- Parkander Roald Tweet 2:45
This is Roald Tweet on Rock Island. It is hard to believe that this November, after forty-nine years of teaching English literature at Augustana College in Rock Island, Dr. Dorothy Parkander will retire. She will be seventy-one. Generations of English majors have absorbed her lectures on Chaucer, Milton, Donne, and Austen, but the must-take course for business major and pre-med alike has been World Literature and its centerpiece, Homer’s Odyssey. Twice a year, Dorothy has taken forty or fifty students from farms in Iowa, small Illinois towns or Chicago suburbs, and launched them from the second floor of Old Main out across the wine-dark seas in an adventure as awe-filled as any Odysseus took, and returned them safe again to Room 220 in time for the final examination. But never quite comfortable again. Many students marked this course as the start of their own restless wanderings in realms of knowledge and imagination they had never dreamed of back in Rockford or Peoria. They are
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