Lyle Guttu: Autobiographical notes

            Lyle Guttu wrote several notes in the course of his life to sum up the events of recent years. Two of them were posted in the annual report of the Harvard Class of 1958; the third was a short autobiography he wrote to accompany his resume to Wagner College in 1972. We are sharing those notes here with you, in chronological order.

From the Harvard Class of 1958 notes (1964)

            Having been duly admonished to acknowledge something more than that I do not belong on the obituary list, I am now tardily taking action to comply. In the last six years I have had at least eight addresses of remembrance, albeit seven of them have been in New York City, and, to my continued amazement, the Harvard Class of 1958 has never lost track of me! Indeed, it is they who informed me that my present zip code number is 10025. It would be untrue to say that I’ve been in hiding. It would be equally untrue to say that I’ve done much communicating with any member of the Class of 1958. I now wish humbly to make partial amends.

            After two years of teaching in Buffalo (1958-60), I packed my bags for New York City, whereupon I immediately enrolled at Union Theological Seminary, there to begin an odyssey for which I was eager and, alas, quite unprepared.

            “Lost” is too definitive a word to apply to the last four years but, without stretching reality or language in the least, I have wandered considerably from the Night Cap Lounge on Seventh Avenue and 135^th Street to St. Paul’s Lutheran Church in eastern Queens, from Judson Poet’s Theatre in the Village to St. Peter’s in the Bronx, gaining my livelihood as a clerical worker for Mutual of New York, stack man for Union’s missionary research library, recreation leader for New York’s Department of Parks, youth director, switchboard operator, tour guide and preacher; I’ve gained two years’ academic training in theology, spent one year as a chaplain intern at Bellevue Hospital, and am working this year to pay off some accumulated debts and patch some holes in my clothing.

            Upon graduation [from Harvard] I had really made no plans for the future other than to live as intensely and imaginatively as my mind and means would allow. That philosophy has wrought a rather fragmented record for which the aphorism “never apologize, never explain” seems to fit perfectly, although it doesn’t much resemble a motto for a minister. The past six years chastens me not to predict the future.

A short autobiography (1972)

            Red Lake Falls has always seemed to me to be an unlikely place for one to be born. But it was there in the northwestern “Dakota Plains” section of Minnesota that I was born on April 16, 1936. In May I was baptized at St. John’s Lutheran Church, a Missouri Synod congregation.

            It was the depression and my father, now with five children and unemployed, that moved us north toward the Canadian border — to Thief River Falls, Minnesota — where he found work as an automobile mechanic.

            I grew up in Thief River Falls, a farm community of 5,000 people, mostly Scandinavian and Lutheran (there were eleven Lutheran congregations in town!) but with a sprinkling of French-Canadian Roman Catholics and American Indians. I grew up playing ice hockey and reading the King James version of the Bible — roughly in that order of priority. In June of 1951 I was confirmed at Zion Lutheran Church, a congregation of the schismatic Lutheran Free Church. Three years later I graduated from Lincoln High School and was admitted to Harvard College — mostly on the strength of my ability to play hockey. I hardly knew Latin was a language.

            At Harvard I first survived and then mildly excelled. It was there that I learned to think — however arrogant that may sound. It was there that I learned what true scholarship is, what an education and an educational institution are all about. While at Harvard I also came to know Rev. Henry Horn and the University Lutheran congregation. After four intense years, I left to become an English teacher (although I had majored in history) at the Nichols School in Buffalo, New York.

            During the two years I was in Buffalo, my parents left Minnesota for California, where all their children except for me were then living. In its own way, that uprooted me — and just at the time that I was becoming aware of the gap between the blue-blood community the Nichols School served and the new, recently uprooted southern black population pouring into Buffalo. My ideas of how one teaches and what one teaches were also changing. As a result, for reasons Henry Roth called “difficult to explain to the dead, impossible to explain to the living,” I enrolled at Union Theological Seminary in the fall of 1960. Five years later, after working in all the boroughs except Staten Island and after a year’s internship at Bellevue Hospital, I emerged from Union with a bachelor of divinity degree.

            On July 21, 1965, I was ordained by the Lutheran Church in America, New York Synod, having already been assigned by the Board of American Missions to the Church of the Holy Redeemer in East New York, where I presently serve as pastor.

From the 20^th Anniversary Report, Harvard Class of 1958 (1978)

            On my first day in kindergarten, I appeared late and was told, as on numerous occasions in the years that followed, that I must relate my activities to my responsibilities. Learning how to tell time was suggested. Thirty-six years later, I still function (I think that is the right word) without a watch, clinging to the maybe juvenile idea that all I possess is time and, in my fashion, I try not to waste it.

            Then John Finley tells me I have forgotten to respond to our Twentieth Reunion Report! Am I that old? Has so much time passed? How much time is left? I hope that last question will have a characteristically tardy answer. It would be a shame to die before having decided what I want to do with my life.

            As I think of it now, I entered Harvard with no imagination at all, meaning that I thought I would become a doctor. My lack of expertise in physics suggested I try poetry, or something equally estranged from science. As many who are conscious of knowing too little, I taught for a couple of years; then, in something other than scientific fashion, I decided to explore a virus within me that, as a discipline, is called theology.

            After graduation from Union Seminary, New York, in 1965, I became the pastor of a small black congregation in Brooklyn, almost entirely composed of teenagers. My years there were exhilarating, crazy, sobering, and, at the end, depressing. Simultaneous wars against poverty; racism, Vietnam and, finally, against ourselves, were also exhausting and tragic.

            In 1972 I went back to academe as the chaplain of Wagner College, Staten Island, New York. There, on August 18, 1974 (tardy again) I married June Allison White. That same fall I became an officer of the college as dean of students.

            On August 23, 1976, June presented me with Allison Ann Dalen. The cost per pound was high but I see her as more of a bargain each passing day. I feel young; too young to be writing this report, but good old John Finley tells me the time is nigh, nay, almost passed.