Professor with a Passion

Waco, Texas (pop. 56,000) seemed an improbable place for it, to everyone but the citizens of Waco (pronounced Way-co). This week they began a $750,000 white marble building, studded with stained-glass windows, to house the largest Browning collection in the world. The city itself had donated a whole block for it, right next to the Baylor University campus. The man who had made Browning a hero to Waco was Baylor's bushy-browed Professor A. Joseph Armstrong.

In 37 years, thousands of Baylor students have taken his poetry course on Robert Browning, and most would never forget it. Peering down at his class from his lecture platform, Doc Armstrong was a lordly figure, with a voice that shook the windows. Sloppy recitations enraged him. "Mush!" he would cry at a mumbling student; sometimes coeds fled the room in tears. Students feared him, but were fascinated; they came in flocks.

The Lessons of the Master. "To me," Armstrong once wrote, "the key word is--Browning. His has been the master influence." To learn all there was to know about Browning, he often stayed at his books until 3 a.m., got up again at 6. But at midnight Saturday he knocked off; his Congregationalist mother had taught him that Sunday was a day of rest. When the clock struck midnight again on Sunday, he often went back to his books.

Collecting letters, manuscripts and books about Browning he found an expensive hobby for a teacher. During the 1920s the Armstrong Educational Tours, which he organized, flourished. He traveled all over the world with them. One year, his travel agency grossed $1,000,000. Extra money went into Browningiana. And every spare hour Armstrong worked over his collection, carefully unpacking, arranging, cataloguing his treasures. Said his wife: "I'm an in-law of Browning."

Last week at a quiet ceremony, Joseph Armstrong laid the cornerstone of his new building. Into it will go the letters Browning exchanged with Florence Nightingale, Leigh Hunt, Benjamin Jowett. There will be Browning's clock, snuffbox, diary, account books, first editions of all his works, the portfolio he held in his lap when he wrote. Only one of Armstrong's treasures will not be there--Browning's ring, which Joseph Armstrong wears himself and absentmindedly twists when talking.

Grubbing Clerk. Today, at 75, Joseph Armstrong still slaves over his collection after class "like a miserable, grubbing clerk." He still snarls at his students ("They haven't even heard about God"), but he likes to invite the "kids" around for long talks after supper. To him, his is the happiest profession. "If I had ten migrations of the soul," says he, "I'd want to be nothing more than a teacher."

Only one thing worries him: that because of his age, he might not live to see his building completed. Says he: "If we can create ... a place where young people can meditate on great thoughts, and by that means give the world . . . another Dante, another Shakespeare, another Browning--we will count the cost a bargain."

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