Remembering Scott Donaldson J. Gerald Kennedy A month before his death, writing the retrospective piece featured in this issue, Scott Donaldson retold the awkward story included in his biography of the enigmatic Charlie Fenton. I don't mean the details of Scott's sexual initiation in New Haven. Rather, it's the revelation of his delayed Yale graduation after Fenton—then a young faculty member beginning his research for The Apprenticeship of Ernest Hemingway—caught him turning in a class term paper as his senior honors thesis. Scott rehashed that ignominy to remind us that, whatever he later achieved, he had a bumpy start. It's a subtle encouragement to friends and colleagues from a man who remained to the end modest, gracious, and generous, especially to aspiring teachers and scholars. Scott was born in 1928, the son of Frank A. Donaldson Sr. of Minneapolis, a onetime tractor salesman who in 1915 devised an air cleaner for a balky farm engine and transformed his invention into a highly successful business. The Donaldson Company is still thriving—a multinational corporation, supplying filters for heavy-duty equipment. Scott was the baby of the family: his brother Frank Jr. was born in 1920 and his sister Joan in 1927. Like his brother, Scott attended the Blake School, established to prepare young men for Ivy League educations. Frank Jr. was groomed to run the family business: he attended Harvard and served in the Navy before becoming company president. Red-headed, freckle-faced Scott took a different path. As a youngster, he mostly devoted himself to tennis, and by the age of fifteen, he was nationally ranked. He also edited the school newspaper. But his path in life was far from untroubled. When he was fourteen, his mother Ruth died six days before Christmas. Then Frank Sr. remarried, and at seventeen Scott had barely adjusted to having a stepmother when his father also died. At Yale, Scott was by his own account an "undistinguished" English major. According to his widow, Vivie Donaldson, he often remarked that he should never have gone to Yale. He felt out of place and never truly accepted. Most of his classmates went to fancier prep schools or came from more illustrious families. His classmates (all male in that era) included William F. Buckley, Peter Matthiessen, and Robert Scholes. Scott's visit to Fenton's Connecticut home in August 1950 served two purposes: he clarified the work needed to transform his Hemingway paper into an honors thesis, and meeting Fenton's family, Scott also got a glimpse of how university professors lived. [End Page 16] He later remarked that it planted a seed: the idea of becoming a teacher. But Scott was then in a muddle about his future. In the early 1950s, he pursued an M.A. in English at the University of Minnesota. With the Korean War still ongoing, he enlisted in the Army, got shuffled around chaotically, and during a leave married a Long Island socialite, Winifred MarieAnn Davis. She died in a car crash, seven months later, in North Carolina. As the war approached its eventual stalemate, Scott shipped off to Japan, where the Army Security Agency was monitoring Chinese efforts to rearm North Korea. In a base outside Kyoto, Scott transcribed—not very well, he admitted—coded Chinese messages. In Japan, he also met several American war correspondents, and that contact fired an ambition to become a journalist. Back in the states, Scott snagged a reporting job at the Minneapolis Star. During that interval, he also wedded a Minneapolis woman, Janet Kay Mickelson, with whom he raised three sons, Matthew, Stephen, and Andrew. He parlayed his newspaper work into what he later ruefully described as a "three-year mistake in public relations" working for Pillsbury. From that job, he moved to editing the Bloomington Sun. With the help of his brother, he became executive editor of a chain of newspapers around the Twin Cities area. But this immersion in the daily grind of gathering and delivering the news finally reawakened his dream of an academic life. Scott returned to the University of Minnesota in 1963, entering its innovative doctoral program in American Studies. The interdisciplinary approach...
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Jan 1, 2022
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