John Perry: First Professor
John Perry was traveling in Europe and Great Britain in the summer of 1975 when he was notified of a teaching position at Lake Tahoe Community College (LTCC), which was to open that fall. He gladly jumped on the chance, he says, rather than return to the college in Wyoming where he was a tenured professor. (Having grown up in a small town in South Dakota, he had had enough of the bitterly cold winters of the Northern Plains.) In the years since, Perry has not only gifted students with his passionate and effective teaching, he also has given them, and the greater South Lake Tahoe community, an opportunity to experience ancient history firsthand through the artifacts he has acquired.
When the college began offering classes in the fall of 1975 in a former motel on Highway 50, and Perry arrived early to teach the very first class, he found students lined up at his door, and his makeshift classroom soon overcrowded. In the intervening years, Perry has taught history, sociology, political science, geography and humanities and, he says, loved nearly every minute of it.
A few years ago, Perry "retired" from full-time teaching; the transition was marked by a ceremony that was part of the college's spring graduation ceremony. However, the event was overshadowed by a forest fire, news of which filled the pages of the Tahoe Daily Tribune. As very few had learned about his retirement, he jokes, Perry decided to continue teaching as if it hadn't happened.
Now an emeritus faculty member, he is full of plans for the future and for ways in which the knowledge of earlier times might be imparted to his students.
At the heart of these plans is the Perry Foundation. Earlier in his teaching career at the college, Perry thought it important that students actually see some of the ancient writings, ceramics and other artifacts that are discussed in his classes. So whenever possible he arranged trips to San Francisco museums. After passage of Proposition 13, however, funding for such trips dried up, and Perry had to find another way to show his students real objects.
His solution was to establish within the college a nonprofit foundation that would acquire and display ceramics, basketry, metalwork and other objects related to his curricula. With support from the LTCC board and administration, he was able to set up the foundation in June of 1988. In the years since, with the help of gifts from several individuals but mostly with Perry's own money, he has built a collection comprised of thousands of objects, including ceramics, glassware, metal work, basketry, European porcelain, maps, etchings, engravings and related books.
Perry is particularly proud of several pieces of paleolithic and neolithic stonework, an Egyptian stone cosmetic dish dating to 6,100 BC and alabaster vase from 5,100 BC; two high Sumerian clay tablets with cuneiform writing; several fine ceramic containers from Hellenic Greece; and a number of early Middle Eastern and Mediterranean weapons. The oldest piece in his collection is a hand axe aged a quarter of a million years. He also enjoys showing visitors more recent objects, including the Native American basket collection donated by former South Lake Tahoe mayor Ken Smith, and his wife and a very fine art nouveau vase by the great French glass artist Emile Gallé. The Perry collection is open to the public during scheduled events and by appointment.
Although many of the pieces in the collection are quite rare, Perry, well aware of the Getty Museum's current troubles with looted antiquities, emphasizes that the collection contains no "national treasures." It is, he says, a teaching collection, one that shows the development of such arts over the centuries and in different regions of the world.
"I like to build sequences, horizontally and vertically," he says, " to show changes that occur," such as when 7,000-year-old glazes were replaced by porous vessels that cooled beverages by evaporation. "There's a lot of work to building a collection, but the great reward is in being able to handle pieces that are thousands of years old." He is further rewarded, he says, whenever a former student reminds him of having seen or touched a certain piece, the memory of which stayed with them.
Perry, who also holds the distinction of being an elected fellow of the Corning Museum of Glass in New York, keeps roughly a twentieth of the collection on display in his classroom in secure glass cases. Rotating the display, deciding what to show and what to keep in storage, is not easy, however, and he has some hope that he may gain a larger display space with the development of the new college library scheduled to open this fall.
In the meantime, Perry is happy to show students of any age his fascinating collection. It is but one way that this consummate educator is continuing the important role that he has filled for over 30 years.
—Jerome Evans