Violetta Halpert; Librarian and folklore muse, she helped build Memorial's folklore collection
Hyfler/Rosner
VIOLETTA HALPERT, 90 / LIBRARIAN AND FOLKLORE MUSE
She helped build Memorial's folklore collection
SANDRA MARTIN
Globe and Mail
June 5, 2009
Violetta (Letty) Halpert was not one to hog the limelight. Married for
more than half a century to the eminent folklorist Herbert Halpert, she
worked behind the scenes, editing his scholarly work and collecting and
cataloguing materials, books and tales.
"They were a wonderful team. Whatever he knew, she knew as well," said
Martin Lovelace, former head of the folklore department at Memorial
University. "She was absolutely devoted to him and his work, but her
work was really important as well, and it is unfortunate that she didn't
publish more."
Folklore is as intrinsic as the sea to Newfoundland history and culture.
The American born and trained Halperts turned it into a thriving
academic discipline at Memorial in St. John's, drawing scholars and
students from around the world. Prof. Halpert helped found the
Department of Folklore in 1968 and served as its inaugural chair.
As a research associate, Mrs. Halpert set precise and thorough
classifications and standards for the cataloguing of folklore materials;
as an assiduous collector and compiler, she was instrumental in
acquiring books and materials to make the university's folklore
collection the best in Canada and among the most significant anywhere in
the world.
"Without her, the program would have not have developed as it did, and
they would not have had the archives that they do," said York University
folklorist Carole Carpenter.
Mrs. Halpert's own research focused on traditional folk beliefs,
especially surrounding death. Her article, "Death Warnings in
Newfoundland Oral Traditions" was published in Studies in Newfoundland
Folklore: Community and Process, edited by Gerald Thomas and J.D.A.
Widdowson.
"Letty had a compendious knowledge of the literature of folklore and she
specialized in beliefs and customs and material culture, such as
textiles and quilting - the stuff that Herbert wasn't so interested in,"
Prof. Lovelace said.
Described as her husband's "best editor, supporter and colleague," Mrs.
Halpert also served as an unofficial adviser and editor to graduate
students, including Prof. Carpenter.
"Letty was a strong-willed, dignified, knowledgeable woman, who was
extremely widely read and a wonderful conversationalist," she said. "I
tried my darndest to be the daughter she never had."
Born just after the First World War, Letty Maloney grew up in
Pennsylvania and graduated with a bachelor's degree in English
literature from Wilson College. Then she went to Indiana University in
Bloomington for a master's degree, where she did further courses in
folklore with Stith Thompson, author of the Motif-Index of Folk Literature.
It was at Indiana, in 1940, that she met Mr. Halpert, who was one of
Prof. Thompson's doctoral students. They were married during the war;
their son, Nicholas, was born in the late 1940s.
One of the first women to enlist in the newly formed WAVES after the
United States joined the war after Pearl Harbor in December, 1941, she
served as a supply officer and a recruitment officer and eventually rose
to the rank of lieutenant.
Her husband's career was the dominant one, but she never abandoned
folklore as a scholarly pursuit. She chronicled folkloric works in
progress for the Journal of American Folklore in the 1950s and
researched a variety of genres, including folk cures, skipping rhymes,
songs and dances and death beliefs.
Besides being a homemaker, she found sessional teaching positions at the
universities that employed her husband and worked briefly as a
journalist for a weekly newspaper in Carlinville, Ill.
In 1962, the Halperts left for the English Department at Memorial, then
just 13 years old as a university. At the time, there was a
disinclination to hire married couples as full-time faculty in the same
department, and, of course, Mrs. Halpert did not have a PhD - the
academic's union card. The following year she joined the acquisitions
department of the university library.
After her husband's death in December, 2000, Mrs. Halpert donated his
huge personal library to the university and later arranged for her own
extensive collection to go there as well.
A year ago, Mrs. Halpert was awarded the Marius Barbeau Medal by the
Folklore Studies Association of Canada for her "unsung" work in building
"a world-class folklore library and nationally recognized folklore
archives" at Memorial.
LETTY HALPERT
Violetta (Letty) Halpert was born May 16, 1919, in Pottsdown, Penn. She
died in St. John's on May 30, 2009. She was 90. She leaves her son
Nicholas and her extended family.