LEIGH LISKER (1918—2006)

Carol Lisker Kennedy
Comments on her father, Leigh Lisker

My father was one of a kind. I think of him as the epitome of the stereotypical brilliant but absent-minded professor, a man who always had a whole universe unfolding inside his head, even when he seemed to be very passive. Sometimes what was going on in there was a comparison of sound pairs, like "Did they fix the spout?" and "Did they fix this bout?" Sometimes there were more speech perception experiments he wanted to run. Ideas just popped into his head, willy nilly, all the time, and he had to pursue them. At times when he seemed to be distant from what was going on around him, it was really because he had so much going on in his mind.

At other times, however, my father was tuned in perfectly to what was going on around him. He could take in what was happening in the present and put his own take on it, based on his wisdom, thoughtfulness, and years of experience. This is what made him a brilliant teacher. I remember one instance of this clearly. We had dinner guests, and someone made a racist remark. The rest of our family sat in embarrassed, stunned silence, not knowing how to respond, but my father, in a calm and pleasant voice, began to recount a scene he had witnessed during the Depression, of African Americans lining up beginning at 3 in the morning because they had heard that the city was hiring and they were so eager for work. With that one mild observation, he squelched the racist blather that had begun and the discussion moved on to other topics.

The universe unfolding inside my father's head mainly concerned his insatiable curiosity about language and how it works. His field became phonetics, but he was interested in every aspect of language, from semantics, to regional pronunciations, to the psychology of language, to studying just about every language he had heard of. He would pick up a grammar of some language, say Malayalam, or Japanese, and study it, just for fun. He would sit in on Russian classes at the university and try out his Arabic with the local restaurant owner in Wallingford. When he lived in Poona, India, for a year, he studied not only the Dravidian languages he had come there to research and teach, but also Hindi and Marathi, the local languages. He taught me the Hindi alphabet that year. Another time, he taught me the Hebrew alphabet and a little bit of Hebrew.

His study of Hebrew makes an interesting story. When he was twelve or thirteen, his best friend was going to be Bar Mitzvah'd. My father himself would not be having a Bar Mitzvah, as his father wasn't religious at all. Anyway, the friend told his parents he refused to be Bar Mitzvah'd unless his friend Len could go to the Hebrew sessions with him. My father agreed to go to the sessions because he would get some Hebrew lessons out of the experience. So that was their bargain, and the boy's parents had to comply.

Leigh Lisker (aka "Len") started life in a working class family in Philadelphia, the son of immigrants. He dropped out of high school for two years to go to work because it was the Depression and the family was struggling. When he went back to school he won a scholarship to Penn. According to my grandfather, he also won a scholarship to study the violin at Curtis, although my father denied this when I asked him about it. After majoring in German at Penn, he joined the army and worked as an interrogator in the Mediterranean Theater.

At the beginning of the Second World War, right after he graduated from college, Leigh and his friend Izzy Golden, who jointly owned an old car, pooled their gasoline ration coupons, bought a tank of gas, and headed west through Pennsylvania. The tank of gas ran out as they approached the top of a big hill. They managed to push the car to the top of the hill and coasted to the bottom, where, conveniently, there was a gas station and, even more conveniently, they were in a county where rationing was not in effect. They were able to continue their road trip all the way to Mexico.

My father's friend Milton Dank was not able to be here today because he is suffering from a bad cold. He grew up with Leigh at Overbrook High School, and they competed for the prestigious Mayer scholarship to attend the University of Pennsylvania. In the end, the school allowed two awards that year, so they both got to attend Penn tuition free. The war separated them, but afterwards Milton and Leigh got together again, and were fast friends right up until the end of my dad's life.

My father had a few stories about the war. One of them was that when he first found himself in north Africa, he wrote his father a letter referring to the new Humphrey Bogart movie. The men had been given orders not to divulge their location to anyone, but he figured that by mentioning the movie, a little sleeper called "Casablanca", he was making sure his father would figure out where he was. It worked.

The other story was about how he just missed the allied landing at Anzio. Stationed in Tunis, one day he had a headache so he went to the infirmary. They kept him there a half hour, and when he got back to quarters, everyone else had left. Their mission: Anzio.

Because of my father, I got to travel all over the world at a young age, and all three of his children inherited to some extent both his interest in and gift for languages, and his unquenchable thirst for knowledge. (Some of his interest in language learning also rubbed off on my mother, who started Russian classes at the age of 44. He was thrilled to learn of my daughter Susan's achievements in French and Spanish, and was excited when she took up Japanese a year ago.) As a child, I lived in two different major cities in India, and in Stockholm, and got to see fourteen different countries before the age of twelve. My father loved to travel, and jumped at the chance to be a visiting professor in a foreign university, and to attend international conferences in linguistics, phonetics, and South Asian studies. Even in the past five years, with failing health, he made his very first trips to Spain, Croatia, Berlin, the Loire Valley, and the Grand Canyon.

In addition to studying violin as a youth, my dad took up the cello, the flute and the piano as an adult. When he was in India he took tabla lessons and dabbled in sitar and veena. He and my mother had their concert series and their remarkable collection of classical records, as well as Indian, Russian, French and Jewish folk music.

Yes, he was a remarkable man, and a remarkable father and grandfather. We all miss him and celebrate what he left us. And he left us a lot! As I said to the realtor, my father never threw anything away. I still have a million little tiny scraps of paper with things written on them like "It's stuffy, it's Duffy, it's tuffy" or "Will you close the store" and "Will you close this door?" Other tiny scraps of paper mention books and movies that his friends and family recommended. There are about 25 different address books, 15 or so calculators, a million paper clips and every paper every student ever asked him to read and critique. Maybe growing up with so little, he had a hard time parting with anything. Maybe he was simply the absent-minded professor. But in any case he was one of a kind, a unique individual, and I am grateful to find memories of him in so many places.

A little later I will share with you some of the messages from former colleagues and students. But now I would like to introduce Arthur Abramson, one of my father's dearest friends and his collaborator on much of the speech research he did.

Leigh Lisker, Caryl Haskins (founder of Haskins Laboratories) and
Arthur Abramson