Carleton's Favorite Poet on "Desperate Housewives" Finale

Some of you may have been perplexed to see a recent online posting, “Carleton’s favorite poet makes his acting debut in the season finale of Desperate Housewives,” accompanied by a picture of a bust of the German poet Johann Christoph Friedrich von Schiller between two of the cast members. An Emmy-worthy performance by the bust was predicted.

Here are some highlights of association with Schiller. A bust of Schiller once graced Carleton’s Scoville Library until it was banished to the storage room of the solarium. In 1957 a student purloined it to decorate his dorm room. Others coveted the bust and it was passed surreptitiously among the students, even landing in the garden of Carleton president Larry Gould before his retirement in 1962. (At that time Schiller adopted the habit of wearing Gould’s signature red tie.)

Check out the adventures of Schiller by clicking on the photos

On November 10, 1962, the bust of Schiller (red tie and all) appeared dangling from a helicopter over Laird Field during a Carleton football game versus Lawrence. The crowd roared when they realized it was Schiller at the end of the 50-foot chain. In October of 1965, the guardian of Schiller arrived on horseback with Schiller at a football game and the bust was busted when it was dropped. Mac Welles of Duluth took it home with him and reconstructed the bust (he recently donated slides of the process to the Carleton Archives).

In the spring of 1977, the bust was taken on a shopping spree in downtown Northfield where it was pictured trying on ties in Perman’s and made a stop at Tiny’s Smoke Shop for a cigar and a hot dog. It was in this year that Schiller became a Carleton grad, arriving at commencement on a motorcycle, clad in a red tie and mortar board as he accepted a diploma. In 1996, one of the periodic bust replacements took place when scuba divers emerged from the Cannon River with the old bust for an elaborate exchange ceremony for a newer model.

Then, when President Bill Clinton gave the commencement address at Carleton in June of 2000, he held the bust of Schiller high, calling it “a souvenir of my stay here.” He revealed that he had agreed to give Schiller a ride on Air Force One “to sort of add to the legend.”

When Steven Poskanzer became Carleton’s new president in the fall of 2010, he was entrusted with the bust and endeared himself to the college community by snapping photos with a self-timer of his budding “bromance” with the bust: shaving with Schiller, riding on a scooter with him, reading bedtime stories to him and dining by candlelight together.

Schiller’s role on the “Desperate Housewives” show on May 13 will not be Schiller’s first television appearance. In the summer of 2010, the bust was held up at the end of “The Colbert Report” and quoted by host Stephen Colbert, thanks to show writer Peter Gwinn, Class of 1993. For the greater glory of Carleton, one can only hope that Schiller’s “acting debut” on Wisteria Lane this Sunday is not a bust.