WINFIELD W. SALISBURY II
by: Carol D. Smith

Spring 1970.  It was absolutely my last semester at San Jose State College.  My Major was Social Sciences (Liberal Arts) with a Minor in Psychology.  I was not a serious student, but I did well enough to stay off academic probation.  I was a sorority girl and a political conservative.  Both being very unpopular positions in the late-1960’s.

I registered for Sociology 171 – Personality and Social Structure – only to fulfill requisites for Upper Division classes so I could graduate with a B.A. in June.  I figured I could knock-off any term papers and still go about the business of planning for a wedding.  The date was set for the week after Commencement.

The class exceeded my personal agenda.  It shook me to my toes and altered the way I looked at things.  I “grew up” in the course of writing two term papers.   I have kept everything – the worksheets, the numerous handouts that teaching assistants (TA’s) distributed, the lengthy book list, and the papers I wrote.

Dr. Salisbury was demanding.  This was the warning emblazoned on the assignment for the first term paper:  “If the paper you write is not passing (C-) in quality of ideas, composition and form, it will be returned to you to do over until you get it right.”

He was a stickler for format.  He assigned a book that finally laid out (for me) how to write a decent paper, Encounter with Sociology: The Term Paper.

I started to read. And read. And read.  I was consumed with ideas.  I bought a package of 3 x 5 index cards.  I had notes arranged across the floor of my room at the sorority house.  I borrowed an electric typewriter and I started to compose.  The first term paper was delivered late (March 12, instead of March 5) but I got an A-plus.  Dr. Salisbury wrote on the cover page, “This is an excellent paper, and in terms of scholarship & comparison of ideas from different sources, the best one handed in.  Really worth waiting for …. The coverage & your outside reading was really impressive.”

 Dr. Salisbury extended a personal challenge.  In his words, “ … please don’t forget that the next … paper … requires … some self-insight (definitely related to the intellectual material, of course) added to the scholarly enterprise.”

This is where I began my own truly personal journey.  As a Psychology student, I had studied Freud, but I knew nothing about Carl Gustav Jung.   As a child, I had read the myths of Ancient Greece and Rome.  I loved the old fairy tales.  They were part of me.  The readings for the second paper included essays by Jung, Joseph Campbell’s The Hero with a Thousand Faces, and Mahoney’s The Meaning in Dreams and Dreaming.  A new world was opening up.  I finally understood what the fairy tales represented to me.  And most important, I started to keep a dream diary.

The events of the world outside of me were beginning to press in.  Anti-war protests were heating up across the United States.  On May 4, college students were shot at Kent State University. I responded by saying that I was “radicalized”.   I staggered through the last few weeks of the semester.  At some point, I must have realized I wasn’t going to finish the second term paper anywhere near the due date.  I took an “Incomplete” in the class. 

Hence, I did not graduate that June.  However, I carried on with the wedding plans. 

And I continued to read. On the honeymoon. During fishing trips.  On hiking trails. In our first apartment. And our second apartment. And the third. And the fourth. I carried packs of 3 x 5 cards in my purse.  My husband threatened to destroy my notes.  (I wasn’t a Feminist, yet, but the word “pig” was about to enter my vocabulary.)  Around the time of the first wedding anniversary, I began to dream dreams that were no longer fairy tales.  They were filled with a particular kind of psychic horror.  It was time to grow up and face reality.  I was no longer a pampered little girl – I was a woman living with an abusive man.  It was time to get up and go.  I had to prioritize things.  I had to finish the term paper and really graduate from college.

I met with Dr. Salisbury in his office at the San Jose State campus.  (I remember how his presence filled the room.)  I described dreams from my journal.  Something was going on in the dreams, but I just wasn’t getting the “picture”.   Dr. Salisbury was brutally honest. He explained, in Jungian terms, I had refused to “Cross the Threshold” – to move forward into adulthood.  He even roared, “Look at the way you’re dressed. You look like a little girl.”  (No one had ever spoken to me like that!)  I went home and borrowed an ancient manual typewriter, and then I worked on my term paper for a month of nights.  (In addition to a daytime job.) 

In October 1971, I handed in the finished term paper, along with a stamped self-addressed postcard for the final grade.  By Christmas, I had already left the marriage.

A few weeks into 1972, I received the postcard.

In my handwriting, it read: 

Completion of requirements for Soc. 171, Spring ’70 –

Paper II  _____ Grade
Course   _____ Grade
Date _________.

Dr. Salisbury entered the details  “A” … “A” … “ 1/31/72”  And his personal note:

“Please contact me.  I am thinking of handing out one edited copy of each paper as an example. This could be used for Jung. I need your permission & editing.  Call xxx-xxxx.”

I think I telephoned Dr. Salisbury.  I don’t remember seeing him again.  I finally received my degree, from California State University at San Jose.  From time to time, I wondered how he used the term papers in his classes.   Politics aside – if that’s possible – as I am once more a conservative - I still stand by the term papers I wrote then. 

My life has been richer – and happier – for having taken the Hero’s Journey.  I didn’t “rush” back into marriage.  In the late 1970’s, while living in San Diego, I was fortunate to meet a “guru” of Jungian Analysis, Robert A. Johnson – author of HE: Understanding Masculine Psychology (1974) and SHE: Understanding Feminine Psychology (1976).  He was already quite “ancient” (to me) and ailing, at the time I met him.  I also met John A. Sanford – author of Dreams:  God’s Forgotten Language.

The years since have been filled with 25-plus years of marriage, more college (a B.S. degree), raising two kids, and holding down a job. But I knew all along, that wasn’t all there was to me.  About ten years ago, I picked up a copy of Women Who Run with the Wolves: Myths & Stories of the Wild Woman Archetype by Clarissa Pinkola Estes.  I laughed and I cried while I read the book; as if I were visiting old friends I hadn’t seen for a long time.

And this brings me to the present.   My son writes screenplays for movies.  He has now discovered Jung and Joseph Campbell.  I was sharing my books and audiotapes with him, when I began to wonder about my old teacher. 

Thank Goodness for the Internet.  That’s how I found all the autobiographical information about Winfield W. Salisbury, the father of my professor.

I was saddened when I found out that my teacher is now deceased.

Carol D. Smith
Poulsbo, Washington
September 2004