John Duncan Spaeth 1887

J. Duncan Spaeth, Murray Professor of English Literature, Volunteer Coach of Crew, and Director of Rowing 1910-1925

J. Duncan Spaeth was the loudest living faculty member. When he lectured in McCosh 50 the rumble carried to Nassau Street and when he boomed out over Lake Carnegie, oarsmen trembled in their shells half a mile away. He was not your slight, shrill noisemaker, but robust, tumultuous, Elizabethan; his ample gestures included the whole universe in one sweep of the arm. He was Princeton’s Paul Bunyan and his saga was a fascinating and as fantastic as any legend of the logging camps, or of Beowulf, whose story Dr. Spaeth translated into rugged modern English. Obviously he was in his element delivering majestic scenes from Shakespeare, the rowdier books of the Canterbury Tales, or the sulphurous addresses of Jonathan Edwards. But here is the anomaly: this great bulk of a man, snorting and guffawing as Flagstaff, can turn to lines of Ophelia or Juliet or a fragile poem of Emily Dickinson and read them with quiet beauty and effectiveness; no wonder he was a favorite lecturer for several Princeton classes. He came here in 1905 after ten years’ teaching at Central High School in Philadelphia. He graduated, Phi Beta Kappa from Penn in 1888 and went to Leipzig for his Ph.D. During the war he organized the Army’s work among illiterates and wrote the indispensable Camp Reader for American Soldiers. But at this point we can envision letters from Henry B. Thompson ’77, Heinie Leh ’21, and other great oarsmen asking, “What about crew?” Dr. Spaeth was Princeton’s amateur crew coach for fifteen years and during that period he startled the country. Not only did the amateurs defeat the best professionals but he did it with an efficiency which caused athletic treasurers to examine his technique. While most institutions had crew appropriations of $15,000, Princeton was beating them on one-third that sum. Dr. Spaeth relinquished
the coaching job in 1925, but just try to keep him away from the lake! If he should be absent some afternoon, however, he would be represented just the same, for the coach’s launch is appropriately called The Doctor.
Princeton Alumni Weekly April 27, 1934
Famous Quotes from the Doctor:
“I like to take my exercise sitting down. Furthermore, I’d rather be a member of forward-moving, backward-looking team, than of a forward-looking but backward-moving team!”
“Never use a megaphone when you should use a monkey-wrench!”
“Never play a sport which you can’t afford to lose, but then play that sport as if you couldn’t afford to lose it!”