AMERICAN FARM SCHOOL
BRUCE LANSDALE MEMORIAL
PART III
BRUCE AND TAD: THE BEGINNING IN AMERICA
A review of
MY METAMORPHOSIS
A TAPESTRY OF PEOPLE, PLACES AND EVENTS
ELIZABETH LANSDALE
ENARETOS PRESS 2007
info@afs.edu.gr www,afs.edu.gr
PART I
Foreword by Dimitris Zannas
My Metamorphosis by Tad Lansdale is about a love affair. In this highly personal and refreshing autobiographical account, Tad expresses her love for people, places and events that transformed her life as the wife of Bruce Lansdale, the Director of the American Farm School in Thessaloniki, Greece, during a period that spans the second half of the twentieth century and carries the reader into the twenty-first.
I first met Tad when she and Bruce arrived together in Thessaloniki in 1949. Bruce and I had been childhood friends. Tad was a bright, attractive and highly idealistic young bride, filled with enthusiasm and anticipation for the part she hoped to play as a wife and helpmate to the director of the Farm School. We became neighbors near the small village of Metamorphosis when the Lansdales purchased a plot of land within walking distance from my own. Our friendship also spans the better part of a century, and I have both watched and been part of Tad’s transformation as our friendship has also unfolded over the years.
In 1968, on a home leave away from the junta, Bruce wrote a poignant poem, Metamorphosis: Why I Love Greece, later complemented and published with photographs by Bob McCabe, a philhellene and friend, expressing Bruce’s deep affection for the country in which he had grown up as a boy, and to which, through agricultural education, he had devoted his life.
In her book Tad documents, through a series of personal vignettes, encounters that touched and changed her life. One of her challenges was to strike the appropriate balance between the School’s missionary spirit and the social obligations which the position required of her. The Farm School, including friends of the school and staff, figures prominently as the setting in which she learns to lose herself by investing in others.
Tad’s life has come full circle, as she and Bruce settle into their summer home at Metamorphosis, where they continue to receive visitors from Greece and around the world. Metamorphosis, as Bruce mentions in his poem, is not just a Greek village on the Aegean, it is a profound personal transformation of lives, in this case both Tad’s and Bruce’s in their life’s journey.
Bruce and Tad have set an example of partnership in service. In My Metamorphosis, Tad has captured her emergence and transformation from a determined idealism to a deeper awareness of the personal and spiritual needs of those around her. It is not just what she writes, but her personal way of expressing it as part of her own metamorphosis that makes this account so interesting, pleasant and inspiring.
PART I: MARRIAGE 1949
Chapter 1: How it all Began: Birth –1949
When Bruce and I were married in January 1949, I believe we were equals in our life searches. During the three years of our initial friendship and eventual courtship, I began to realize how deep his Greek roots were. I had actually never heard him speak Greek until we arrived in Greece. To me, he was the all-American boy: athlete, scholar, and humanist.
Our backgrounds had been very different. Bruce’s first twelve years were spent in Greece, and he traveled extensively with his family throughout Europe. I, on the other hand, had always lived within the boundaries of New York State.
We had met as undergraduates at the University of Rochester, and found we shared myriad interests, although our upbringings had been very different. I too, like Bruce, was raised in a small family as a second child with a brother three years older. We grew up on Long Island and later in Schenectady. I had lived a protected life as the only daughter. My father was self-employed, determinedly independent, and had originally done well in real estate, but following the depression, he founded the Schenectady Home Improvement Company, always dreaming optimistically that his fortune would return. Our family lifestyle continually fluctuated between feast and famine, depending on my father’s job opportunities. We lived a provincial, working man’s life with none of the broadening, cultural exposure that Bruce experienced as a child.
In 1946, Bruce and I had become good friends at the University of Rochester through shared classes and football rallies. He captained the football team, and I led the cheerleaders in rousing cheers for his team. Our first social event was a double date with different partners. When he asked me to dance, I remember being held in a tight bear hug, nothing sensual, more like a tackler’s hold.
I discovered that nothing fazed Bruce, and I soon became aware of how unique he was. At the age of twenty-one he not only knew who he was, recognizing his own strengths and weaknesses, but also knew exactly what he wanted to do with his life. He stood out from all the other young men as he paid little attention to social chit-chat, but got right to the heart of the matter. While other dates would appear with a book or flowers, he would endeavor to raise money for his beloved American Farm School in Greece. At one point, he convinced young debutantes in Rochester to forego corsages and donate the proceeds to his School, raising $800 so that village boys would have mattresses to sleep on instead of straw tics. His enthusiasm was contagious and I wanted to learn more about his School, his Greek experience, and what it was about his background that made him so different.
Bruce and I enjoyed endless discussions about life goals and our spiritual beliefs. We were both active in non-denominational campus activities, and when a student chapel was built by the McCurdy family, Bruce wrote a free-flowing poem as a tribute to them, which hung for years in the chapel.
Religion has always played an important role in my life. When I was nine I had attended different churches with small friends, and I asked my uncle Roland why there were so many different religions. He was a Harvard graduate, and always seemed to have a measured answer. “It’s like coffee. There are many brands, and each one thinks his brand is the best, but it’s all coffee. Many religions, but still one God.” Over the years I accompanied many friends to churches of their persuasion: Catholic, Synagogue, Christian Scientist, Baptist, Presbyterian, Quaker, Mormon, and later, Hindu mosques and Buddhist temples. My father had been raised a Baptist, and my mother a Lutheran. I received confirmation lessons in a strict Lutheran church environment. Aged twelve, I was extremely impressionable, and was overwhelmed when told that the wafer put gently into our mouths at communion was the true body of Christ and must never be bitten. Pastor Schleed started me reading the Bible and I read it through my high school days, a chapter each night before going to sleep. In college I took a thought-provoking elective on comparative religions and marveled at the differences and yet similarities of each religion.
When I was assigned for field work to the Syracuse Diagnostic Hospital for Mental Illness, I was an hour away from where Bruce was studying at Cornell. He came to visit on alternate weekends. Each weekend our relationship grew as we explored mutual interests, but I was in no hurry to make a permanent alliance as I was fully enjoying my new life as a professional. I had a good salary, a small apartment, a convertible car, lots of friends, and, for the first time in my life, the exhilarating sensation of financial independence.
Bruce, however, had another agenda. He was returning to Greece in the fall of ’49 for a long commitment, and needed a wife. He was twenty-three, and I was twenty-two. As we read books together, went skiing and bicycling, and took long walks among orange leaves and fall chrysanthemums of the Syracuse campus, I became increasingly aware that we had so much in common that it seemed only natural to share a lifetime enjoying each other. I realized our friendship had blossomed into a solid romance, and I would be desolate if he returned to Greece alone.
Bruce had first arrived in Greece at the age of six months. His parents, Marjorie and Herb, were an adventurous couple who were willing to try a new lifestyle in politically unstable Greece of 1925, away from their relative comforts in Rochester, New York. Their two sons, Parker, two, and Bruce, were additional challenges as Bruce was a thin and sickly baby who needed a special diet of peeled grapes and whole milk from the American Farm School. Little could they foresee that in twelve years this tiny baby would leave Greece for the U.S. so stocky he was dubbed “Meatball”, or “Meatie”, a nickname that lasted well into his retirement. His mother lamented, “We named him Bruce so there would be no nicknames.”
His childhood years tested his metal for becoming the determined, unique individual of later years, as he lived between two cultures. Greece in the 1920s was in chaos, recovering from the Exchange of Populations with Turkey which uprooted and transplanted a million and a half Greek-speaking orthodox people living in Asia Minor to Greece, and half a million Turkish-speaking Muslims living mostly in Thrace to Turkey. Bruce has vivid memories of his childhood in Thessaloniki when they lived in a large house on Modianou Street across from the splendid Governor General’s palace, while behind their house on a dry river bed a crowded makeshift refugee camp of tin and cardboard shacks dominated the neighborhood. Bruce remembered for years the horror of a horse and cart being swept off to sea by a sudden Mediterranean storm which created a swirling current.
On the other side of the social strata, the eight-year-old boy remembered an occasion when Crown Prince Paul of Greece came to dinner and hung up his cloak in the hallway. While the guests were having dinner, Parker and Bruce took turns playing “prince” and cavorted in a regal manner wearing the royal cape.
Another dinner party included then Bishop Athenagoras, later the Orthodox Patriarch, with leading lawyer Kostas Zannas. The boys remembered the tall Bishop and the shorter lawyer taking one look and throwing their arms around each other. They had not seen each other since fighting together in the resistance against the Turkish Occupation in the mountains of Northern Greece.
When the German School that the boys had attended in Thessaloniki began to insist on “Heil Hitler” salutes, Marjorie Lansdale accompanied them to the U.S. to enroll them in boarding school.
Bruce’s grandfather, father, and brother chose to serve in the YMCA for their careers. “That’s enough Lansdales for the Y”, Bruce said, as he determined to establish an identity of his own. He decided to study mechanical engineering and left high school halfway through his senior year to enroll at the University of Rochester.
It was January of 1943, and America was engaged in a war overseas. By July, the U.S. had set up the V-12 program to provide academic training to meritorious students to prepare them to become officers in the U.S. Navy. As an engineer, Bruce was selected to take the full four-year course in two years and eight months, graduating in November 1945.
While serving as a naval ensign, he heard of a mission to Greece to observe the Greek election in 1946. He was assigned to the State Department as an interpreter for the English, American and French observers. It was while he was stationed in Tripolis in the Peloponnesus that he received a telegram from his family: “Happy Twenty-first Birthday and Congratulations for making Phi Beta Kappa”. There was no one around who understood the academic significance of these three Greek letters, representing high academic achievement, but an inner voice told him, “Go to the Farm School and share it with the Houses.”
It was a life-changing decision. With typical determination, he found a British two-seater plane and a pilot willing to take him to the School, on the outskirts of Thessaloniki, Greece’s second largest city. There he found the farm he had explored and enjoyed as a child, and it beckoned him to use his talents as an engineer who wanted to work with people. He told the director, Charles House: “I want to make the School my life’s work.” Charlie replied: “The School has no funds to offer”, but when he saw the disappointment on Bruce’s face, quickly added: “We could provide room and board if you could get yourself here.”
When he returned to the States, Bruce found a Mennonite group who was shipping horses to the Greek army. Bruce signed on as caretaker for the forty mules for a long sea voyage where everyone, including himself, became very seasick in heavy seas. He spent the following year at the American Farm School as jack-of-all trades, renewing his bonds with all departments of the School, the classrooms, the industrial departments, the administration and the farm, and fell in love again with the institution he had known so well in his youth.
With his typical insight, Bruce later explained to me, “After a year in Greece I realized there were two things I needed to be an effective director: training in agricultural education and rural development, and a wife who would be crazy enough to want to live in Greece.” In the summer of 1948, he enrolled in the Master’s Program at Cornell University in the College of Agriculture addressing the first need.
The second need was met as Bruce and I took up our college association. On his return by boat, he found me waiting for him on the dock. We rode together on the train to Schenectady, holding hands and reminiscing about our college years. Our close friendship was intensifying, even though thoughts of marriage lay in the distant future as far as I was concerned.
But our time together passed quickly and it was late in November of ’48 that I realized Bruce was coming to propose. However, I had no idea how memorable his proposal would be. With his engineer’s mind for details, he arrived at my apartment in Syracuse with a yellow legal pad. “I thought we should analyze our prospects for a happy adjustment to each other,” he explained. When he saw the shock on my face, he quickly added, “Just as Dr. Koos used to advise us.” He had made a table of sociological factors that affect a marriage, such as cultural backgrounds, religious preferences, money management, free time pursuits, and lifetime goals. I was initially appalled, but soon became intrigued with his overview. We were essentially in accord, except for money matters, where Bruce emphasized saving and I leaned towards spending. Interestingly enough, after a lifetime together, we discovered that some of these roles had reversed, and I enjoyed watching our savings grow although we both enjoyed being able to tithe freely.
In the euphoria of our college days together, I considered that Bruce and I shared leadership capacities. It took Greece and a deeper understanding of the multiple facets we each brought to our marriage for me to realize that I had a long way to go to catch up with Bruce’s image of Greece, to his effective role as the beloved director of the American Farm School, and to confront some of my own inadequacies, and love Greece as he did, before I could consider myself an equal partner. I had my own tapestry of experiences to weave, with multicolored themes, some faint, others dominant, to illustrate the vicissitudes I encountered trying to adapt to the strange yet wonderful new culture of Greece.
My identity and purpose in life have been shaped by extraordinary experiences, relationships and opportunities. The Greek connection is clearly the dominant thread in the tapestry of my married life, while there are the diverse and, at times, conflicting roles of wife, mother, Farm School responsibilities, social worker, and now grandmother and caretaker, among others. It is the weaving of these roles into a rich tapestry that make up the story this book recounts, which turned an ordinary life into a joyous metamorphosis with its interplay of unforgettable personalities. Each one has played a significant role as I took up the shuttle to weave our lives together as closely as possible, all the while realizing that the Master Weaver continued to add His special touches.