CLASS OF 1908
Ralph H. Sherburne was appointed postmaster in Penacook, N. H., in February. He has worked in the office most of his life. His father was appointed postmaster in 1899, and Ralph was general office boy until he entered Dartmouth in 1904. Then he worked in the post office during vacations, and in 1910 was appointed clerk. He has been clerk and assistant postmaster until his father resigned last month and Ralph succeeded him. Ralph has under him two clerks and a corps of city and rural mail carriers.
String Hale is now in his busiest season in the New Hampshire forestry department, what with danger of forest fires and the planting season, and every thin'. Recently he furnished the Assistant Secretary with pamphlets to prove that the horrid looking white things on the trunks of his pine trees are harmless lice and not fatal fungi.
Newspapers late in February included Art O'Shea's store in Laconia in the list of places burglarized by a gang which appeared to be doing a systematic job throughout New England. According to the report the thieves nicked the O'Shea establishment for about SSOO in merchandise. This was not as good publicity as Art and Pauline O'Shea received at the time of the big dog team races. Then they entertained some radio men at their home, and next night the broadcast about the dog races contained some flattering comments about the hospitality of Arthur D. O'Shea.
Letters from Arizona tell of the great improvement in health of Bob Marsden, genial dean of the well-known Thayer School, who went West with his wife early in the fall. It seems he has beefed up until he can't get into the clothes he took with him. He had his picture taken under that giant cactus; the one they use for all tourists, like the big paper tarpon at Miami. The Marsdens are due home in April, and if they are as pepped up as they claim to be we'll expect to see 'em riding into Hanover with Mary at the Buick's wheel and Bob in chaps and sombrero astride the radiator whirling a rope and greeting his fellow deans with some such dignified salutation as "ride 'em, cowboy."
Plaintive appeals for class news brought accounts of the Chicago banquet from Bill English, Bill Knight, Ev Marsh, and Howard Cowee. Seems 'OB was represented there by those gentlemen, also Dolly Hilton, Park Stickney, and Fred Cooper. We have a detailed 4-way report on the dinner, but shall assume the MAGAZINE will have its own coverage of this event.
Park Stickney, they say, travels over most of the U. S. A., and has been urged to divulge the news of the classmates he has hunted up all the way from Philadelphia to the Pacific coast. His letter is awaited with interest.
Ev Marsh and family are now nicely settled in their new house in Geneva, Ill., where they are neighbors of the Jess Hawleys.
Nat Leverone '06 caught Bill Knight at the Chicago dinner, and bulldozed him into appearing as an after-dinner speaker at some Chicago function which Nat was engineering. Bill, by the way, reports tough going during the winter when his daughter Mary developed mastoid. Two serious operations saved her, and she is now doing well. Mrs. Knight wore herself out and became a hospital case too. Bill writes that they had two nurses for six weeks and one for a longer time, and that one of his doctors is now spending the late winter in Florida while another has gone to Cuba on the proceeds of the Knight business.
Still on subject of Bill Knight: we've had two clippings mailed in by classmates which describe Knight as the best football official in the Western Conference. It seems that "Biff" Jones, coach of the West Point team, said something of the sort after the Army- Illinois game at Champaign last fall. Bill was umpire in that game and apparently he gave Red Cagle's lads a fair shake. Jones said the players and army officers considered that game the best handled by the officials of any they had played in, and later wrote a letter saying the same thing, just to show it wasn't an impulsive statement.
Art Lewis says too much about him is appearing in the class news. With respect for his modesty, truth compels us to state that if it wasn't for Art not much news of the class would find its way to the editorial desk. Then we'd have to take those galling remarks which the miscreants of '07, '09, and other classes used to make regularly after the ALUMNI MAGAZINE appeared: "We see by the MAGAZINE that 'OB is dead." Well, Art Lewis was elected a director of the Union Market National Bank of Watertown this winter. It has $12,000,000 resources, and is affiliated with the First National and Old Colony banks in Boston with $500,000,000 back of them. So Art can think in big figures.
On a business trip the first of March Art Lewis found time in Detroit to forward a few pages of class news. He got hold of Stanley Nute, and here's what they say:
"Charlie Severance has left the Federal Motor Truck Company, Detroit, and is with Brockway Motor Truck Company, Cort- land, N. Y., as production manager. Charlie had just built a new home at Detroit, but the call of the shekels lured him away.
"Charlie Bennett has started chromium plating in his Detroit plant, and is still prospering, doing lots of work for Hudson and Essex, and improving his golf game with Dutch Schildmiller '09.
"Roger Hill, our Detroit contractor, has closed out his business to take a position with the Palmer-Bee Company, engineers. Rog is still champion of his golf club. "A. B. Rutherford is in the general contracting business in Detroit.
"Stan Nute is still in the general insurance business at Detroit, and is located on the 27th floor of the Penobscot Building, where he claims the fishing is good.
"I am now heading for the Dartmouth lunch held here every Tuesday noon in the Buhl Building. Will be in Chicago next week, and will try to pick up some news."
If any classmate has complained that all the news printed is about New England men, he can't prove it by this month's grist. We don't know that anybody has canceled his subscription on that account, but it's been that way some times. Now we're strong in the Middle West, and if those Pacific Coasters will come through next month we'll show that it's a cosmopolitan class after all. Here's more of the Mid-West news, this from Ev Marsh: Dear Art:
Few appreciate the difficulty of your job like I do, because I take seriously frequent appeals for news letters. It is awfully hard to get any news on our crowd in Chicago. Stacy Irish is a professor at Evanston High, and I never see him. I see Fred Cooper on the street about once a month, looking very fat and prosperous, and after six o'clock always with a different girl. Stick, whom I see often, really gets to see more 1908's traveling around the country, as for example, rounding up our bunch in Los Angeles and meeting more 1908's there than he does in Chicago. Howard Hilton and his wife and three daughters and little boy sometimes drive over to see us at home.
You will remember Al Shoninger, who left our class at the end of the first semester because of disagreement with the dean. I had not seen him since 1904 until the other morning, when he walked into the eleyator in my building with me, on his way to my office, looking exactly the same, fat, jolly, prosperous, with only the addition of a blonde mustache.
There is nothing more, but I hope that you are getting a generous response of photographs and will have names and a little information published in the same booklet,, which I am sure will be a great success.
The merchandise stolen last month from Art O'Shea's store in Laconia, some $600 worth, was recovered by the police in Manchester, according to newspaper stories. It seems the thief selected among other things one of the best suits of clothes in the store and put it on. He left his old clothes, and Sherlock found a laundry mark in the abandoned coat which led finally to the arrest of a man in Manchester and recovery of the loot.
The town of Rockingham, Vt. (of which Bellows Falls is a part), has been in the public eye lately because of a possible law suit by the town to recover some millions of dollars from the estate of Hetty Green, claimed to be due the town in taxes which were never paid. Mrs. Green had no relatives in 'OB, but the town manager of Rockingham is our own Sidney Lee Ruggles, sometime Thayer School professor, who now gives all his time to the town managing business.
Mrs. Mary Marsden, favorite wife of Dean Marsden, who accompanied her husband to Arizona, where they spent the winter, mailed post cards to classmates. The picture on the cards showed her standing beside a tall Mexican yucca. We were shocked to hear that she would associate with one,of those fellers, say nothing of having her picture taken with him. —Later. We've looked up "yucca" and it's all right.
A good letter from John Glaze says that he chummed with Vietor at a Dartmouth dinner in Buffalo. John is addicted to taking movie films with a 16 mm camera and wants other classmates to do the same, so at some reunion we can show family pictures of the next generation in action. Seems like somebody else has also suggested this. We'll get more dope, perhaps, to broadcast next month.
Walter Rich, our classmate in Youngstown, N. Y., attained distinction and nearly died by contracting that rare disease, psittacosis, or parrot fever. For a while he was believed fatally ill, but March 5 John Glaze telephoned Mrs. Rich and got the cheering report that Walter was out of danger and in two or three weeks should be up and around aigain, resolved to have no more association with tropical birds.
Assisting Secretary, Milford, N. H.
