Hulse to publish book

Lloyd Hulse, professor emeritus of Spanish, loved Spanish from an early age. He was in grade school in La Grande when he caught a Mexico City radio station on the airwaves and first got an earful of Mexican Spanish with “the staccato sounds that I just loved.”

After high school in the 1940s, he hopped a Greyhound bus and headed for Mexico to perfect his Spanish.

He eventually earned his bachelor’s and master’s degrees in Spanish from Mexico City College (now the University of the Americas) and received his doctorate in Spanish from the University of Cincinnati.

As a Spanish professor at Lewis & Clark for nearly 25 years, Hulse especially enjoyed seeing students lose their fear of speaking and communicating in Spanish and develop a real love of the language and its sound.

His book, Tres Caminos Hacia El Sur (Three Roads Towards The South), to be published this fall by University Press of America, offers Spanish students the opportunity to learn more about the historical and cultural context in which Spanish is spoken.

The “three roads” refer to Latin America’s ethnic and geographical diversity, the common values of its cultural mainstream and Hulse’s own bicultural experience.

Whether singing Latin American folksongs with his wife, Ana Maria, a native of El Salvador, lecturing or speaking with friends and family members, Hulse is credited with a perfect Spanish accent.

“I’ve known only two or three people in my life who are so skilled bilingually that native speakers are unsure which of two languages is their native tongue,” says Bradley A. Shaw, associate professor of Spanish at Kansas State University and a former student of Hulse’s.

“Dr. Hulse is one of that select group. He taught me the importance of mutual respect in the classroom. He was a role model for me in terms of what it means to be a professor.”

–by Holly Johnson