Northwest Arkansas Democrat-Gazette
Special kind of teacher
UA professor has gift for making intimidating subject accessible.
“Anyone who joins the English faculty has to get used to experiencing a certain amount of friendly jealousy of Joe Candido. At one time or another, we’ve all heard our students tell each other that ‘Dr. Candido is the most amazing teacher ever.’ At such moments, one must have the grace to refrain from responding ‘I’m standing right here!’”
— Dr. Dorothy Stephens, chairman of the UA Department of English
J oe Candido always knew he wanted to be a teacher, but at first he didn’t know what sort.
He first taught English to high school sophomores in Connecticut where, between cafeteria duties and discipline, he hoped the literature would help students transcend their daily lives.
In his classroom one day, Candido reached the end of A Tale of Two Cities where the character Sydney Carton sacrifices his life for another man. Reading aloud as he often did, he recited those famous lines, “It is a far, far greater thing than I have ever done. It’s a far, far greater place that I go to than I have ever known.”
Candido lifted his eyes to meet a rare thing, the whole class staring right back at him.
“Here’s this wonderful work of literature that’s going to inspire these kids,” he thought. “This is an inspiring moment. Look at that, they’re all paying attention.”
Just then, in the back of the class, a girl’s hand shot up. “Aha!” he thought knowingly. “I left my gym bag in the other class, can I go get it?” she asked.
Deflated but with a good sense of humor, Candido relented. He should have known. This sort of thing was always happening with his high school students.
After returning to college to earn his master’s from the University of New Hampshire and a doctorate from Indiana University, Candido was able to catch students at the ideal time in their lives — when they’ve gone to college and actively chosen, for one reason or another, to be there.
A JOYFUL PERFORMER
For 36 years, Candido has taught English literature at the University of Arkansas, where he’s known for exuberant courses on Shakespeare. During most summers, he’s taken students to Europe to experience the classic plays firsthand at the Theater Royale on Drury Lane through the London study abroad program. In decades of teaching, he’s influenced somewhere in the realm of 7,000 students and taken them to well over 400 productions.
He has a gift for taking an intimidating subject, the most well known works of Elizabethan literature, and making it accessible and enjoyable for students.
Candido’s unbridled enthusiasm for the literature makes students sit up and listen.
“I looked for every class he had to offer each year,” says Adelaide Schaeffer, founder of Champions for Kids and a former student. “The content is not what I signed up for or what I remember.
“It was Dr. Candido’s personhood that I loved.”
He arrives in his classroom before anyone and sits casually on a desktop, dressed in bow tie, suspenders and jacket, to chat with students until it’s time to get down to business.
The bow tie is iconic, an image students always remember.
“The first thing you notice is the bow tie, of course,” says Camilla Shumaker, a former student who took every undergraduate class he offered. “But what really struck me is his passion for literature.”
Dot Stephens too, now chairman of English department, noticed it right away during her interview to join the UA faculty.
“The interview took place in a hotel room with 11-foot ceilings and Queen Anne furniture,” she says. “Joe Candido and Sidney Burris both wore red bow ties. Never having lived in a world that included bow ties, I was more than a little awed.”
In classes, Candido first reads a passage from the assignment, deliberately steady at first but growing more spirited as the performance comes to a climax.
“He doesn’t just lecture, it’s like he experiences the poem or play in front of you and shares that experience with you,” Shumaker says. “You can’t help but get excited about it.”
“Joe speaks with gorgeous fluency, seemingly off the top of his head, without referring to notes,” Stephens says. “He creates a kind of electricity about the subject matter.”
The classroom is his stage, and he revels in it.
Ask an English department adviser and he’ll tell you most students have a college bucket list item in common: Take a class from Candido.
“Anyone who joins the English faculty has to get used to experiencing a certain amount of friendly jealousy of Joe Candido,” Stephens says. “At one time or another, we’ve all heard our students tell each other that ‘Dr. Candido is the most amazing teacher ever.’ At such moments, one must have the grace to refrain from responding ‘I’m standing right here!’”
After teaching for nearly 40 years, Candido can’t believe his luck at landing the greatest job he could imagine.
Of course, some days are harder than others. So how does he keep going?
Take, for instance, an actor he met in London after a production of Cole Porter’s Anything Goes. The man was in his 60s, and Candido asked him how he summoned the energy to keep performing, sometimes multiple times daily.
The actor admitted that some days just walking into the theater doesn’t cut it. But once he hears the music, he’s there — ready and in love with it all over again.
The act of teaching refreshes and energizes Candido in much the same way.
“Some days I don’t really feel like doing it today, and then you’re there, and you see the kids, and you open the book and see the passage you’re going to do, it’s all great stuff, and you start reading it and then bingo! The blood starts flowing, and you don’t know where the energy comes from because the audience is there,” he says. “When you get those things together, it’s a performance.”
KNOCKED OUT OF THE PARK
Candido’s own love of reading grew from a love of sports. Summertime in New Haven, Conn., was one big baseball game, broken into intervals only because he had to go home for supper sometimes. When he wasn’t playing baseball with the neighborhood boys, he was trading baseball cards or reading a series of books by John R. Tunis, whose protagonists met difficulty in life and overcame it while playing baseball, football or basketball. Even then he saw the pattern in the plot, but he enjoyed every single one anyway.
His father took him to Yankee Stadium once a year and at home let him watch all the baseball he could find on TV — Yankees, Giants and Dodgers.
Watching his father work long, stressful days as an accountant made Candido search for a life path that wouldn’t keep him up late at night, turn him into a smoker and give him heart attacks at an early age.
He got a taste for hard physical labor when he worked road construction as a teenager. Coming home exhausted in the afternoons, Candido flipped through the college course catalogs he’d requested and received by mail. In one, from Colby College, he saw a picture of a boy reading in a library with snow falling past the window and instantly wanted that idyllic, academic life. He arrived at the private college in Maine in the 1960s.
THE SOUND OF MUSIC
When young people balk at Shakespeare’s language and wonder how they could ever understand such an ancient text, Candido has them recite the verses in class to get past the dialect and into the meaning.
“When they hit a wall or get to a point where they don’t enjoy it, I have them read the passage aloud,” he says. “And then they can see it, they can hear it and understand it. Then they’ve got it.”
Suddenly the characters are human again. Connecting with their worries, joys and desires brings the story back to a place where it can grip them.
The author of books King John: The Critical Tradition, Value and Vision in American Literature, Henry V: An Annotated Bibliography and Richard II, Henry IV I and II, & Henry V: An Annotated Bibliography of Shakespeare Studies 17771997, Candido is known for his expertise on Richard II and Henry IV.
In her tenure as an English student, Shumaker read Henry IV three times but says it never got old.
“He always put the literature in context,” she says. “I learned as much about Elizabethan history as I did about the literature, and it made his classes richer. He told us all the behind-thescenes details, all the historical and cultural things you wouldn’t know otherwise, including all the dirty jokes.”
“He brings the literature to life,” says Suzanne McCray, vice provost for enrollment management at the UA and a former student of Candido’s. “He gives you a bigger picture historically and what the messages were for various audiences. He wasn’t an actor exactly, but you could hear the part in his voice and at the really powerful parts, he’s up on his toes.”
Candido loves the two histories the best, he says, because of their lyrical value.
“They are the most like music,” he says. “When you recite it, especially Richard II, it’s such a musical and highly poetic play. The speeches made in it are very moving, very operatic, and I love the play for that.”
Candido finds music everywhere.
A sucker for French opera, Candido had the kitchen in his old Fayetteville bungalow redesigned and fitted with stereo speakers so he could indulge in his favorite pastime, listening to music while cooking and having a glass of wine.
The creations of Handel and Mozart, Puccini and Verdi move him in ways that are immediate. Literature takes time and work to interpret, to sift the layers of meaning, but music goes straight to his heart.
“Music is the greatest of the arts, greater even than literature,” he says. “It’s mysterious and transcendent. Literature you have to work hard at, but music, bingo! It just hits you right there.”
Naturally, he shares it with his students in a course that combines the works of Shakespeare and the operas that have been created over the years to portray them: Othello, Macbeth and Falstaff by Guiseppe Verdi; Romeo and Juliet by Charles Gounod and The Enchanted Island, which combines his third and fourth favorite Shakespearean plays, A Midsummer Night’s Dream and The Tempest.
During those summers in Europe, Candido ensured that students never missed the London Symphony Orchestra. Each time he arrived with a new gaggle of kids, they bought the cheapest and best seats in the house, the ones that placed them in back of the orchestra where they could get a clear look at the conductor’s face and the musicians’ hands.
LOVE’S LABOUR’S WON
Candido was a fifth-year graduate student checking his messages in the mail room of the English department when he noticed her and said, discreetly, to the secretary, “Who’s that?” They saw each other in the department on the way to classes and assistantships, but it wasn’t until Candido saw her at the campus Catholic church that he couldn’t believe his luck.
“I thought, ‘Wow, a pretty girl who’s majoring in English, who goes to church?!’”
He took his time approaching her until finally one night they met at the English department vending machines, got to talking and went out for a beer.
It was his formal dress — a daily tweed jacket and tie even while he was a graduate student — that first caught Ann Marie’s eye.
“Most of the people back then looked like hippies, even if they weren’t,” she says. “But he didn’t bother to look like one. In the age of nonconformity, that was a nonconformist thing to do.”
He had “Republican tendencies” and she had “Democratic tendencies,” but it never got in the way of their mutual faith, respect and love for each other. They were engaged six months later and married on Aug. 6, 1977.
Candido’s collegiate teaching career began at Oklahoma State University in Norman while Ann Marie was finishing her dissertation. The two moved into the Conquistador Apartments — where the shag carpet didn’t live up to the castle-like name. Both northerners, the pickups with gun racks in the back and ranch houses were a bit of a culture shock, but they warmed to the area.
When Ann Marie’s education was officially finished, they both found work as composition teachers at Iowa State University for a year. Going from graduate assistant salary to having two full-time incomes that totalled $22,000 made them rich overnight. But it was a tenured position Candido had his heart set on.
A year into his stint at Iowa State, Candido was a candidate for a teaching position at Idaho State when he got a call for an interview with UA English professor Ben Kimpel, for whom Kimpel Hall is named.
Entering a long room in the St. Moritz Hotel off Central Park in New York City, Candido found himself across the banquet style table from a rather large man, napkin tucked under his chin, who was eating a club sandwich and drinking coffee from a silver service.
Rather than talk through traditional interview points, they instead had a conversation about food. Sometime later, he was invited for a campus visit — and the rest is history.
Having found his home, he has no intention of leaving or retiring.
“I’ve always felt very, very fortunate that I’ve had a job that was never a job for me,” he says. “It was always recreational. I never considered it work.”
“Some days I don’t really feel like doing it today, and then you’re there, and you see the kids, and you open the book and see the passage you’re going to do, it’s all great stuff, and you starting reading it and then bingo! The blood starts flowing, and you don’t know where the energy comes from.”