By Richard F. Spall Jr. ’77
Cornelia Cole Fairbanks Professor of History
Ohio Wesleyan University
I met Al Hayden in spring of 1974 as a prospective student in his tiny, windowless, book-filled office in what could be described as the dungeon of Zimmerman Hall. My initial impression was that he had read just about everything and had thoroughly embedded himself in the life of the mind. This proved dead on. I have known him for nearly 50 years as teacher and academic advisor, scholarly colleague, professional conference roommate, most of all, as dear and valued friend.
As a teacher, Al was thorough and filled with insights. In class, he liked to pose tough questions to put ideas together as new ones were being introduced. His lectures were organized to perfection, each one in its own individually labeled file folder and honed to precisely 60 minutes. He played with the Venetian blinds cord, often undoing the knots that some student had imposed on it. As an advisor, he made me explicitly justify each course selection. Once, during a noon advising session on that small chair tucked into the corner – right at the door – of his office, I heard bubbling. Underneath me was a hotpot that had come to boil. He asked me to move my feet, extracted the pot, and proceeded to make his soup without hesitating in the process of course selection, even completing it in his own hand. He was demanding in class, and more so in independent study. Never would I have read all 1,000 pages of John Stuart Mill’s Principles of Political Economy except to keep from disappointing him.
As a scholar, Al Hayden did important work. His study of immigration to New South Wales was a landmark in the study of settlement colonies. More recently, his investigations of Home Rule for Ireland pointed towards an entirely new understanding of how the Conservative Party considered Dominion status as a solution to the Irish Question that implied something other than Union. In discussions during graduate school and professionally, the bibliography of the most recent scholarship in British history fell from his lips by casual allusion and never an attempt to impress. It turns out, he had read everything. And, nobody knew the Chicago Manual of Style more thoroughly.
Al was always efficient and knew when to seize opportunity. He liked to tell the story that as company clerk in the U.S. Army Air Corps, he was part of the occupation force in Japan. When the orders came through to begin the return of troops to the U.S. and the unit commander put him in charge of making up the lists, he put himself literally on the first ship home. He pointed out that his greatest contribution as department chair had been to separate history from political science.
There was no finer, more loyal, or more generous friend. He met the challenges of his personal life with grace and courage. He faced adversity, like so many of his generation, with quiet fortitude and no hint self-pity or complaint. But I am sure that Al would most like to be remembered as a man of principle. He admired historical figures who put principle over promotion. He stuck by his principles, sometimes as a voice in the wilderness – always as his conscience dictated. He was humble in success. Reading his recent obituary reveals many accolades he never mentioned, didn’t it? He had enormous self-discipline. In the 35 years since his heart by-pass surgery, I never saw him deviate even once from his strict dietary regime. Last winter when Rosemary and I took him to dinner at a downtown Springfield hotel at which he had been a frequent diner over the years but not of late, the waitress greeted him with “no salt, no butter, right?” He faced advancing years and declining health with courage, good humor, and without complaint. He touched all of us, and though he is gone, the warm twilight glow of this great friend still illuminates our path. “Having light, he passed it on to others.”
There are a few lines, appropriately enough from the poet laureate Alfred, Lord Tennyson, that perhaps describe our bittersweet circumstances today:
Though much is taken, much abides,
And though we are not now that power which once moved heaven and earth,
That what we are we are,
One equal temper of heroic hearts,
Made weak by time and fate,
Yet strong in will,
To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.