CHAT: Pike (was Re: theory (was: Re: Greenberg's Word Order Universals)

I wrote:
->(SIL folks, especially, got dumped
>>on.)  Attitude like that produced hard feelings at Michigan, home of
Kenneth
>>Pike......
Ray Brown replied:
>That's the first time I recalling seeing Kenneth Pike's name on this list
>since Mark Line ceased to contribute here.  It's made my day  :)>
At risk of un-making it-- I was sorely tempted to add..."(anyone remember
him?)" but thought better of it.  (Actually czHANg mentioned him a while
back in the list of contributors to a volume of "poetry by linguists"....)


I'm probably one of the few degree-holders from Michigan during Pike's
tenure who never took a course with him.  Don't know if I should boast of
that, or not--  the problem of being Present at the Creation of a New
Paradigm.  He was a brilliant but rather strange man.  One of the few people
I've met, in any profession, who could speak in complete, well-formed
paragraphs.
An amusing but sad story:  One year I was nominated to hold the
beginning-of -term welcoming party.  All went well (Prof. Pike was absent),
though we managed to spray the ceiling with beer.  The next night, as I was
sitting down to dinner and surveying the wreckage, -- a knock at the door.
It was the Pikes, ready to party.  Awkward explanations, and I really wasn't
up to asking them in at that moment, so off they went.