Word: rileys
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...Monday afternoon, a few hours before TIME'S April 3 issue went to bed, Researcher Marjorie Burns put in a fast phone call for Ed Heinke, our Indianapolis string correspondent. She told him that a story in Education referred to a poem by James Whitcomb Riley entitled Perfesser John Clark Ridpath, A.M., LL.D., TYTY. What, asked Researcher Burns, did the T-Y-T-Y stand for? Could Heinke find out? Possibly somebody at DePauw University, where Lecturer Ridpath lived and worked before his death in 1900, would know...
...call for David Laurance Chambers, president of Bobbs-Merrill, publishers, to ask for the names of those who knew their Riley lore best in this part of the country where Riley lore springs at you from everywhere. He suggested a Riley historian named Marcus Dickey, who has a studio at Bear Wallow down in the hills of Brown...
County; and two Riley nieces, Miss Lesley Payne and Mrs. Harry Miesse, the wife of an avid local tax expert...
...Others: "Professor" Friedrich Bhaer, who married one of Louisa M. Alcott's Little Women; James Whitcomb Riley's "Perfesser John Clark Ridpath, A.M., LL.D., T-Y-TY." The TYTY was a bit of Riley humor. Since schoolchildren used to spell by syllable (e.g., PURITY, p-u-r-PUR; iI; t-y-TY), the alphabet after the "perfesser's" name brought forth from Riley the old classroom response...
MARJORIE ANNE RILEY Dunsmuir, Calif...