Graduate Janitor

On the platform at the commencement exercises of Jesuit University of Detroit last week a grizzled oldster nervously adjusted his hood. As the name Adam Denhardt was called, he stepped up to become a Master of Arts. What made Master of Arts Denhardt remarkable was not his age (64) but the fact that so far as could be determined he is the first public school janitor in the U. S. to earn a graduate degree.

Interviewed by newshawks in his office at the Winterhalter School, Janitor Denhardt calmly displayed his two caps (one with a special officer's badge for directing traffic), a tin lunch bucket, a neat list of his day's duties beginning "Faucets to be repaired," a pile of English and German books. No ordinary janitor, Adam Denhardt was a German teacher for 33 years until he was pensioned off in 1924. When he and his wife Agate went to the U. S., leaving their three daughters behind, the only job he could get was one as "house father" at Detroit's Protestant German Orphan Home. A school janitor for the past eleven years, old Mr. Denhardt began studying nights at the University of Detroit three years ago. He wrote his thesis, in French, on Victor Hugo et la Nature.

Before going back to work, scholarly Janitor Denhardt observed: "I am unhappy unless I am busy. ... I started to study theology once, but I dropped it. I now have no faith. The existing faiths, they do not convince me, though I would like to believe. ... I have no political opinions either. I was a member of the Provincial Legislature in Germany once. Then after the War there .was . . . violence and beatings and I could not stand seeing that. I would never be interested in politics again. It is not civilized."

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