Our Own Hall Of Fame

BERGAN EVANS

CATALYST ON HOT TIN ROOF

 Bergan Evans Delights In Puncturing Old Notions

DAYTON DAILY NEWS,  MARCH 11, 1961

BY MARY ELLEN LYNCH

Daily News Staff Writer

     Franklin’s Dr. Bergan Evans is an English professor who believes in splitting infinitives and ending sentences with propositions.  He’s also a myth-smasher who says gargles are no good and that pigeons have no more homing instinct than many animals.

     Evans has been described as “a catalyst on a hot tin roof” because he enjoys puncturing notions that have gone unquestioned for generations.  And, through his books, TV programs and magazine columns, he has won recognition as a final authority on how Americans should speak their native tongue.

     Evans (who’s now 56) was born in the Warren county city, spent part of this early childhood in Sheffield, England, where his father held a diplomatic post.

     HE RETURNED to Franklin to graduate from high school, enter Miami university at the age of 15 and get expelled (for one week) because his grades were so terrible.

     Reinstated, the future Phi Beta Kappa buckled down, got mostly A’s, went on to a Rhodes scholarship at Oxford and to win his MA and PhD at Harvard.

     In 1932 Evans joined the English faculty at Northwestern university.  (He is still there, still calls teaching his first love.)

     Fourteen years later Dr. Evans stirred mild attention with a book, “The Natural History of Nonsense.”  He made his TV debut in 1951 as the witty, pun-tossing moderator of “Down You Go,” a somewhat highbrow quiz show.

     THEN, “The Last Word,” a panel show billed as “the court of appeals for all questions and arguments about the English language,” was launched by CBS in a Sunday afternoon time slot.

     The show was described as “an unspectacular that offers nothing more than four eggheads roosting at a table and talking about words for half an hour.”

     But it was soon drawing 6,000 letters a week and when Evans called “it is me” good English he probably did more to influence the language in a single Sunday afternoon than did generations of grammarians before him.

     With his sister, Dr. Evans worked for 10 years on a monumental “Dictionary of Contemporary American Usage,” a 600,000 word volume that weighs 134 pounds in manuscript form.

     IN THE heyday of the “$64,000 Question” and its sister “Challenge” show, Dr. Evans spent two days a week thinking up the questions—sometimes as many as 800 in a single category.  In the subsequent rigging scandal there was no stigma attached to his role on the two shows.

     Today the dimpled scholar has more books and more TV shows in the offing.  But he still meets his Northwestern classes regularly, whisking around campus on a bicycle.

     Dr. Evans believes that predominant usage—rather than a set of hard, fast rules—governs language correctness.  And, judging from his success, a lot of people agree with him.

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