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In the fall of 1969, on the first day of my junior year at Concordia Senior College, in Biblical Greek class (or maybe Theological German or Biblical Hebrew—required subjects, all), our professor, a gruff, elderly fellow whose name I have long forgotten and of whose class these fifty-some years later I hold only the one solitary memory I am about to tell you, called the roll. Because Concordia was a senior college, not a four-year school, the professor was unacquainted with his incoming students until that first day of the school year. I remember the roll call, but I do not remember any of the names that came before my own on that alphabetical class list and just one of the names that followed mine.
“Grossmann, Gordon!” the professor called out when it was my turn.
“Present!” I affirmed.
And so on, until the professor arrived at “Pagan, Richard!” and pronounced the name Pah-GAHN.
The student answered, “Present! But that’s ‘PAY-gun,’ sir. And I go by ‘Rich.’”
“Thank you, Mr. Pah-GAHN,” the professor said dryly. And just as dryly he insisted, “I shall have no pagans in my class.”
We juniors chuckled cheerfully, though our learned Lutheran leader had not yet cracked a smile.
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Now, here is something funny. Not funny ha, ha, but funny curious, puzzling. In doing my research for this WoW, I Googled Rich Pagan. I Googled “rev rich pagan” without the quotes, and darned if Google didn’t bring up a guy, very first hit, that could be him, pretty sure it’s him, my classmate. What I find funny is that the guy I found is Rich Pagán with an accent in his name. Was that his name all along? Was that little speck over the second vowel of his surname simply too great an inconvenience, back in the days of typewriters? But if the accent was there, in their handwritten signatures, how would Rich and his family have come to pronounce their name as if it wasn’t? How do the Pagáns pronounce it now? Did the witty professor inspire a revision of Rich’s identity? Who was that professor, and if I find him on the Internet, will I learn that he only seemed “elderly” to me when I was a twenty-year-old boy? Which of the languages did we study in that class, and isn’t it a shame I was never offered a chance to study Latin?
More questions will occur to me, no doubt, and if you, dear reader, have questions of your own, please let me know. I plan to write to Pastor Rich Pagán and invite him to fact-check my story and to put a little light on some of the related uncertainties.
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