Carver's only serious romantic relationship (1903), his type of aloneness, and his troubles with Tuskegee's administration and staff (1902-1911).
 |
| |
 |
| |
A friend called Carver “too busy to make money.” Imes confirmed this, saying he was too busy even to cash his paychecks from the school. “His attitude toward money,” he said, “was one of total indifference, so far as his personal uses of it were concerned... In auditing the books at the close of the school year,… the Institute… found… discrepancies,… the result of Dr. Carver’s failure to cash his…checks for months at a time.” “There were times,” a student said, “when some of us were sent out by the bookkeeper to tell him to cash his checks... He would laugh, pulling… from his pockets… many pieces of paper on which he had made notes,… and finding not only one check, but two or three.” One student suggested that the bookkeepers on some occasions didn’t inform Carver about the checks, but “straightened out the books,” keeping the money in the school’s budget. “Dr. Carver, in all probability,” he said, “never knew the difference.” Another student bitterly resented this. “Had they genuinely wanted to pay him,” he said, “they could have opened a savings account in the Institute Bank in his name and deposited his monthly pay... What they really wanted… was to have Carver to ‘lend’ the Institute money to ‘tide them over,’ and most of these loans were mere surrenders of his checks”