Wilfrid "Will" Hamlin

Will Hamlin was a student at the college from 1940 to 1942. He also served as Guest Faculty, worked in the Print Shop, was active in the work camp, and participated in the College Publicity Bureau.

Early Education

In 1936, on graduation from Northampton High School in Massachusetts, Will Hamlin remained for a second "postgraduate" year both to save money for college – it was the Great Depression – and to take some additional courses. He had heard about Black Mountain in high school from Alexander Eliot, whose father taught drama at Smith and who had entered Black Mountain in the fall of 1936. But it was former Antioch students, friends of Will's mother, who persuaded him to apply to their alma mater.

Antioch to Black Mountain

At the end of Hamlin's third year at Antioch, he felt he had mastered "what Antioch had to offer." Black Mountain College was a frequently discussed alternative to Antioch, and WIll and a friend hitchhiked to take a look at the school. Earlier, on a visit to the Tennessee Valley Authority with fellow Antioch students, he and his fellow students had stayed overnight at Black Mountain College. He already knew one Black Mountain student, Betty Brett, whose brother was at Antioch. After that visit, Will thought he might like to "try out" Black Mountain. His mother’s gave her permission, and he enrolled in the fall of 1940. It was his intention to spend a year at Black Mountain and then to return to Antioch to graduate. He registered at Antioch in the fall of 1941 but was soon on the Southern Railway heading back to Black Mountain, where his friends greeted him with, "We knew you'd come back!"

Theater

At first Will was primarily interested in theater. The French teacher at Antioch had encouraged his interest in cinema, and he participated in the theater program where "the emphasis [had] been on a kind of baby Broadway." There he learned "technical things about theater." He recalled that at Black Mountain "[they] had no theater equipment." Despite this presumed handicap, Will discovered in his courses with Robert Wunsch "a wholly different view of how theater could be taught." He compared Wunsch’s teaching style to method acting, "In the sense of trying to find out who this character you’re acting is and what he was doing before he came on stage and what kind of life has he has had, and what he’s bringing with him in the invisible baggage people always carry with them." He had a role in Molière’s The Physician in Spite of Himself and played the male lead in Shadow and Substance.

Besides Wunsch's drama courses, Will took a general curriculum including Elsa Kahl’s Movement for Actors, literature with Kenneth Kurtz and Fred Mangold, and Psychology of the Human World with Erwin Straus. He had always been interested in photography and, inspired by the college’s first picture bulletin, for which John Stix made most of the photographs, he became one of Black Mountain’s student photographers. Fritz Hansgirg, who taught chemistry at Black Mountain, was classified as an "enemy alien" and therefore could not use his cameras – a Speed Graphic, a 4 x 5 format camera and a Leica with a complete set of lenses. He generously made them available to the student photographers.

Work Program

For his work program at Black Mountain, Will helped with college publicity and printed publications, including newsletters, concert and drama programs, and an announcement for an exhibition of hardware jewelry by Anni Albers. He remained at the college for the fall of 1942 as a member of the staff to help with college publicity. He recalls that he left in March.

Drafted

Will received a draft rating of 4-F, which exempted him from service. When he left Black Mountain, he did editorial work for the newly founded Bantam Books in New York and also edited a newsletter for civilian employees of the Air Technical Service Command. He worked as an aptitude tester and interpreter for the Johnson O’Connor organization. Will’s primary interest, however, was in teaching. Having attended both the Horace Mann School and the Dalton School in New York and a progressive high school in Masschusetts, conventional schools did not interest him. He applied to several institutions including Goddard College. In his first response, Royce Pitkin, President of Goddard, stated that unfortunately they had just filled the position. Soon thereafter, Will received a phone call from Pitkin. The other applicant could not accept, and the position was open. From 1948 until his retirement he taught literature, psychology and education at Goddard. He obtained his Ph. D. degree from Union Graduate School.

On June 11, 1944, Will married Betty Brett, the Black Mountain student whose brother he had known at Antioch. Betty Hamlin died in 1968 of pulmonary fibrosis. Their son Christopher Hamlin is a science historian and author of A Science of Impurity (1990) and Public Health and Social Justice in the Age of Chadwick (1998).

The above biography was written by Mary Emma Harris for the Black Mountain College Project.

Hamlin's obituary shares more of the end of his life and surviving family.

Relationships

Wife: Fellow BMC student, Betty Brett

Asheville Art Museum Collection

Writings about Will can be seen in digitized college bulletins on Asheville Art Museum's collection website: collection.ashevilleart.org. They can be found by searching these accession numbers: 2017.40.130, 2017.40.158, 2017.40.163, 2017.40.260, 2017.40.069, 2017.40.056, 2017.40.071, 2017.40.273, 2017.40.274 and those below

2017.40.133a-g November 1943 bulletin, “Will Hamlin recently played the role of Salonicus in Ronald Mitchel “Set It In Troy” produced by Columbia Theater Associates of Columbia University.”

2017.40.106a-f May 1943 bulletin,

“Will Hamlin writes from New York, in part: “Tuesday morning the Army looked at every part that was visible and then took x-rays to look at the rest, talked to me about girls, being afraid of the dark… whispered among themselves for ten minutes, and then stamped my various papers ‘Rejected by the Armed Forces’. So I walk the streets of New York (alternately egg-fryingly hot and swimmingly wet) a free man in search of work a little more interesting and a little less nervously straining than copyholding legal briefs.””

2017.40.110a-c June 1943 bulletin,

“Will Hamlin is working now for the Johnson O’Connor Research Foundation on East Sixty-Second Street in New York City, (formerly the Human Engineering Laboratory of Hoboken, New Jersey). Will writes: “You may know a little about the work they do, it’s a matter of giving a series of tests developed over a long period of time, designed to distinguish between and measure ability in certain basic aptitudes such as the power to think in three rather than two dimensions, fluency in inductive and analytic ways of thinking, dexterity in manipulation of tools and so forth. No world-shaking discovery, the tests do however have much value in showing some people why they aren’t happy in their present jobs and in suggesting fields in which they might fit better, in helping high school boys and girls to decide on colleges and to get some idea of the lines in which they have the largest change of success, to give anyone a better idea of what he can do… me, so far, I am learning about the tests and the aptitudes they measure, giving a few of them, and taking care of much of the office work. As soon as possible (as soon as they can get me barely trained) I’ll start giving most of the tests and helping with the experimental work that goes on all the time.””

2017.40.122a-c September 1943 bulletin,

“Will Hamlin writes from New York City:” For me it has been a very busy time, with the Foundation doing more work than it has a number of years, much publicity, a constant schedule of testing and interpretation, and no spare time of any kind… I’ve wondered from time to time whether some vital and challenging personality or problem wasn’t almost a necessity at Black Mountain College, to bring it again to life—another Rice to make the students cry at general meetings; another building project to get them excited about things in general.

I don’t think on a long time of reflection, that this is adolescent unhappiness; I feel that this is a very real need in any community as in any country… There was a kind of passion in the Lee Hall air, and whether such passions are healthy or not, they are exciting, and I think help to make people into people, instead of just college boys and girls.

There was something very important in exactly the remoteness the college on the mountain implied- in its rugged living of its own life, and the valley, working out its own problems with its own people. It is of course partly romantic dreaming to say that such a thing ever existed or ever could exist—yet I think there may be some metaphysical truth in it.

Straus says we live in a physiognomical world—and I think he is right. We symbolized a lot for ourselves by the decayed magnificence of the building we lived in—by the physical unity of the plant, and its altitudinous separation from the rest of North Carolina; by the formal formality’ of tess and dances and dressing for dinner.

I wonder if it is a possibility that such a thing might be again, or if such impractical yet beautiful idealism is only for the first struggling years of an insecure institution, to be given up as soon as it reaches a certain maturity of thinking and plant.””

2017.40.187a-c January 1945 bulletin,

“After the concert, Fritz Hansgirg will show several reels of movies; the reel made by Will Hamlin, showing the students and teachers laying the foundation of the Studies Building; a reel, made by him, of the four seasons at Lake Eden; and several reels, made by him, of the ice carnival in California.”

Black Mountain College Project

Mary Emma Harris interviewed Will in 1997 and the transcript is available from Appalachian State University under The Mary Emma Harris and Black Mountain College Project, Inc. Oral History collection.

Topics: Decision to apply to BMC - Antioch College - Longtime interest in theater - Robert Wunsch as director and teacher and personality- Elsa Kahl - Heinrich Jalowetz - Kenneth Kurtz - Frederick Mangold - Erwin Straus - Josef Albers as teacher - Photography at BMC - 16 mm film at BMC - Studies Building construction - BMC printing press - Anni Albers hardware jewelry - Reasons for leaving BMC - Betty Brett Hamlin - Fred Stone - Importance of mealtimes at BMC - Yella Pessl harpsichord concert - Henry Miller visit - Influence of BMC - Theodore Dreier

Courses Taken

Fall 1940: Music II, Contemporary Architecture, Psychology of the Human World, 19th Century English Essay

Spring 1941: Composition and Semantics, Psychology of the Human World, 19th Century Poetry,Contemporary Architecture, Play Production II, Advanced Dramatic Production

Fall 1941: American Life and Letters, Dramatics II, Writing Tutorial, Journalism Tutorial

Spring 1942: American Life and Letters, Writing Tutorial

Fall Quarter 1942: Advanced Dramatic Production

Transcript says Hamlin was admitted to the Senior Division on October 14, 1941 and his extra-curricular activities included spending a number of hours per week doing college printing