C. Esco Obermann (1904-1999)

Esco Obermann died of cancer early evening on March 22, 1999. His contributions to the Center that bears his name were enormous.

In the mid-seventies, Esco and University of Iowa President Sandy Boyd and Vice President D. C. Spriestersbach discussed the idea of an institute that would encourage the exchange of ideas among researchers from many disciplines and institutions. That idea was formalized as University House in 1978 and then, nurtured by generous funding from Esco and Avalon Obermann and from the Vice President for Research, grew into the University of Iowa Center for Advanced Studies in 1990. In 1993, with great ceremony and celebration, it was renamed the C. Esco and Avalon L. Obermann Center for Advanced Studies.

Esco Obermann & U.I. President Coleman

Esco’s financial commitment to the Obermann Center was quite extraordinary but no more so than his intellectual commitment to interdisciplinary and collaborative scholarship. Esco was able to see his dream realized in the creation of the Obermann Center and then, just recently, in the Provost’s identifying interdisciplinary research as a major University strategic goal.

Esco loved to recount the tale of how The University of Iowa expanded the universe of this farm kid from Pleasant Grove, Iowa (Esco once joked that, when he went to high school, he was not sure he could compete successfully with the urban sophisticates from nearby Mediapolis). The University of Iowa represented a vast world of intellectual horizons and Esco wished to pursue all of them, while also participating in singing, debating, and varsity gymnastics. (Even late in life, Esco was taking singing lessons from an opera student and was a great supporter of Tom Dunn’s gymnastics teams. For one of their final visits with Esco at the Iowa City Convalescent Center, Jay and Theresa Semel made a late night beer run; Esco, with paper cup in hand, sang a few choruses of “Danny Boy,” then coached Theresa in the fine points of improving her handstand.)

After getting his bachelor’s degree, Esco went to Chicago to try to become a professional “pseudo-Irish tenor” (he claimed he had considered a stage name of O’bermann) but then returned to The University of Iowa to get a Masters degree and later a Ph.D. in clinical psychology and speech pathology. World War II found him a colonel in the Army Air Corps stationed at Fort Randolph. His final assignment was to offer vocational counseling to servicemen being mustered out. Upon his own discharge, he worked at the Veteran’s Administration and then directed the St. Paul Rehabilitation Center.

He also held positions on the faculty of Iowa, Texas, Iowa Wesleyan, and the University of Minnesota at Morris. While a research fellow at the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare, he wrote The History of Vocational Rehabilitation in America (Minneapolis: Denison, 1965).

When his wife Avalon died, he sold their farm in Afton, Minnesota, and moved to Iowa City, where he became a frequent visitor to the Center, eager to learn from the Center Scholars and to encourage the Center director. Esco’s own interests focused on world hunger and on child education.

Esco made it his practice to welcome the incoming Obermann Fellows participating in the Center’s summer research seminars. He loved the idea of high-powered researchers coming to Iowa from all over the world. He always invited them to look out the window to the fields beyond: “There is a lot to learn from a cornfield,” he would say.

The remarks inspired Larry Griffin, an Obermann Fellow in an international research seminar on Walt Whitman, to write this poem:

The Emancipated Cornfield In the middle of an Iowa cornfield, Yellow with the third month stubble Beneath blue sky with tall cedars Green on the horizon, I hear Whitman sung in ten tongues, And blackbirds move in the sky Like my heart through the sound Transparency in which we merge.

Esco was buried with full military honors in the church yard at Pleasant Grove, overlooking rolling Iowa cornfields.