Through Myers' Eyes
With Berlin, Germany and life in the Shenandoah Valley as bookends, Henry Myers has much to share about life in between.
Story by Clay Gaynor
Photography by Casey Templeton
Shuffling around his Jackson Hall office with shoulders hunched, tie tucked into his belt as if it’s pulling him down, history professor Henry Myers, who came to JMU in 1969, looks like a veteran of academia that could be found at any university reciting rote lectures to glassy-eyed students … until he begins to speak.
“I could see a parade, lines and lines of people, some in uniform, some in regular civilian clothes,” Myers says. “As I got closer I thought, ‘You know, there’s something funny about this.’ Then when I got real close, I realized I was the only spectator. There’s thousands of people marching to a phonograph somewhere being broadcast. No bands, just people marching to the same beat. I got still closer and saw that every hundred feet or so there were members of the People’s Police. One of them turned around and took his gun off his shoulder and pointed and motioned for me to get in the ranks of the people passing by. Of course I didn’t want to, but I didn’t want to get to get shot either. So I did.”
Myers’ account of being forced into a pro-Soviet parade — the last lines delivered with his dry sense of humor, along with other tales from time spent around the world — are guaranteed to keep students engaged.
“I was kind of an exchange student,” Myers says, sipping coffee in his squeaky desk chair, explaining how he got to the Free University in West Berlin from Swarthmore College in Pennsylvania. “This was before the days of formal exchange programs. I was kind of looking for something new, something adventurous. I was in my sophomore year; the college routine was OK, but it wasn’t that exciting.”
Following Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin’s death in June 1953, adventure and excitement are what Myers got by venturing into East Berlin to see anti-Soviet demonstrations. According to Myers, “You didn’t have to be there long to see the unpopularity of the regime.”
Students wanted a free press, and workers in East Berlin wanted an end to compulsory Saturday afternoon work clearing rubble from World War II. The rumor that America would aid those rebelling against communism was rampant. President Eisenhower and Vice President Nixon had talked of “rolling back the tide of communism” in Eastern Europe, and many East Berliners believed America would assist them.
Myers notes that Stalin’s successor, Georgi Malenkov, seemed more tolerant than Stalin, further stimulating dissent. “One thing you learn in history is that revolutions don’t occur when a dictator is at his most ferocious, or even under really severe dictators,” he says.
“They tend to occur when a regime is trying to reform a little.” With the communist regime in a state of flux, the demonstrations Myers had gone to watch erupted into chaos.
“There were thousands of people in the streets on June 16,” Myers says, eyes brightening through his glasses. “So I thought it would be nice to participate in a revolution. Maybe subconsciously I kind of wanted to get even — here I was forced to march in support of Stalin, and now I have a chance to demonstrate against him.”
Myers boarded the subway and headed into the heart of East Berlin. After he exited the station, the gates came down and didn’t open for three weeks. He would have to get back on foot. Prior to the uprising, the People’s Police had become the People’s Army and were taking the brunt of the crowd’s abuse. In the morning, demonstrators took over the Army’s headquarters and wrecked it without Russian interference.
“Then, in the afternoon, the crowd I was with marched on the Soviet embassy,” Myers says, frequently pausing between sentences, as he travels back to the events buried in his mind. “Before long trucks of Russian soldiers came up, and these guys knew what they were doing. About half of them had machine guns and about half of them had bayonets, and they surrounded theentrances [to the embassy]. They didn’t wait for the crowd to get close enough to think about coming in. They fired over the heads of the crowd and the crowd would stampede back a bit and then the soldiers with bayonets would take up the slack. And that was the end of the attempt to take over the Soviet embassy.”
As evening approached, the protestors’ morale was dwindling. “In the morning it was great to be an American,” Myers says. “People would say ‘It’s great that your President Eisenhower has decided to support revolts like this.’ And I’m thinking at this point, ‘Is President Eisenhower going to do anything of the sort?’ He was afraid it would release World War III. And so the uprising was put down.”
Much has changed in the 50-odd years since Myers’ time in Berlin. He’s traded revolution in the streets for a teaching career, and for a home on an Augusta County farm.
“I try to stay in the black, just barely,” Myers says of Elk Run Stables, the farm to which his family moved in 1977. “We raise horses, sheep and cattle, and we have lots of poultry: ducks, geese, chickens and peacocks.” The farm is managed by a former student of Myers’ and is maintained to a large degree by JMU students, who exchange farm work for horseback riding.
It’s on the farm that Myers comes alive. Following him through the dimly lit barn, where cobwebs decorate the ceiling and hay covers the floor, Myers loses his classroom shuffle and walks with a purpose, showing visitors newborn lambs and the stables. In the barnyard, ducks, geese and chickens clamor to be fed when they see him approach with an old Folger’s can full of corn, black rubber boots squishing in the mud.
With Berlin and life at JMU as bookends, there were several important stops in between.
After finishing school, Myers joined the Army Counterintelligence Corps and returned to Germany. “I had thought when I did I might make a career out of it,” he says. “As a student I got the impression that the Counterintelligence Corps did real exciting things.” He chuckles, his smile framed by a white mustache and sideburns, as he laments that as a junior officer he got to question only ex-Nazis; communists were interrogated by senior officers. He quickly realized that paperwork outweighed excitement and began to look for something else.
In September of 1956, while still in Germany, he married Nancy, who he had met at Swarthmore. The first of their four children, daughter Terry, who heads an after-school program for 14,000 children in five African countries, was born there in 1958.
Myers then took tests for the State Department, but with the appointment process taking up to two years, he needed something to do in the meantime. An army buddy told him about an opening to teach German at Lowell Technological Institute in Lowell, Mass. Since he’d lived in Germany, he took the opportunity. Myers stayed at Lowell Tech for 10 years; his oldest son Dan, an actor and bartender, and daughter Lisa, an attorney, were born there. He got his State Department appointment but, “I really liked teaching so I turned it down.”
After earning his masters from Boston University and his Ph.D. at Brandeis University in Waltham, Mass., Myers decided to move on from Lowell Tech. He liked the Valley, having spent childhood summers here with relatives, and decided to pursue a job at JMU.
“We still came down here some in the summer,” Myers says. “Madison College seemed to be thriving and expanding, and a friend of the family got me an interview with the fellow who was head of the social sciences and he said ‘Yeah, you’d like it here; we could use someone teaching history and political science and that kind of stuff.’ I had, I think, the first and maybe the only joint appointment of half political science and half history, and I’ve been here ever since and expect to be here a couple more years anyway.”
For students like seniors John Ardovini and Lauren Gualdoni, it’s fortunate Myers has stuck around JMU. “I remember I was always interested in what he had to say because he had such a wealth of knowledge from his experiences around the world,” Ardovini, a history minor, says. “I would recommend anyone to take a course with Henry Myers.”
Gualdoni took the class to fill a general education requirement. “He looked like a typical history professor with his old blazer and tie tucked into his pants,” she says. “At first I thought it was going be boring, but it was fun to listen to him tell stories about all the stuff he’d done — it wasn’t just history. When I see him shuffling around campus now I just smile. I never missed a class.”
Myers’ own kids also have a lot to say about their dad. Their well of experiences, stories and humorous anecdotes appears to be bottomless. Recalling childhood in Massachusetts with her father, Lisa Myers seems to have an endless amount of tales, many involving his off-beat sense of humor. “Maybe one of the most valuable aspects of my dad as a parent is that he provided a living example of thinking outside the box,” she says. “Of course a child assumes that all families are like his or her family, and it’s not until one is older that one can appreciate the differences. Maybe the simplest way to put it is that he would often mess with our heads! Of course it was all in good fun, but there was an air of a science experiment about it – pushing buttons to see what would happen.”
“One of the ways he used to drive us nuts as little kids was in the fall when Daylight Saving Time would end,” Lisa continues. “All the clocks in the house would ritually be set back one hour, except dad’s wristwatch. He would explain that he was saving his hour, to use it when he wanted. ‘No!’ We would say, ‘You can’t do that!’ He would just sit back and quietly smile, saving his hour.”
Lisa also remembers a Halloween tradition, taken seriously by the children, that brings a smile to any adult. Each year her father took her brother Dan out in the woods behind their house in Massachusetts to re-enact the slaying of Grendel’s mother from Beowulf. They would always return with a hideous monster mask, quest completed. “Anyway, for a long time I thought everybody slayed Grendel on Halloween,” Lisa says.
The family’s youngest son, Allen, a communications technology consultant, was the only one to grow up entirely on the farm. As a child Allen enjoyed feeding the ducks, fishing in the creek and, later, catching chickens with a fishing net. “We’d also get chickens out of the trees at night when they were sleeping,” he says. “We had one tree in particular that was easy to climb and full of chickens, aptly dubbed the ‘chicken tree.’ When we caught them, we’d put them in the chicken house, from which one could be taken whenever we had an occasion for a chicken dinner.”
Allen also mentioned his father’s way of instilling values and a love of knowledge in him almost solely by example. “He was always a role model in terms of how hard he worked, the way he treated other people, and the vast variety of his interests,” he says. “He has always seemed so genuinely interested in seeking out and applying knowledge that it was contagious – I couldn’t help but be interested in a wide range of things myself.”
“He’s a great fit for the absent-minded professor type,” Allen says, as he recalls one more humorous anecdote about his father. “But be careful if you ever let him use your microwave. I have a vivid memory from many years ago of seeing sparks in the microwave emanating from the coffee mug within. As I was looking alarmed, he reassured me, ‘Don’t worry, it’s just a little metal on the cup.’” And when someone has lived a life like this, what harm is that?
Back in his office, Myers pours another cup of coffee as he readies for class. While it’s not marching into revolution, or even questioning ex-Nazis, grabbing students’ attention with tales from the past must be pretty exciting, too. Exciting enough to keep Myers at JMU for a few more years anyway.