Werner Held – Teacher and Thinker by Michael Jamison
Werner Held, teacher and thinker, was ‘fully engaged in life’
The article below appeared in The Missoulian on November 26, 2004.
November 26, 2004 12:00 am • MICHAEL JAMISON of the Missoulian
Never mind that he wasn’t a boat builder.
Never mind that he wasn’t exactly a seasoned sailor.
Never mind that his wife didn’t much like the water.
“OK, Dad’s going to build a boat and sail around the world, but who’s going to go with him?” Held’s daughter remembered. “We called it the Ark. The rest of us just wanted it out of the garage. We wanted to put cars back in the garage.”
But once Werner Held was in the grip of an idea, the project would not wait.
“It’d be late, dark,” remembered son Arthur, “and his shoulders would be covered in sawdust. His hair would start to get kind of wild and stand on end, almost like Einstein. Then came this crazy, maddened grin, and he’d say, ‘can’t stop now.’ He’d turn up the lights and just be fully engaged in life. If the neighbors came by, it could kind of startle them.”
Werner Held went about building his boat much the way he went about living his life – with an intensity and focus fueled by brilliance and a driving curiosity. A teacher by trade, a mathematician by vocation, he was a thinker who would rather do than watch, would rather debate than chat, would rather engage than idle.
It’s hard to imagine a fire that burned so intensely could last a lifetime, but somehow Held’s curious flame blazed for the better part of a century. Perhaps he just couldn’t stand the idea of not learning anything new tomorrow, of not experiencing what wonders waited in the world.
He died, wheels still turning, on Nov. 17, 2004. He was 88.
“I think he influenced a lot of lives along the way,” said daughter Pauline Utter. “Warner wasn’t the sort of person you could ignore. He had very commanding eyes; you knew it when he was looking at you.”
Those eyes first opened to a view of Boston on March 26, 1916. A short two years later, his father died, and his mother took over the task of preparing young Werner for the world.
Perhaps someone should have been preparing the world for young Werner.
“He had some very strong ideas about right and wrong,” Art said, “and about the ways the world worked.”
Or, more precisely, about the way the world should work.
Those strong ideas were formed during a childhood Werner Held didn’t much care for.
His widowed mother, a language professor at Mount Holyoke College, had immigrated from the Old Country, and was convinced her son should see the world through eyes that, though American, were informed by older cultures as well.
And so his early years were spent traveling between the Eastern Seaboard and Europe. His seventh year was spent with his paternal grandparents in Germany; the next, with a family in Lyon, France. He was treated poorly there, sleeping on the floor in the maid’s room, the family all but ignoring him as he struggled to communicate.
“That really stuck,” Art said. “He really remembered his mother, without notice, dropping him off with strangers who didn’t speak his language.”
The sink-or-swim trials left him somewhat ambivalent toward his mother, and if he appreciated the education “you’d never have known it,” Utter said. But by his early teens he had three languages under his belt, as well as a fourth – mathematics – in which he would prove most fluent.
Held returned from Europe just in time to be sent away again, this time to a prestigious preparatory school for boys. It was a religious school, a tough spot for a lifelong agnostic, and for the first time in his life he learned to repeat what the teacher thought, rather than what he thought.
He thought enough, however, to gain admittance to MIT, then the Worchester Polytechnic Institute, graduating with a degree in electrical engineering.
“But it was the Depression,” Utter said. “There weren’t a lot of engineering jobs out there.”
And so the cultured graduate washed dishes, swept the floor of a garment factory, delivered newspapers. That last job would worry him later, during the McCarthy era, as the newspaper was the communist Daily Worker.
Held was no communist, just a young man in need of a paycheck, Utter said, but he always felt himself an outsider in American culture. The Committee on Un-American Activities, she said, seemed a particular threat to a young man who did not believe he had full ownership in American culture.
That feeling of being an outsider, coupled with the constant need for a salary, might explain how Held came to apply his brilliance in science and math for the U.S. Navy, designing anti-detection devices for submarines.
While in Washington, D.C., he met and married Doris Sorensen, only to leave her for active duty when the country entered WW II. Held put his German language skills to use for an intelligence unit, Utter said, then served in Europe as part of the invasion and occupation forces before applying his science to build radio systems for the Army Signal Corps.
Then came the GI Bill, the master’s degree in math from Wisconsin, the job interview in Kremlin, Mont., of all places, and finally the teaching post in Eureka. (Eureka, of course, being so much warmer and more cultured than Kremlin.)
“I’ll never forget the day he arrived,” said former Lincoln County High student Bill McClure. “We lived across the street from the principal, and one day this old, green torpedo-shaped Plymouth pulls up – the new teacher in a country town.”
McClure, like most former students, remembers Werner Held as “a tough teacher who had very little patience with students who were not interested in learning.”
Those he didn’t reach were never so happy as the day they left his classroom once and for all. Those he did reach, however, had a mentor for life.
If you were interested in learning, as McClure was, Held made sure you received an education, both in school and in life.
“They subscribed to the New York Times,” McClure remembered. “They had lived in Boston and D.C. They were kind of a window on the world for me in old Eureka.”
The teacher McClure recalls as “intense, energetic, imaginative, enthusiastic” hired him to do odd jobs, providing “teaching that was beyond the classroom.”
McClure ultimately would receive a Ph.D. from MIT, spending a career as a research scientist, just as Held would have had it.
But math wasn’t all Held taught.
“I had him for math, algebra, geometry, French, German, chemistry, physics,” Utter said. “He did it all.”
The trick, she said, was to get him talking about the war; if you could really get him on a roll, he would often ramble so far afield that you could get a test postponed or slip out with a homework assignment unnoticed. It became a game for his students in Eureka and later at Missoula’s Hellgate High, but it was a game you can bet he understood and had calculated from the beginning.
He loved the games, loved his students, loved life in all its weirdness, but not as much as he loved a good equation. Upon his death his granddaughter Lisa uncovered whole notebooks filled with his mathematic work, saying “I never knew he was so intellectual.”
But Werner Held also loved things well beyond the reach of science – good nonfiction writing, for instance. Their house in Eureka had no television, but it had Harpers and the Atlantic Monthly and the Saturday Review of Literature.
He liked to learn, no matter the source, and used to say “everybody serves a purpose, if only as a bad example.”
Tenacious, emphatic, ornery, generous, sensitive, baffled by America’s Americanisms, Held “tried constantly to do his best,” Art said, “but he didn’t always know how to do it.”
He liked to travel, but slept in tents, not hotels, and preferred the everyday slice-of-life of the cultures he visited rather than the mainstream tourist package. He liked to laugh, to toy with wordplay, to put on clever accents.
“He liked Scrabble better than cards,” Utter said, “because with Scrabble you were learning something.”
He was a skier, a builder, a loner, a sometimes flyer of questionable airplanes.
He was a taskmaster, a father with a houseful of rules. But at the same time, he’d buy his son a six-pack on occasion, believing it was inevitable and certainly beat drinking and driving. After moving to Missoula in the early 1960s, he signed absentee slips so Art could attend Vietnam War protests, even though doing so threatened his job as a teacher at Hellgate.
“He was loving,” Art said, “but in his own way. It’s more like he was committed.”
At one point or another, all of Utter’s own children lived with her dad, testament to his own children’s trust and belief.
“It was just such a welcome thing to go visit them,” Utter’s daughter Lisa said of her grandparents. “It was warm, restful, relaxing. It was home.”
“But,” she is quick to add, “he was a tough old bird and I think he had mellowed quite a bit by then.”
Held was a progressive, a free thinker, a pragmatist with vast reserves of empathy; he was a debater, a pounder of tables, a waggler of fingers and a maker of points. He was an afternoon napper and a tremendous snorer, a binge exerciser and a caring father.
“You know,” Art said, “he knew he was dying. And he spent our last conversation trying to make me comfortable.”
Werner Held liked American musicals and big American V-8 engines, liked building and tinkering and soldering together tomorrow’s technology today.
“There really wasn’t anything he wasn’t interested in,” Utter said, “and there wasn’t anything he wouldn’t tackle.”
“Basically,” McClure agreed, “I think he was interested in the whole world and the way it worked.”
Which, of course, brings us back to that 26-foot wooden-hulled boat sitting in the garage.
“It never saw the water,” Utter said.
“I think he just ran out of steam.”
More likely, said son Art, Dad ran out of interest. Held’s focus, Art said, was always to learn how to build a thing, to learn how it worked, to apply his math to the world and see what would happen. That’s why he liked ham radio equipment better than ham radio chatting.
The creative scientific process, Art said, held far more appeal to Werner Held than did the realities of actually sailing around the world. Once the boat was built, the fun was done, and it was time to move on to the next project.
“He finally sold it,” Utter said. “This beautiful handmade sailboat that he built from scratch. He just sold it. God, that was just like him, you know?”