D: This is Denise Stobbie and I am interviewing Professor Emeritus Richard B.
 Stephens in his Gainesville, Florida, home.

R: As I said to you when you first came in, I thought it would be interesting
 in the little time I was waiting for you to think back about the people
 who really had the most profound effect on me from the standpoint of my
 writing and teaching, the most profound effect on the professional things
 that I have done. I quickly got back to my father, of course, which is a
 sensible enough place to start. He was an Englishman who came to this
 country at a pretty early age, in his teens, with practically no
 education. Without much formal schooling, he joined the Baptist ministry.
 As a matter of fact, he had a church in Jacksonville, Illinois, for a
 time, but he felt the ministry was not exactly made for him although he
 stayed a very religious person all his life. He left that to go to school
 and was admitted to the University of Chicago without ever having had the
 equivalent of a high school education. He graduated Phi Beta Kappa from
 the University of Chicago, after I was born. He was a fairly stern
 father, but he had an Englishman's kind of jolly sense of humor. It was a
 pretty good mix. I think I can properly say we were good friends, at
 least after I had attained maturity. He had, I suppose in part from his
 training in the ministry a great way of articulating his thoughts, a great
 way of getting his thoughts across to people. I did not, at the time,
 study that consciously, but I am conscious now of his getting me started
 in that direction.

D: What did he study in college?

R: He studied English in college, majored in English. I do not know why he
 did that. He had no means, no wealth or anything and in fact, went to
 work for a time for my uncle's business in Chicago. They were in the
 grain business for years. That was not a happy arrangement for anybody, I
 think.

D: What is his full name?

R: Percy William Stephens. I think they used Percy in a denigrating way
 which sort of reflected their relationship. So he left them at a farily
 early time and set up business for himself, which was quite successful for
 a time but was overcome badly by the Great Depression along about in the
 early 1930s. He really never fully recovered from that. But he
 unquestionably, as I think back upon it he had a very profound effect on
 me.

 I move now, and this may seem odd, to a teacher I had in the sixth grade.
 Her name was O'Connor, and a stern and forbidding figure at that. She
 taught us arithmetic. She would ask a question and you would answer
 somewhat timidly. When you answered she would say, "Do you know you
 know?" in a stern, profound, fashion. This shook you right down to your
 boots, and you asked yourself, "Do I know that I am right about this?"
 That thought, "Do you know you know?" has stuck with me all my life. Some
 things you think you know and some things you know you know. In
 arithmetic, as we were learning it as children, you could know if you
 were right and when you should be right, you see. I think she had a
 profound effect in that fashion on my later thinking and analysis of
 things. We need not waste anymore time or spend anymore time on Miss


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