Tristram ("Tris") The Potter Coffin (February 13, 1922 - January 31, 2012) is an American folklorist and prominent scholar of ballad texts in the 20th century. Coffin spent most of his career at the University of Pennsylvania, where he was an English professor and co-founder of the Folklore Department. He is the author of 20 books and over 100 scientific articles and reviews.
Video Tristram P. Coffin
Biography
Coffin was born February 13, 1922 in San Marino, California, son of Tristram Roberts Coffin, an earlier investment banker in Richmond, Indiana and New York City, and Elsie Potter Robinson from Edgewood Farm, Wakefield, Rhode Island. He has an older sister, Trelsie Coffin Buffum Lucas (1918-1987); brother Roberts Robinson Coffin, who died shortly after birth in 1920; and a younger brother, Peter Robinson Coffin (1923-1998), who is also a college professor. He also has an older half-brother, Lydia, and half-brother, Richard, from his father's first marriage.
Coming to Rhode Island after his father died of influenza in 1927, he was educated at Providence Country Day School, Moses Brown School (1939) in Providence, and then Haverford College (1943) outside of Philadelphia. After three years at the United States Air Force Corps and Corps Signal during World War II, he completed his MA and PhD from the University of Pennsylvania.
Through his father, he is a direct descendant of Tristram Coffin, one of the original permanent settlers on Nantucket Island in 1660.
In 1944, he married Ruth Anne ("Rusty") Hendrickson (28 May 1922 - 5 August 2011), an original administrator and school of Columbus, Ohio, who attended Madeira School in McLean, Virginia, and Bryn Mawr College in Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania. They have four children, eleven grandchildren, and many dogs.
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Careers
Coffin is an Associate Professor of English at Granville, Ohio's Denison University, where he teaches and trains (tennis and soccer) for nine years (1949-58). He was elected to the Denison University Athletic Hall of Fame in 1986 and Tristram P. Coffin Scholarship was founded inside and his wife, Ruth Anne, honored in 1994 by William G. Bowen of Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.
In 1959 he moved to the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia where he taught until he retired. With MacEdward Leach, he co-founded the Department of Folklore in Penn, and became full professor in the English department and Folklore, as well as Vice Dean of the Graduate School of Arts and Science.
During his career he was also a visiting lecturer at UCLA, University of Rhode Island, Providence College, and in 1962 and 1963 was Visiting Literary Professor at the US Military Academy at West Point, one of the first civilians to teach there. After his retirement, he became a Lecturer at Folklore at Providence College and at the University of Rhode Island.
Affiliate
Coffin is a former Secretary-Treasurer of the American People's Folklore, as well as their Memoir Editors and their Bibliographic Series and was selected as a member of the group. A Guggenheim Fellow in 1953, he was the twentieth-century high scholar of the ballad text, listed in the Who's Who in America Millennium Edition, and highly respected internationally.
He is a member of the Phi Beta Kappa Society and the Delta Upsilon fraternity. Membership of the club includes Merion Cricket Club (Haverford, Pennsylvania), URI University Club (Kingston, Rhode Island), The Dunes Club and Point Judith Country Club (both Narragansett, Rhode Island).
Television
While in Philadelphia, Coffin is active in educational television, appearing in over 100 shows in Folklore and Shakespeare. She also hosts the National Education Television (PBS pioneer), "Lyrics and Legend", which is featured nationally, and the editor-in-charge of the "American Folklore" series for Voice of America.
Publications
Dr. Coffin is an authority in the English, Scottish and American ballads. His book, British Traditional Ballad in North America , has been the standard reference text for over 50 years. In addition to numerous scientific publications, he also publishes some commercial works. The Book of Christmas Folklore is a Choice of Book-of-the-Moon Club, and The Old Ball Game: Baseball in Folklore and Fiction , Uncertain Glory - Stories The people of the American Revolution, the Heroes of the Woman and the Sexual Stories Book are widely read. With Hennig Cohen, he also publishes Folklore of the American Holidays , other standard references. Finally, Dr. Coffin edited the book Our Living Traditions , where folklorist Richard Dorson makes use of the first phrase known as "urban legend". Overall, Dr. Coffin publishes 20 books and over 100 articles, encyclopedia entries, and reviews.
Interests
The coffin is very fond of sports. He coached Denison University's tennis team to five titles in the old Ohio Conference. He always felt the most satisfying achievement of his career was, without ever playing football, taking over the men's university Denison University who had gone 0-10 in 1955 and, with the same football team, won the Ohio Conference league in 1956 with a Record 6-2-2. He changed what is usually his hobby and recreation into a part-time job. A tennis player and a college coach, he uses this ability during his summer vacation from teaching as first assistant, assistant and then, tennis pro ten at Point Judith Country Club for 23 years. He also commemorates football for 15 years in the Philadelphia area. He wrote two books on tennis: a novel, Girls Great Games , and a handbook for club players, How to Play Tennis with What You've Got.
Coffin has a lot of interests, including intellectual subjects, social and civic issues, and almost all sports (even including extensive knowledge of horse racing and horse breeding), combined with an important sense of humor, and a special love for Gordon Setters.
References
Source of the article : Wikipedia
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