An Interview with John W. Bennett

Abstract

JWB: At the time of my birth in I9I5, my father was the registrar at the University of Wisconsin/Milwaukee Extension Division (later UW-Milwaukee). He took a wartime job in intelligence and never went back to the university. He eventually wound up as an investment banker and took a beating in the I929 market collapse. My mother was trained as a bookkeeper but left this work after her marriage. The family lived for a time with my matemal grandmother, who had a large old house on the east side of Milwaukee. Eventually, the family moved to a Dutch-colonial-style house in what was then Wauwatosa, a suburb that was subsequently annexed to Milwaukee. I had a conventional middle-class upbringing in a typical middle-class neighborhood which looks much the same today as it did when I lived there. I attended the Milwaukee public schools, and in the I920S they were schools in which one could get solid academic training. I owe a lot to the education I received in this system. I went to West Division High, which marks the beginning of my interest in anthropology. There I had an extraordinary science teacher, a man with a high celluloid collar, a luxuriant mustache, and a passion for natural history and archaeology. It was he who steered me toward Beloit. Literary training at West Division was also excellent: we really studied the classics. By my third year I was pretty well convinced that I would be some kind of anthropologist, and I was definitely leaning toward the archaeological side of the discipline. Another strong influence came from popular books on exotic locations. I still have the term paper I wrote for the science teacher's class on Robert J. Casey's Last Home of Mystery, a book dealing with Angkor Wat as representing the mysterious Orient, vanished civiliza-