THOMAS W. D. WORTHEN

Random Anecdotes from a Long Life

Even in Vermont, home of a sturdy race, the valley farmers are not quite so rugged as those of the hills. The deep, rich soil of the lowland meadows is easy to cultivate and fruitful to harvest. But along the steep slopes of the "back country" hills, stones must be laboriously built into walls, soil is shallow and full of gravel, the work is done with axe and hoe and scythe.

It was on a hill farm in Vermont, in 1845, that Thomas W. D. Worthen was born. There also on Potato Hill, in the Town of Thetford, his father and grandfather before him had lived long lives of toil and helpfulness. In admiration shared by many of the independent hill folk for the stranger who in Rhode Island had tried to achieve universal suffrage by force and rebellion, they named him Thomas Wilson Dorr.

With an early eagerness for hard work, he soon took his place beside his father, mowing by hand, carrying the full saptmckets on the yokes, mending wall, or chopping all day long in wood-lots deep in snow. One of his earliest memories took him back to the rough fields and rocky pastures of that hill farm. Trudging along with a scythe on his back he stumbled over a boulder and fell, laying his shoulder open to the bone. The nearest doctor was in Post Mills, two long miles away. So with stitch after stitch of linen thread his mother sewed it up. All through his life he carried the long scar, but carried deeper still the memory of the quiet, resourceful little mother, rising to meet the need of the moment as only such a mother can.

Going to the District School at the four-corners was a long trudge over a "mean road," but the terms were short. Soon his father began to buy poultry throughout all the neighboring townships and ship it to Boston, and so summer after summer found his sturdy son helping to drive flocks of turkeys, several hundred in a flock, over the winding hill roads of Vershire, Fairlee and Thetford. When dusk sent the birds to roost in the nearest tree, the drivers sought lodging in a farm house, only to return again before the first gray light of early morning brought the turkeys down.

His pastimes were fishing the mountain streams and ponds,—the ardent love of which he never lost—, and going to the country circus. Invariably the future teacher of gymnastics made friends with the clowns and acrobats, all of whom knew him and loved to teach him their feats of strength and skill. And always with eager practice he mastered them, to the joy of his chosen teachers when in the following year the circus returned.

The district school finished, he attended Thetford Academy and entered Dartmouth College with the class of 1872. The toughest wrestler in his class, he was chosen during his first week in Hanover to hold the cane for the freshmen in the annual rush. It was a short, thick cane of ash, and though at the end of the mauling, tearing tussle most of his clothes were gone, he still held the cane. With that, however, he was not content. A few mornings later he saw fit to carry it to chapel, persuading other freshmen along the way to follow him and his cane. At the steps of Dartmouth Hall the sophomores were awaiting them in force. A renewal of the mighty struggle was well under way, with the short, square-shouldered canebearer the center of it, when President Smith hearing the disturbance came out from chapel, quelled the riot and took possession of the cane. It was subsequently restored, under c i r c u m- stances easily imaginable, and Tom Worthen kept and prized it for nearly sixty years. But one does not wonder that the sophomores mindful of his initials and of this incident with many others like it, dubbed this obstreperous freshman "Too Wicked to Die."

As was customary in those days, to help pay his college bills he taught school in the winter, attending college in the spring and fall. In the neighboring mill town of Lebanon a gang of toughs in a playful moment had carried their teacher out of the school and deposited him on the outskirts of the town. The school board was willing to pay his successor well, and Tom Worthen got the job. It took two days of physical violence, given and taken, to prove to the boys that he could hold it. "Then,"as he used to chuckle, "we got down to business," and he spent two winters there. Graduating from Dartmouth with Phi Beta Kappa rank, he taught school in W oodstock, Vermont, and then returned to join the Dartmouth faeulty as tutor. So through the years of his climb to co-leadership, with Professor Sherman, of the Department of Mathematics, and through the long succession of years thereafter, he was always "Tute." With the grave dignity of his seniors in that early period he was not wholly in accord. "Tutor Worthen," Said Professor Noyes, having observed him jump the campus fence, "Tutor Worthen, it will be more consistent with the decorum to be expected from a member of the faculty, if hereafter you will use the campus gates."

To Dartmouth men the character of his teaching is too well known to require extended comment. The conclusive evidence of his success lies in the lives of the hundreds, yes, thousands of men who sat in his classes to learn the character of mathematics; and learning it, learned also the character of the mathematician who taught them. For nearly forty years the processes of algebra, geometry, trigonometry, calculus which he taught to succeeding classes of freshmen and sophomores, were practically the same. Yet never did he lose the zeal of his work. Day after day, year after year, decade after decade, as he flashed his hand across the blackboard in quick successions of figures, with a vigor which continually broke his chalk but almost as often caught it before it reached the floor,—his, always, was the ardor of one who suddenly finds knowledge wholly new, then turns and gladly gives it, all of it, to the clear-eyed lads who follow him.

Outside the class room the same zest took him into almost countless activities of brain and brawn and spirit; the same unselfishness moulded them into the welfare of his fellow-men. For nearly twenty years he taught gymnastics daily to the freshmen. Never was he happier than on the rings and the bars, teaching the difficult "giant swing" forward and backward, and performing feats of strength one of which, at least, which he repeatedly performed, is believed never to have been equalled at the college.

More often than not during the earlier years, Saturday afternoon of the late fall would find him with Professor Hardy or some other congenial friend, hunting small game over the hills surrounding Hanover. His love of nature was almost equalled by his knowledge of it. Every animal and bird and tree he knew as few naturalists know them. With Professor Henry G. Jesup, the professor of natural history, he was joint author of a printed pamphlet on the flora and fauna of Hanover. In birds particularly he was intensely interested. His observation of them led him into the study of taxidermy, in which he became so adept that for years he instructed groups of students in the subject. Some of the many collections of small birds and animals which he shot, stuffed and mounted himself still find place in the college museum.

Equally keen was his interest in geology and mineralogy. Two long summers he spent with transit and compass helping Prof. "Type" Hitchcock gather data for the great relief map of New Hampshire which still has a prominent place in the State House in Concord. Two of the latitudinal lines which he followed entirely across the state for that purpose in the early seventies took him across the Crawford Notch. Straight east and west lines a few miles apart were followed, however precipitous or wild the country they traversed; and it was Tom Worthen who led the surveyors through the roughest territory of all. Everywhere he took his observations, collecting geological and mineralogical data,—and speckled trout.

And so the years rolled on, full of energetic helpfulness to his family and his community. It was indeed almost a matter of course that when an early coal strike left the town without coal, it was Professor Worthen, a stranger to the railroad and to the coal companies, who by his own effort procured a carload; and who then hired the teams and drivers from a local dealer, and distributed it throughout the village.

Late in the nineties he built his house, out in what was then a pasture, on the brow of a low hill chosen because from there he could see mountains which he loved,—Ascutney to the south, Cube and Moosilauke to the north. From the Vermont hills across the river he selected some of the straightest of white birches, and a maple or two with the brightest coloring he could find; dug them up, one of them with a jack knife, and carried them home over his shoulder, planting them about his house where they still stand. Years later, after his children had all grown up and he had sold the house and moved to Concord, a former student chanced upon him pruning, with his pocket-knife, one of these same trees in the old yard in Hanover. After the glad recognition and greeting which he invariably gave to those who had learned from him, the alumnus asked him if he still lived there. "Oh no," he answered, "but I planted this tree, and I just noticed that it needed pruning; so I'm pruning it."

His large gardens were always very close to his heart. Though they were usually more extensive than immaculate, he loved to work in them through the long summer evenings and to teach his skill and knowledge to his children. Time after time a student coming to see him long after dark, and being directed to the garden, would go stumbling through a great potato patch or a quarter-acre of standing corn, finally to discover the short, stocky professor, tirelessly and with that characteristic energy of his, wheeling a barrow or wielding a hoe or sickle, as though the vigorous work of the day had only just begun.

One remembers well, too, his working there one afternoon when a tramp came to the door and asked for old clothes. Being referred to Mr. Worthen, the tramp asked where he was. Mrs. Worthen then pointed to the professor down in the garden, pulling weeds and thoroughly enjoying the comfort of his oldest clothes. The tramp looked at him a moment, looked again, then turned on his heel without a word and walked away.

A typical public service was his creation of what is now called "Faculty Pond." The idea originated with Mrs. Worthen; the initiative was his. Two long ditches connecting a few holes of black and bottomless muck, fringed with alders, ran the length of the mosquito swamp which covered the whole area. Well does one remember seeing him, with a farm hand whom he and a few of his neighbors hired, chopping out the bushes and running a horse mower where he could, the professor riding the mower and driving with all the eagerness with which he always turned back to the work of the farm. Then with pick and shovel he and his helper built a dam of loose stones and soil at the north end of the hollow. The summer was a dry one, but not so dry as the humor of a few of the stand-backs who inquired whence the

water was to come to cover these ten acres. The next spring the snow melted, as the professor had remembered its doing before. The pond filled up, and remained so for nearly a year. Then when a muskrat burrowed through the dam so that it washed out, the professor's lesson in public service had been taught by deeds, not words. Willing friends now joined with him in providing a solid stone dam, water was run down from the village reservoir, and by the generosity of Mr. C. P. Chase, owner of the land, the permanence of the pond was assured. It never occurred to Professor Worthen that because of his efforts the ultimate value of the land overlooking the pond on all sides,—a mere trifle of which he owned,—would, as now, be doubled or tripled. He only knew that the beauty of that whole section of the village,—his village,—would be enhanced. That was reward enough.

Indeed he had a genius for public service. Though he was never a fish warden, often in the earliest gray light of day, before even a turkey would have left a tree,—hiring a horse and wagon he would drive out alone or with one of his sons, with a great milk can full of fingerling trout secured from Concord at his own expense; would scatter them up a stream in the neighboring hills; and then drive back through the morning mists to the sleeping village, before the sun was up. Never have I known him to fish a brook which he so stocked. Yet "Sometime," he would chuckle, with a twinkle in his eye,—"Sometime someone will happen on a great string of trout in that brook!"

It was to him, to him above all others, I am sure, that those in the village and among the surrounding hills turned for help in trouble. If a widow could not "make a go of it," as he would say, it was to him she would invariably and never vainly turn for aid. If a farmer was having trouble with a wilful son, it was Professor Worthen who trudged out, —arms swinging straight and wide with the old free motion of the scythe,—over the hills to help; as with the strength and nobility of his character and the utter modesty of his manhood, he alone coiild. For years as judge of the local court he decided what was fair, and then with a word and a smile of friendly fellowship made the contestants before him see that it was fair. And wherever he went or whomever he saw, always he gave to stranger as to friend, to teamster as to governor, the frank, cheery greeting which under the old, unwritten code of the northern hills is owed to every man. "You can never realize," said a stranger whom I met on a hill farm in Thetford only last spring, "what all we farming people think of your father. All among these hills, whether we know him personally or not, our people simply worship him."

Among the Dartmouth students, too, he was as deeply beloved a teacher as the college ever had. If in his early days an unpopular professor was being "horned," it was Professor Worthen who would stroll out, casually and smilingly, "to see that it wasn't overdone." In later years no football rally was complete without him. "Fellow students!" he would begin and after the roar of response had subsided, there would follow his abstruse mathematical analysis of the favorable sporting prospect, ending with a final cheery prophecy of the ultimate score. And in 1903, when Dartmouth beat Harvard 11 to 0, he was exactly right!

A significant incident, one of many, occurred in 1911. A group of students returning, via a productive hen-roost, from a late Saturday night party in Norwich, were waylaid and outnumbered by some "roughs" at the covered bridge, where they were clubbed and badly battered. One of their assailants being recognized, the following afternoon found some three hundred students surging around his house, bent on throwing him into the river. A half dozen protesting members of "Paleopitus" had been jeered into submission, when the Professor forced his way onto the porch. In a few ringing words he expressed his cordial sympathy with their feelings, but his opposition to their proposed solution of the difficulty; said that he would personally deal with the matter as he saw fit, and advised them to "go off about their business." Instantly and without a protest, they did so. It was but one more signal tribute to the admitted strength of his personality.

Although the town of Hanover was overwhelmingly Republican and he an ardent Democrat, he was elected to the state legislature in 1904. The national Republican ticket was headed by Roosevelt and Parker. "Teddy and Tute!" was the first placard in the student torchlight procession. "Parker and Tute!" said second; and the third, "Tute Anyhow!"

Immediately on his election he received a free pass from the railroad company, which then dominated the government of the state. Such passes were considered welcome courtesies from the railroad to the chosen representative. The professor was raising four children and doing all his great work of helpfulness to the community on a total income of approximately two thousand dollars a year. Attending the legislature meant traveling a hundred and fifty miles a week for months. But by return mail he sent back the pass. One remembers well his amusement over the personal letter which then came from the president of the road, a letter of pained surprise that one would ever dream that acceptance of the pass would place the legislator under the remotest obligation. Again the pass went back to the sender, this time with a letter the finality of which could not be misunderstood. Did he try to attract the widespread attention which, by publishing this correspondence, could easily have been his ? Never! He simply knew that he was blazing a trail, "doing the square thing" in a new way. And it was to him a matter of complete indifference whether he was recognized as the pioneer.

His work as Public Service Commissioner of New Hampshire, commenced after he had reached the age of sixty-seven, and eagerly and enthusiastically continued until he was eighty, may be only mentioned here. It was of the very finest of his life's work. His genius for mathematical analysis, coupled with his almost intuitive perception of the requirements of justice under given circumstances, no matter how intricate, raised him to the very first rank of this distinguished calling. As Hon. Wm. T. Gunnison, who for twelve years has been chairman of the Commission, writes:

"He early made a study of rate schedules, becoming one of the best, if not the best, informed commissioner in the United States on that subject. For several years he was Chairman of the Committee on Rates, appointed by the National Association of Railroads and Utilities Commissioners; and his reports, as chairman of that committee, read at the annual conventions of the association, received high commendation from his associates. During his incumbency as a commissioner, he wrote most of the reports in rate cases' which came before our commission, and those written by other commissioners were largely based upon his advice. Many of his decisions have been quoted with approval by commissioners of other states.

"But in addition to Professor Worthen's ability to decide knotty problems correctly, and his disposition to do more than his share of the work, he had other attributes which contributed largely to the value of his service as a public service commissioner. These attributes may be summarized as a sweet disposition, tolerance of those who did not entertain his views, fair-mindedness and honesty. Strong in his conviction, yet he respected the opinions of those who honestly differed with him. Sham and demagogy, how- ever, he could not tolerate. He had no respect for an opinion without merit, entertained merely to meet popular favor."

Of a life so long, so active, so helpful, a narrative at best is utterly inadequate. One anecdote illuminating his character or personality only brings to mind scores of others equally significant. One must here pass by his splendid work as organizer and for many years Director of the Dartmouth Summer School; as the affectionate guardian of "Tri Kap," to which fine old brotherhood of Dartmouth men he stood almost in loco parentis; as trustee of the library and of the hospital in Hanover; as later chairman of the Board of Trustees of the City Library in Concord; as active Trustee of Thetford Academy for nearly forty years; as deacon, as Superintendent of the Sunday School, as President of the Concord Federation of Churches. Never was he known to seek his own advancement, nor credit for what he had done. Yet to each new task he brought, even to the end of his life, the youthful eagerness, the tireless vigor, and the all-inclusive friendliness of the farmer's lad from the north country; and to them he added his years of experience, his breadth of learning, and that complete unselfishness which was the very essence of his character. Underlying and controlling all was the virile uprightness of the man, clean as the hill winds of Vermont; with the deep, conscious, personal religion of the man, sure of his faith, and untiring in good works because he believed his Maker knew that they were good.

On his desk when he left his home to undergo a serious operation shortly before the close of his life, was a clipping which he had recently cut out and preserved. In it he had found a happy statement of his working creed:

"I am of the opinion that my life belongs to the whole community, and as long as I live it is my privilege to do for it whatsoever I can. I want to be thoroughly used up when I die, for the harder I work, the more I live. I rejoice in life for its own sake. Life is no 'brief candle' for me. It is a sort of splendid torch, which I have got hold of for a moment; and I want to make it burn as brightly as possible before handing it on to future generations."

Professor Worthen