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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.” |
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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.” |