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Christmas, 1969

Dear Jack and Gladys

Although we love to receive Christmas letters, this is the first one we have ever written. Personal notes are impossible this year because Jean is working full-time as assistant Librarian in the University of Wisconsin Library Scott Library. Quite a change after seventeen years as a full-time mother but it's a perfect job for her and good for everyone, we feel.

Linda and Dick have joined the working force, too so we are all busy. Linda attends the University of Wisconsin and chose to live at home. Every Saturday she teaches riding at Hoofbeat Ridge Ranch, a wonderful two-hundred and fifty acre farm in beautiful hilly country twenty-five miles west of Madison. This fits in with yer pre-veterinary course att he University. Dick is a junior at West High School and finds time to work twenty-three hours a week at a pet store. He is making good use of his knowledge of tropical fish. David is now in his fifth year at St. Coletta School for Exceptional Children in nearby Jefferson. He is able to write us a note each week and to read quite well, which is a joy to him and us.

After three years as chairman of the Department of English and one year's leave at the University's Institute for Research in the Humanities, Walter is now happily back at full-time teaching. Last summer he taught in the Harvard Summer School, and we were lucky to rent the home of friends in Belmont. It was a busy summer for him but provided us with a wonderful opportunity to see old friends and revisit favorite places in the Boston area. A trip to Maine in June included a visit to the Colby College campus, a Rideout family reunion in Bangor to celebrate Walter's mother's eightieth birthday, and a nostalgic tour of the Main coast. We loved seeing New England again but are all happy to be home in Wisconsin.

With very best wishes for a happy holiday season,

Walter, Jean, Linda, Dick, and David

Dear Jack, I reviewed David Malden's Proletarian Writers of the Thirties very favorably in American Literature (November, 1969) and in my seminar on the 1930's have a very good graduate student, one Denis Gartner, writing a paper on you. Could you stand being apotheosized in a doctoral dissertation one of these days? Faithfully, Walter