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the dance of the pen Sometime in 1969 Virginia Reynolds, Lloyd’s wife of 44 years, was diagnosed with a terminal illness. He took a leave of absence to care for her and chose a one-time Trappist monk and monastery scribe, Fr. Robert Palladino, to take over his calligraphy classes. So it was that the man who considered a two-hour spiel merely a warm-up gave over pen and lectern to a man who had been silent for 18 years. When Virginia died in 1970, Reynolds made his retirement from Reed permanent. But calligraphy at the college, like the elegant descender on Lloyd Reynolds’ favorite letter, R, hung in there.

The choice of Palladino spoke more of attitude than aptitude. “Lloyd was a very spiritual person,” says Palladino. “I think that it was why he wanted me to be his successor. He had many outstanding students, and some of them were already teaching, which I wasn’t. Yet he picked me to be his replacement. I really think it wasn’t because of my ability, it was because of my spiritual orientation. He just wanted someone who would keep the spirit alive. Someone who could understand that there was more to calligraphy than drawing letters.”

 

Under Palladino, calligraphy remained the top elective at Reed, with 80 students jamming the room for every class. The teaching style changed, surely, but what was being taught remained much the same. What lay behind and between and beside the letters was the real subject and the real draw.

Views among certain members of the Reed faculty, however, hadn’t changed with calligraphy teachers, and the priest Palladino was never the bulldog Reynolds was when it came to politics. Every year the academic credibility of the class was assailed, and part-time faculty member Palladino never knew from semester to semester if he was coming back.

“Each time it was a struggle,” Palladino recalls. “It turned out that I had inherited all of Lloyd Reynolds’s enemies as well as his friends.”

“Bob Palladino is a beautiful, honest man,” says Jaki Svaren, “who at the time had no sense of backdoor politics. When he was told that, as a part-timer, he didn’t need to attend faculty meetings, he believed it. And that was the beginning of the end of calligraphy at Reed. Once the college discredited the course, it never had a chance.”

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2003