Emmett L. Bennett, Jr.

In the early 60's, while an undergraduate in Madison, I tried to satisfy my language requirement by taking Spanish. I reasoned the language was the easiest I could study, because I knew I was terrible at learning languages. The Spanish Department was huge, so undergraduate beginners were taught by teaching assistants only a few years older than we were.

Even so, by my third semester, I was almost flunking Spanish, marring an otherwise high GPA and jeopardizing my financial aid (BTW tuition was $350 in-state, a whopping $750 for non-Wisconsonites). I decided to quit Spanish one day when after more than two semesters with the language, the earnest young t/a was still trying to teach us to say, "See Pepe eat the tortilla. The tortilla is hot."

I switched to Classical Greek. Instead of Pepe, we encountered Homer, Aeschylus, Herodotus, and The Holy Bible. I took four semesters of this dead language, and aside from a few Bs, aced all of the work.

The Classics Department was populated by some really quirky teachers. If they had teaching assistants, I never met them. Instead, the heavies of the classics world taught us themselves.

Emmett L. Bennett (NYT)

One of those professors was Emmett Bennett. He was one of the few teachers I had in Madison who actually scared me. He was never mean or even rude to us bumptious undergrads. He was just unbelievably focused, and his profound respect for the material was so strong it penetrated every moment of the class. He didn't have to enforce discipline and seriousness in his classroom, it radiated from him every minute he was with us.

Bennett was one of the three people who had deciphered Linear B, a Minoan language that at the time was the oldest known to the Western World. With no key like the Rosetta Stone, figuring out the strange symbols was an act of sheer genius in code breaking. In fact, Professor Bennett had been a code breaker during the Second World War. And he and the others broke this unique code with their minds - no laptops for this bunch.

Occasionally we could get Bennett to diverge from the curriculum and tell us stories of the ancient languages - far older than the classical Greek we were learning - that seemed as alien as if they had come from Andromeda. On these occasions he sped up and lit up - passion overtaking his normal formality that somehow added to it.

It's a great advance for ordinary people like us to extend the power of our minds with extra-corporeal brain machines like the computers we're all using to write and read this blog. But learning of Emmett Bennett's death, I'm reminded of the great beauty of a human mind working on its own to understand and explain the deepest mysteries of our world.