Carrie, my dear wife, and I were in Wilmington, North Carolina last week.  Each and every time I venture to New Hanover County, I think of Millard Dunn.  That was just the first time I have ever referenced him as Millard in anything that measured more or less as casual discourse.  Heck…maybe ever.  Today, it just came out.

I owe my career in great part to Millard Dunn.  Dr. Millard Dunn, that is.

I don’t know what day Dr. Dunn was declared such.  I am sure there was a ceremony of sorts.  A commencement to celebrate the event was due.  I hope there was some sort of celebration that Millard had the chance to bask in.  I know I had my day in the sun when I graduated from college thanks to him.  I went through commencement that May day.  It was a special day.  When I was not thinking about myself and my family, I was thinking about Millard Dunn.  Last September I chronicled how and why he was and is so important to me.  I was back on campus for a meeting of a professional nature that day.  Again, I was thanking Millard Dunn for seeing me through college.  He made sense of what I was doing when many others on campus were not making any sense to me whatsoever.  That experience may be exactly what we all need.  Sure there are the chestnuts that roast about why on earth I am made to take another algebra class in college…especially when I did so poorly at it in high school and had not been asked about x over y plus seven since the last time I had last seen an algebra book. Still, know that I had that factoring thing down.  So much so that I had this conversation with Millard about it one day.  He said it like no one else ever could or ever has before:

Me:  I was hearing this conversation about factoring between some of my classmates and I actually knew what they were talking about more than they did.

Millard:  And what did you do about it.

Me:  Well, I went over and asked them what the problem was.

Millard:  That was a good start.  What else?  (Millard could forever pepper you with yet another question that was an end to means of accountability)

Me:  I looked at it.

Millard:  What did you do then?

Me:  I started to explain the process.

Millard:  Did that work out for you or them?

Me:  Well, give me a minute.  (I could forever give it back to him) What I did was grab a piece of chalk and I went to the board (the chalkboard age…Millard was an artist at the chalk board).  I wrote out the problem.  I felt like John Madden up there. Chalk flying as I made the point and helped them to realize the answer.  To tell you the truth, I didn’t know what I was doing there myself.  It was the darndest thing.  I don’t know what I was doing.

Millard:  (He said something I never thought I would hear.  They were words that gave me the confidence to do anything.)  I know what you were doing.  What you were doing was teaching algebra and it sounds to me as though you were doing it effectively.

You could have knocked me over with a feather.  I had arrived.  If I could teach algebra…anything was possible.  Anything is possible.

So I thought about Millard last week while Carrie and I were in Wilmington. Wilmington, NC  is where Millard went to high school.  He headed up I-40 on scholarship to finish (that is what they say in the south about one who graduates from the school…they “finish”) at Duke University.  He was declared my Dr. Dunn by way of Indiana University.

Millard is a gifted poet.  I hope one day the rest of the world knows what I know about his poetry.

His Chapbook Engraved On Air won a winner at the Kentucky Writers Conference in 1983.

I have a copy.

I also have a copy of Place We Could Never Find Alone from 2011.  I love this collection.  In it I can hear the Millard I knew…I know.  Find a copy if you can…thank me later.

And I have a copy of a book of poems he would later refer to as “vanity publishing”.  An ambitious Duke sophomore found a way to get a collection of his poems published and bound in a nice book.  This was 1960.  Nearly forty years later, Millard spoke of it with a wistful tone.  It was a tone of a poet knowing his voice had not been cultivated in 1960. He was seemingly apologetic.  Ever the teacher…he gave me a lesson to fulfill with regard to this work.  I have never stopped thanking him.

Foothills was published in 1960.

I want to believe that is a view down a corridor of Duke Chapel.  I have seen it.  It is beautiful.

The following are pictures of Millard.  One from the jacket of Foothills and the other from Places We Can Never Find Alone.

I am fortunate to say I feel like I know both of these guys.  I am a blessed man.

Speaking the Millard Rights…

Danny Johnson…oops…for Millard, I best say Dan Johnson.