alexander Campbell, the founder of the Christian Church (Disciples of Christ), and his “seminary of learning” had been duly chartered by the Commonwealth of Virginia in 1840 before there was a West Virginia. It had become co­ 2 University Builder educational in 1877, though women took a separate curriculum. Then as now it was beautifully sited amid the hills and forests of a small village, along Buffalo Creek, about a mile from Campbell’s home, and several of its original buildings still stand exactly as young Lovett first saw them in the fall of 1886 when as a fifteen-year-old student he began his academic career. He had actually graduated from high school “with first honors” on May 28, 1885, but, as Lovett’s father later wrote, his parents “on account of his delicate health kept him out of School one year.” They may have really thought that at the age of fourteen he was simply too young to go away to college. As with most small colleges at the time, Bethany provided no dormitories , and so Lovett roomed at one of several privately run boarding houses down the hill from the main collegiate building near the intersection of the road past Campbell’s home and the road to Pittsburgh, some fifty miles to the northeast. Lovett worked his way through college with a job that involved picking up and delivering laundry to other students. During his sophomore year he became a “local” editor of the college’s literary magazine, the Bethany Collegian, writing news of alumni and happenings both on campus and in the surrounding village, interspersed with witty sayings. By his senior year Lovett was editorin -chief as well as business manager, although contaminated water had made him ill at the beginning of the year and for a short while he was unable to perform his editorial duties. Later in the year he received a telegram that his father was ill, so once again he had to forgo his editing responsibilities for a short while—he and his brother Guy, by then a freshman at Bethany, both returned home to be with their father. Probably in his freshman year Edgar had also joined the Neotrophian Literary Society, founded in 1841 and possessing its own hall for student meetings and staged debates on various subjects of the day—an institution characteristic of collegiate life in the nineteenth century. Here on October 15, 1888, Lovett practiced his speaking skills with his first society declamation, entitled “The Singleness of Purpose,” and although the text of the talk is lost, the title was eerily prescient of his later career. He would give his second oration on February 22, 1890, in celebration of George Washington’s birthday, and on this occasion his...

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