Old Missoula

Professor Walter King

Native Montanan, scholarly writer, but first a teacher.

Professor Walter King of the University of Montana English faculty is an academician with two strings to his bow. He is both a writer and a teacher.

He has written essays on Renaissance literature, has edited a collection of 20^th-century essays on Shakespeare’s “Twelfth Night,” and has written a book on “Hamlet” that will be published next spring. But his main string, he says, is teaching. “The classroom comes first,” King says, emphatically.

“A lot of people are instructors,” said Brenda Holland, a writer-editor for the Missoula Equipment Development Center and former student. “Dr. King is a teacher.”

“He was extremely tough, extremely fair, and very, very demanding. His comments on your papers were devastating, and unfortunately, very accurate.”

Gary Parks, who will be a graduate student in English this fall, said that when King teaches Hamlet “it’s almost like a performance. He makes you feel as if you’re experiencing the literature instead of just talking about it.”

Mark Osteen, a graduate student, and his wife, Leslie Gilden, who graduated in June, agree. “He does Hamlet better than Sir Laurence Olivier,” Leslie said.

“Even more than literature, he cares about his students,” she said. “He will do anything to help you learn how to write. Even if you get an A, your paper will be scrawled all over with red marks.”

“Dr. King always has an ear for your problems,” Mark added. “He’s got a fearsome exterior and a heart of gold. He’s untiring. I can’t emphasize enough how dedicated he is.”

King’s philosophy on teaching comes from his mother who, in 1909, began teaching in the Bitterroot Valley when she was 18.

“During her first year as a teacher she was not popular,” King said, “and thought she very much wanted to be. She discussed the problem with herself and decided she was not hired to be popular; she was hired to teach. That is the essence of good teaching. If you teach well, you will get the respect of students and may become popular. I’ve never tried to be popular.”

Last June he was one of two professors selected to receive UM’s newly established Distinguished Teaching Award. King was chosen for the $1,000 award from nominees submitted by colleagues and students on campus. In 1966, he was named the first winner of the $500 Teacher of the Year Award by members of Phi Kappa Phi, a scholastic honorary society. He was one of four faculty members in 1970 who received the Standard Oil Good Teaching Award, a $1,000 award for superior teaching at the undergraduate level. In 1972, King was one of 10 UM faculty members cited in Outstanding Educators of America, a national awards volume honoring distinguished service, achievements and leadership in the field of education. He also was awarded a certificate of appreciation in 1979 and 1980 by Silent Sentinel, a senior honorary organization.

King was born in Corvallis and raised in Missoula. His father was a physician and the family moved to Missoula in 1923. In 1936, King graduated from Missoula County High School, the valedictorian of his class. He enrolled at the university that fall, but due to a severe visual problem, he did not receive a bachelor’s degree in English until December 1946.

In the summer of 1948, King received a master’s degree in English from UM. In June 1952, he was granted a PH.D. in English by Yale University. He was an instructor of English at Yale for four years before joining the UM faculty in 1955. He married the former Jean Louise Comte, a UM alumna, and they have three children, two of whom are UM students.

“My father always told me I wouldn’t be happy anywhere else but Montana,” said King, who is one of the few native Montanans on the faculty.

As an undergraduate and graduate student, he was employed by the Forest Service for seven summers. “I could swing an ax at about C-plus,” King said. He eventually became foreman of a crew, not because he was totally handy on the job, but because he had learned how to get a day’s work from a “mixed bag of laborers.”

“I’m glad I had all that experience and the problem with my eyes because it turned me into a human being,” King said, reflecting on the past.

With respect to teaching, King said literature is one of the most difficult areas to teach because it deals with human nature, which is cantankerous and variable. “You have to make it come alive for the students, and that’s not easy to do,” he said.

King, whose area of specialization is literature of the English Renaissance, will teach three course this fall; Introduction to Poetry, Major British Writers, and Shakespeare’s Dramatic Contemporaries.

“What I try to get the students to see is that all great literature, past and present, deals with value conflicts which are recurrent in every historical era,” King said.

King, who has had 30 years of college teaching experience, 26 at UM, has no plans to retire and is as enthusiastic about teaching as ever.

“A teacher has to be enthusiastic in the classroom,” King said. “If he isn’t, he has to pretend to be in order to get the students involved in what they’re reading.”

The business of the university, he says, is to train the mind. “If a student is allergic to thinking, you can’t teach him anything no matter how hard you try.”

Virginia Vickers Braun

UM Office of University Relations.

The above article appeared in the Missoulian on September 22, 1981.

https://www.newspapers.com/image/350054972/

Dr. King was honored as UM’s ‘Most Inspirational’ teacher in 1984. He died in Missoula in 1989.