CLASS OF 1929
There is a great deal to be said, and, thank the Great Spirit, plenty of time in which to scratch it into the records for the tribe. We feel rather ashamed of the last few letters that have appeared under the '29 column, and wish to promise something better for the future, or at least until another spring season in Cambridge rolls around. This June just past had most of us who hang around the northern boundary of Harvard Square (where there is a law school) pretty groggy, and even such an experienced student as Bill Coles came out of the last exam a mere shadow of his usual genial rotundity. But that's all over now: Lazy-no-more Bill Williamson has hied himself back to Niagara Falls, Jerry Swope is chasing mermaids in all likelylooking inlets between Montauk Point and the Bay of Fundy, and John Dickey is filling inkwells and dusting off law volumes in a law office somewhere in Pennsylvania. And all fifty of us are growing fat waiting for the August day that will tell us whether we are to be allowed to wander those severe halls another academic year.
In the midst of the May melee preceding exams we slipped off and away to Hanover for the secretaries' week-end. And was it great to be back! There was old Doc Foster and Sim Cantril plodding a weary way homeward from the Medical School; Jerry Updyke eating an early breakfast before hitting the trail with Phil Rising and the rest of the engineers; Benjie Leavitt, a bespeckled instructor crossing the campus briskly to a class; Kin Batchelder and Will Christman ambling off toward Tuck School; and many more. Then a ball game won from Brown; a visit with the Dean; a chat with Sid Hayward and Bob Strong, Harry Hillman and Harvey Clown Cohn. It was great fun, a good checking up, and we hope to do a better job by reason of the visit and the renewed zeal.
The three letters which follow are too good to be commented upon more than to express a hearty thank you and a resounding tribal yell of pride and good luck to their authors.
U. S. NAVAL AIR STATION
Pensacola, Florida Monday the Nineteenth of April Dear Andres:— Your execration of the literary ability of the class of '29 is very moving in fact it is so moving that it has forced me to stop playing the old army (in this case Navy) game and to just break down and write something which you may use for anything from blotting paper to paper napkins if you wish.
For nine months I've been wrestling and flapping my miniature wings around this place, and at last the Navy has, with guilty conscience and many dark misgivings, graduated me to a commission and a designation as Naval Aviator.
As a great and far cry from the cloistered halls of Dartmouth, one finds a large barrack where one eats, lives, and sleeps to the restful snores of fifty other dodoes. (For your further information a dodo is an African bird which is very small of wing and very heavy of tail, which facts make it almost impossible for it to fly.) Then the business of becoming an aviator commences. First you get enough "stick time" on the business end of a broom to earn a transport pilot's license. The "Parade of the Wooden Soldiers" becomes a drab reality. Inspections, drills, ground school no-end.
Finally we were introduced to an NY-2 seaplane, which is a large box kite with a log under it which beginners fly and which is so safe and sane that if you do the wrong thing it will correct you and do the right one all by itself. An instructor gets on the workable end of a football helmet with a speaking tube attached which the student wears. (This is called a gasport.) It is decidedly a one-way affair and were I to repeat all that has come through the tube I could be shot for any crime. Sufficient to say that the tubes burn up and have to be replaced after every hop where the student makes many mistakes. Before long we are solving and trembling in our boots about whether we would "wash out" on the next "check" or not. The "check flight" is a review of previous work and it is the bane of every student's existence.
Seventy long hours of splashing about the bay in the seaplanes and the lucky ones graduate to NY-1 landplanes, which are much more of an aeroplane.
The first five hours one flies around and around "suicide circle." This consists of circling the field, landing over and over again. The trouble is that about forty other novices are doing the same thing, and nobody knows exactly what the score is at all. After that things begin to get much better. No more brooms or drill. Still the periodic checks, but they are getting worse all the time. They consist of such maneuvers as precision landings, reverse control work of all kinds, eights, split S's, loops, barrel rolls, cartwheels, precision spins, falling leaves, Immelmann turns, wingovers, cut-gun landings anywhere and at any time. Whether you are over woods, water, houses, or not you have to land and land safely. Sometimes you touch wheels in a cow lot, on a road, somebody's front yard, etc.
The final "check" finishes your worries on that score, and there are no more instruction hops. We now go to service type planes. The first are 02U-S—Vought Coisans. Beside the small NY's they seem like a Mack truck with a superfluous amount of fuselage and wings—but the first hop undeceives you. You have just twice as many hours in the motor, and the ship maneuvers at your slightest touch. We spend fifty hours in these, sending and receiving radio from ground stations; spotting shots at ships outlined on the ground, flying division formations of large numbers of planes; machine gun work on towed targets, etc.
The last squadron consists of F7C's Curtiss Hawks—which are single-seated fighting planes with all the maneuver-ability in the world. They climb almost vertically, have a high speed of 160 knots per hour, and can turn on a dime. In these come all the real thrills of chandelles, slow rolls, snap rolls, inverted flight, and dog fighting. An altitude hop to 18,000 ft. is made, and several hours are given to carrier landings.
When we finish this squadron we get shot off the catapult several times pass a short course in instrument flying in a covered cock- pit—and we are through.
Then came the exams for a commission, which consist of nautical navigation, strategy and tactics, naval law, general information. I had those today, and on Wednesday I'm going home until I'm ordered out for one year of active duty, which I must take, and then I'm out of the Navy.
Sorry I have no news of any members of '29. The only letter I have gotten came from Bill Coles, asking me to contribute to the class fund. Waite Buckingham hesitated here to see his cousin who is taking the course, but he didn't stay long enough to be seen so good luck.
JOHNNIE BALL
Harding Road, Nashville, Tenn. Puerto Castilla, Honduras, C. A. April 30, 1930 Dear Bill:
I have eagerly read every issue of the ALUMNI MAGAZINE, particularly the section containing news of our own class. I appreciated the news in your column, because I never see any of my classmates and for any news of them I have to trust to a few letters once in a while. Perhaps I owe you some information about my own situation.
Since last August I have been down here in Honduras working for the United Fruit Company. The plantation on which I am located is almost a hundred miles from port by railroad. It will be several months yet before I shall be allowed to run a plantation alone, even for a month or two at a time. One does not usually get that chance in less than a year of experience. The job is exactly the same as Dana Condon '28 had. One spends about all day long riding about over the plantation looking after things in general and the handling of bananas in particular. An overseer has his house and grounds looked after by two servants, and does not live a very hard life if he is willing to forego social events, dances, and such for a couple of months at a time. Spanish is easy to learn, and I have found that six or seven months are ample time, if one does some studying, in which to acquire a very good knowledge of conversational Spanish.
The rainy season came in November and December, and now we are entering on the dry season. The heat is not as bad as at home in the city, for the nights are always cool.
Honduras, unlike some of the other countries of Central America, is very backward in every respect. The means of transportation are confined almost entirely to mules, except for the company railroad. Police force is very weak, and for this reason all persons in authority with this company are allowed to wear revolvers. At first this seemed to me a novelty, but is a matter of policy and soon becomes a habit.
I have returned from the district to Puerto Castilla but once in nine months, and so have not happened to meet the two Dartmouth men who are working in port, Seavey and Beers. I don't recall what year they graduated except that I believe Seavey was there in '23 or '24. On a nearby plantation is another '29 man by the name of Perkins. He did not finish out his last semester, I believe. Though I have not met him as yet because he was so recently placed in this district, I have heard that his name is Harry A. Perkins.
I have missed this past winter entirely, but I cannot say that I am very glad of that. Life in the tropics is easy, but one sometimes would like to do some skiing or take part in winter sports which made a winter at Hanover so agreeable.
Sincerely yours, LAWRENCE WORTH
Dear Bill: My blushes of shame should in some way alter the color of the paper on which I am typing, and I fear that I am able to do no more than blush I have been concentrating on alibis for hours, but none suggests itself. The best I can do is to promise most faithfully that you will hear quite regularly in the future from this "wandering one."
My year here at Oxford has been an extremely pleasant one, and now that I have come to understand something of the ways of English people I find that I like them as well as I have liked their country since the day of my landing at Southampton last fall. The first months are rather trying, and one feels that the enigmatical English character can never be solved—and one feels this more keenly when one is from the other side where friendships are made so easily. The evolution from acquaintanceship to friendship is a slow one, but one that I have found well worth going through.
Our undergraduate life here resembles that in the States in name only the differences are just as marked in the academic system as they are in the field of athletics. We are told when we come here what we will be expected to know at the end of two or three years; we are given a lecture list and a reading list we can do as much with both as we please as long as we are prepared for the time of reckoning at the end of the three years. There is the same lack of organization and strict supervision in athletics no coaches, no training, and if one doesn't care to play on a certain day the .captain is quite ready to find someone else. I played rugger last fall on the college team, and it was great sport, though no one ever got particularly excited about winning or losing a game a well modulated voice of an occasional spectator saying "well played, chaps," would be the extent of the cheering done. The quantities of beer that were served in the club house after each game seemed quite consistent with some of Harry Hillman's training theories.
As you may know, I am studying law. I am trying to do my B.A. in two years so that I can use the third year of my scholarship in studying private international law, which I hope to make my field of practice. Consistent with its faith in all that is old and musty, Oxford still devotes considerable time to Roman law my term's work in Gaius and Justinian is behind me, and I have been finding torts, contracts, and real property some what more interesting," though struggling with such things as the rule in Shelley's case is not the most pleasant pastime. Tell me something of how you go about things at Harvard.
I have been spending the larger part of my vacations this year in Germany. The Christmas vacation was spent in the Black Forest district of Wiirtemberg. I stayed there in the home of a German militarist of the old school I found it extremely interesting, though I soon learned that his group is safely in the minority in Germany. Wiirtemberg is the German state from which my grandfather came, and the district in which I lived had been the home of our clan from the seventeenth century until the time when the old boy, then a youngster, decided to hie himself off to the States—had he realized that in his older days Volstead at al. would deny him his deutsche beer, some part of me would probably still be in a little Black Forest village.
I spent a glorious spring vacation in the Moselle valley not far from where its river joins the Rhine—the district is that land of castles, terraced vineyards, and quaint villages that is at times so perfectly beautiful that one is inclined to cry out "fake." While I was at Cobern, a village not far from Coblenz, I received a wire from Ed Plumb stating that he and a man from Rochester were com ing on from Paris on "two weird French bicycles," and that they would arrive in "three days." But old Plumb had judged the distance by calculating how far he could go in America for the price of the listed railroad fare from Paris to Coblenz, so that at the end of the three days he and his pal were still quite far from threatening the German border. A wire stated that he would arrive by train on the morning of the fourth day. I shall never forget the sight of Plumb when he emerged from the crowd at the station in Coblenz an old black football jersey with orange stripes, a greasy pair of corduroy trousers, a beard of three days, a package of cheese and bread under one arm, and a bottle of cheap French wine under the other and then in the midst of my laughter, he contorted his face in the Lon Chaney-Hairy Ape manner and innopently asked, "Wazamatter?" I hid him for two days until his clothes arrived from Paris. Now that he is finished with his cycle trips he is ready to go to one of the German universities or to Vienna for his music study.
I spent the last week of my vacation on a canoe trip on the Wye river, which runs along the border between Wales and England. It was a good trip through a country that reminded me very much at times of the river country of New England.
After this term I plan to go to Geneva, where I have been promised a clerkship at the League. I hope to attend some of the meetings of the International Institute there during the summer. Here's hoping I see some of the fellows there during the vacation time.
Last week Dud Orr visited Oxford for a couple of days with his mother. There seem to be few places that Dud hasn't been to in his year of travel, and he is now to be prepared to go back to the States and join you fellows at Cambridge.
I received a letter this week from Bob Stevens '27, inviting me to see him at Antwerp, where he is working for General Mo tors—there are six other Dartmouth men there with him. I hope to visit that wigwam on my way to Geneva this summer.
But enough for now I enjoy your accounts of the month's news immensely, and hope to be able to add a little to assist you in the future.
My best to any of the gang you may meet in Cambridge.
Sincerely, CAHL B. SPAETH
P. S. If you see Willie Coles, tell him I have sent my alumni contribution directly to Strong in Hanover. Exeter College, Oxford. May 30, 1930.
Secretary, 114 Pleasant St., Arlington, Mass.
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