Recent Harvard graduates looking for jobs can quit their obnoxious whining: at least they’re not living in the Great Depression.

For the young Fletcher Hodges Jr. ’28, job prospects were grim after college; he swept slaughterhouse floors and was in the process of being rejected by Eli Lilly and Co., the drug firm, when fate struck in the form of a wonderfully unprofessional interview tactic.

The Washington Post quotes Hodges: “As I was leaving, [Josiah K. Lilly] pulled a sheet of music out of his desk, and he said, ‘Do you know anything about this?’ It was a copy of ‘My Old Kentucky Home,’ and I believed that it was the work of Stephen Collins Foster.” The Post notes that despite the correct answer, Hodges had “bare musical aptitude” at the time. Presumably this didn’t impair the career that resulted: a 51-year stint as curator of the world’s largest archive of Fosteriana.

The Foster collection, with Hodges in tow, soon relocated to Pittsburgh (Foster’s birthplace), where it has found its permanent home at the University of Pittsburgh. The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette is unapologetically sentimental about Hodges’ passing, dwelling on the positives: “So many, many people in Pittsburgh remember Fletcher with fondness,” the newspaper quotes Dean Root, the current archive curator.

The comparatively dry-eyed Post focuses more on themes of rejection and loss: “At Harvard, he... competed unsuccessfully for a place in the 1928 Olympics in the 100-yard dash. He was also turned down when he applied for a spot on the 1928 Antarctic Expedition led be explorer Richard E. Byrd.” In the next paragraph, we discover that he “rejoiced in reading about famous train wrecks... and tyrannical world leaders.”

Finally, Disney World’s 1930s-retro Adventurers’ Club, of Pleasure Island, has apparently been paying its own respectful, bizarre tribute to Hodges for years; here, an “interactive entertainment experience” includes a bespectacled, white-coated personage named Fletcher Hodges, the club curator, lovingly described as “slightly off-center” but nonetheless “the voice of authority regarding the Clubs [sic] eclectic artifact collection.”

And that, ladies and gentleman, is exactly what Andy Warhol was talking about.

Andy Warhol: also from Pittsburgh.