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Miss Vincent I never called her "Mean Jean" |
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Let's get this straight from the beginning. I never called her "Mean Jean," as some of my classmates apparently did. Even though I received a failing grade from her in Art History my freshman year, I always thought of her as "Miss Vincent."
Jean Anne Vincent. I recall her as a trim, petite, attractive lady with dark hair, glasses, someone who cared about her students, even one as abysmally ignorant about the origins of art as me. Blame it on the Minoans and the Mycenaeans. I never could get them straight. Did it really make any difference? They were just a bunch of people who fitted in somewhere between the Egyptians and the Greeks. So she gave me an "E."
That came as a shock. My preliminary grades had been, well, okay until the final exam end of first semester. I must really have blown it. Fortunately, a balancing "A" in Creative Writing saved my grade-point average, but I figured if I wanted to remain much longer at Carleton College, I better learn how to study (something that never happened at my sports-oriented high school). My end-of-year Art History grade improved significantly.
Years later, I discussed Miss Vincent with Kay Middleton Chapin, a fellow art major. "She was tough!" claimed Kay. Agreed, but I never called her "Mean Jean."
Only after leading a tour of Chicago's Outdoor Art for classmates did I begin to wonder what happened to Miss Vincent. I had forgotten, but Kay reminded me that Miss Vincent left after our junior year to be replaced by another professor, Albert Elsen. Of him, I have no memories. Maybe I never have had him in class. But I do remember Miss Vincent.
Tracking former faculty
After my conversation with Kay, I began to inquire about what had brought Jean Anne Vincent to Carleton and what happened to her afterwards. Nobody at the Alumni Office knew. "We track alumni better than we do former faculty," confessed David Sipfle, a classmate who became chairman of the philosophy department after graduating. Alumni, he suggested contribute money after they leave; faculty often don't. David suggested I contact Eric Hillemann, the college archivist.
Eric said that Miss Vincent had attended the University of Minnesota, getting both undergraduate (1942) and graduate degrees. She began teaching at Carleton during the 1945-46 academic year, remaining six years. Moving to New York, she worked as an Associate Editor for Interiors and a Senior Editor of House and Garden. In 1955, Barnes & Noble published a book by her, History of Art. (A second edition was published in 1967.) Her address in Manhattan was 224 East 65th Street. "Beyond that, my files are silent," Eric confessed. He did suggest that, if still living, she would have turned eighty-four two weeks before my inquiry, which was in May, 2002. I later learned Miss Vincent's birthday was April 26, 1918 and that at another stage in her career, she served as an Associate Editor of Architectural Digest. She also worked as an editor at Doubleday, which in 1968 published another book of hers: Patriotic poems America Loves. A search of Amazon.com, however, failed to uncover a copy of that book, her history of art, or any other books that might have been written by Miss Vincent.
A separate search uncovered a reference on a genealogical bulletin board about a Ruth Vincent of St. Paul, Minnesota. Ruth's husband Hugh died in 1939 leaving a wife and two daughters: Mary Louise and Jean Anne. Jean Ann would have been twenty-one years old then and in college, a sad time to lose a father.
My genealogical search led me to the Denke family and the Jones family. Jean Anne's mother's maiden name was Jones. And there was my Miss Vincent in a family photo, a young girl wearing an ear-hugging hat that would have been haute couture in the Roaring Twenties. I didn't recognize her as the young woman I knew in the 1950s. According to the Denke family tree, her sister Mary Louise died in 1989. Neither she nor Jean Anne married. I wondered about that. As an adolescent male, she seemed attractive. Perhaps she was too career-oriented to care about marriage.
A friend of Jackie Kennedy
In 1995, Bob and Joy
Jones visited Jean Anne Vincent in her New York apartment on East 76th Street:
"There was much talk of family and past doings. She gave the information
about her Vincent family, including the fact that the original Vincent in
her line arrived in Nieu Amsterdam on August 25, 1635." My search uncovered
Alan Denke, who responded that he knew little about Miss Vincent other than
she was a good friend of Jacqueline Kennedy. (Jackie, of course, worked at
Doubleday.) Denke believed Miss Vincent dead.
That worried me. I wanted to show her my article "Starting with Picasso" to prove that her once flawed student had amounted to something. In the 1960s as a freelance writer, I often wrote for the New York Times Magazine, which certainly landed on the doorstep of Miss Vincent's Manhattan apartment each Sunday morning. I frequently visited New York to meet with editors. Perhaps we passed on the street without recognition. I wondered if Miss Vincent ever saw my byline and connected it with her former pupil.
I would never know, since Alan Denke later confirmed that Jean Anne Vincent had died on April 14, 1997. Joy Jones, who had visited my former teacher in her apartment, provided more information: "She used to say that her students at Carleton called her 'Mean Jean.' You might be interested to know that she went on to a distinguished career, wrote a number of books and founded a company for her inventions of engineering equipment for translating Egyptian hieroglyphics."
Alas, though we inhabited similar worlds, Miss Vincent and I never saw each other after she left Carleton. Considering my failing grade, I probably should have born a grudge against my teacher, but how could I? She introduced me to art. And I never called her "Mean Jean."
--Hal Higdon
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Copyright 2002 by Hal Higdon