Interview with Allen Harding
Allen Harding: Let’s see…I retire in three weeks. I’ve spent the last 28 years working for an IT consulting firm, and traveled quite extensively in Europe and India. Not in any way something that you would think of as my father’s son doing, but I’ve kind of been in the business field. I did not go to college right out of high school. I went about 10 or 12 years after high school to Geneseo, got an undergraduate degree in accounting, and then went to Carnegie Mellon in Pittsburgh. Backing up a little further, I had a vineyard where I raised wine grapes. I’m married, no kids, and looking forward to retirement. I spent quite a lot of time working with the Thoreau Society and the Thoreau Institute up in Concord. I live half time in Manhattan and half time in a little stone cottage out in the middle of the wilderness in Pennsylvania. we have about 5000 acres of wilderness around us.
What do you remember most about your father? Describe him in three words.
Harding: Kindness. If you ever go up to the Thoreau society meetings that they have yearly...I don’t know how many people have come up to me- and of course they aren’t going to say bad things about him- but everyone has so many nice things to say about him. So many people respected him. He was not a pushy sort of person...didn’t like playing politics or anything like that. He would just state the facts and leave it at that.
What is your favorite memory of your father? What is something that sticks with you?
Harding: Well there are a bunch of different ones depending on age. I remember him reading...there were 4 of us: I have two brothers and a sister...and I remember him reading to us every night. That was always fun, until he tried to read Hiawatha to us once: We all revolted and said we weren’t going to listen to that! [laughs] But the hiking and camping were always very enjoyable. When asked, I talk about the trips we took in the summer. We drove the car up with camping equipment, all six of us, and drove across the country.
You said that you looked forward to working with the Thoreau Society and going to Concord. Growing up, did you ever go up there with your father? Did you ever go camping there?
Harding: Yes and no. Every summer, my father would try to get a job at a different college somewhere speaking or teaching for a short time. He would load up the car and we would all travel around the country, stopping at national parks and camping [sites] and end up at some place where he would teach for 2 or 3 weeks, and then we would move on. We did a lot of camping while growing up. As far as Concord...he used to go up there every summer for 5 or 6 weeks, also to teach, but by that time we were all kind of old enough that we weren’t that interested, so we stopped. In the early 70s, my parents bought a farm up in Groveland, and at that point my mother stayed home to take care of the garden and take care of the animals, stuff like that. So he would go to Concord on his own for 5 or 6 weeks.
Do you know what initially drew your father to Thoreau? What inspired his passion for Walden and other Thoreau works?
Harding: His story, that he told everyone, is that he was originally interested in bird watching. He started reading Thoreau because he thought that was a good source of information about birds. That’s what actually got him interested. I think it was probably when he was 23 or 24, or during his undergraduate years at college.
Our of your father's many accomplishments, was there a professional achievement he was proud of above the others?
Harding:That would be so hard for me to guess. His biography, The Days of Henry Thoreau, is still considered the definitive biography, and that was written 50 years ago. And there hasn’t been anything to replace it yet. There’s other interesting things like the version of Walden that he annotated towards the end of his life. He actually bought a laptop computer and learned how to use it. I remembered him working on that over the summer when we were down at the Jersey Shore. My grandparents had a cottage there. He would just sit up in his room with a fan going, typing away on a typewriter to type the whole book. Another thing is just the collection that he did. He was just kind of possessed in wanting to collect anything related to Thoreau. The curator at the Thoreau Institute tells me that there’s 15,000 index items in the collection- the true size of the collection is really 40 or 50,000 things. If you imagine someone collecting 40 or 50,000 items for a library, that just boggles the mind. That’s really it: the collection, the books, and the people that still remember them him up in Concord.
What was your father's connection to SUNY Geneseo? Why did he choose to work there?
Harding: He was teaching down at the University of Virginia and it was probably his first job after getting his PhD. I’m not exactly sure why he decided not to stay there, but he was looking for a job and he came to Geneseo with my mother and spent the day at the college. They took my mother around to show her the town. My father said to my mother “I don’t think I’m interested in coming to Geneseo”, and my mother said she was absolutely interested in coming to Geneseo. They got in the car to drive back to Virginia. They made it to Wayland and my mother convinced him to call Franceis Moench, the president of the college at the time, and asked him if he could have a week to decide if he wanted to come to Geneseo. Then he decided and stayed there for about 40 years.
Yo mentioned before that you believed that your father's legacy is his collections of books, articles, and people he met. Can you expand upon that at all?
Harding: His legacy is his collections, the Thoreau Society, the books he wrote, and the fact that Thoreau went from being a no-one to a very well thought of author. In other words he took an author who everyone ignored in the 1930s and 1940s, and made him into a star of American literature. If you ask anyone up at the Society or in Concord, they will say that Thoreau wasn’t considered that important. But after my father got ahold of him, that all changed.