Two-time Pulitzer Prize winning poet Carl Sandburg, then age 85, was a guest performer at the State College of Iowa in Cedar Falls when I was a freshman. Sixty years ago.
This sold-out concert, “An Evening With Carl Sandburg,” according to the February 15, 1963 edition of The College Eye, was a special addition to the scheduled 1962-63 Lecture Concert Series.
“Mr. Sandburg’s visit to campus will probably mark his last tour in the Midwest,” said Dr. Howard Jones, committee chairman.
Carl Sandburg’s concert of reciting poetry, lecture and singing folk songs was held February 22, 1963, in the old Auditorium.
Mary Furlong, Feature Editor of The College Eye, wrote in the March 1 edition that Carl Sandburg was relaxed during the concert, “with a blanket spread over his lap, his long white hair slipping down.”
Sandburg’s biography, Abraham Lincoln: The War Years, won the Pulitzer Prize for history in 1940.
He won the 1951 Pulitzer Prize for poetry for his Complete Poems.
The amazing thing was that I was there that night. Carl Sandburg may be the most famous man I’ve seen in person, other than two U.S. Presidents. Certainly he is the only one with a Pulitzer Prize. Or two.
A reader asked whether there might be a recording of Sandburg singing. I found this.