CLASS OF 1920
A ghost walks in the column this month a ghost from those days when everyone was too busy making his fortune to pour the interesting story of it all into the receptive ear of the class editor. And now that all that is behind us, now that the stories are equally hard to get because there are so few to tell, the one-time editor celebrates Old Home Week of his own by coming around with his rusty shovel and settling down to the business of digging up a little dirt. It seems natural enough to be starting from scratch, having seen almost no one nor heard from anyone else, to be figuring out how much news can be made out of practically no news at all.
Just to make a beginning on the thing, let's consider the case of your Secretary. Modesty forbids his making a diary out of the pages of the MAGAZINE, but a substitute can in all propriety disclose the facts. Does Needham, Mass., mean anything to you? Have you ever been there? If so, congratulations. If not, try it sometime. Better than that, don't try it. Far better to give up before you start. And yet, by some uncanny, systematic planning Old Man Cate makes his way back and forth, from Needham to work, and from work to Needham, day after day; getting up, no doubt, at some ungodly hour and charting his course to Boston by bus, trolley-car, subway, or whatever comes along. As a matter of fact, the town is our idea of an ideal place to live—if you can once find it; quiet, comfortable, almost rustic. Somewhere in the middle of it all the Cates inhabit a really charming house that stood on the selfsame spot when the Minute Men rushed to Concord Bridge.
Time was, you know, when not only Al and his wife and his eldest child, but a goodly proportion of the class of 1920, spread themselves around Ocean Parkway over in Flatbush and whiffed the salt breezes blowing up the line from Coney Island. Perhaps Carroll Swezey is there yet, but we doubt it. Norm Richardson set his family down at the summer place on Lake Winnipesaukee and then proceeded to move all the household goods across Brooklyn Bridge and up into Westchester county, establishing himself without any fuss at all in another Dartmouth colony at Pleasantville. There's a sketch in one of the current Broadway shows: A fellow tries to telephone his wife that he won't be home for supper, or something of the sort. He talks with London and Paris and every other wrong number in the world, until finally with the aid of a ship in mid-ocean, he gets the call through. It doesn't sound so funny on paper, but anyway, that's about the way it is with Norm and ourselves. The width of 33d St. separates our places of business. We could lean out our office windows and wigwag distress signals to each other. And still he has to move up here in Westchester, only fifteen miles or so from Rye as the crow flies, before it occurs to us to renew a very pleasant acquaintance. That's New York for you. Take all of it you want and there's plenty today that can't be given away.
The Pearsons moved to Rye about a year and a half ago. We rented a house with much of the age but little of the stability of the Cates'. On a Merry Christmas or a Happy New Year's Day biting winds come crashing through gaps above the doors; windows blow open (they're that kind); perhaps the roof springs a minor leak here or there. But we like it. Perhaps we draw comfort from the fact that New England is only three or four miles nor' by nor'east, carefully avoiding the Boston Post Road.
Up there in the Connecticut hills Jim Frost is still supervising the educational upbringing of aspiring youth. He moves around from town to town and without much question gets a great kick out of it all. At one time, as we remember, he was located at Glastonbury, but now he's settled in Pomfret —and you can't beat Pomfret. They don't come any better, those old New England towns.
Joe Brewer says it's those old devils, the textbook publishers, that are the ruin of Anlerican education. We can't arbitrate the matter here, Joe, not unless we can bring up Ben Farnsworth of Henry Holt and Company by way of reinforcement. Live and let live, say we. Shall we make an armed camp of this publishing business in times like these? Joe, as president of Brewer, Warren, and Putnam, had quite a story on the subject in the Publisher's Weekly, but the part of it we cherished was that one phrase, the "testbook business, profitable as it may be." The words give us courage, even while we repeat the last ones, '"Maybe."
There was another story we read in the papers back in the fall, in the column of a famous columnist on the Cleveland PlainDealer, to be specific. He told how Hub Duffy had gone out to the Coast a while before, to visit some friends in the Hollywood movie colony. It isn't news any more that Hub wrote the first authentic biography of William Howard Taft, and got a; great hand from all over for the way he did it. Anyway, he landed in Hollywood and made his way to the palatial residence where he was supposed to be a welcome visitor. The place was dark and silent as the grave. No life stirred within. He rang the bell but nobody answered. Finally he pushed open the door and walked in. This isn't another story of the Three Bears, either, for when he stepped into the vast living room of the place, he found a huge replica of his book planted in the middle of the room and half the stars of Hollywood prostrate on the floor before it.
We've picked up some other items now and then as we've gone along. In Denver we discovered more than a year ago that there's no surer password than "Zach Jordan." They don't call him Zach, either, out there; we forget the local name for him. But they'll drive anybody who will listen into a corner, just to tell him about Zach's sensational work as a football referee. Can you imagine anybody going to a football game to watch the referee? That's what they do out there, because Zach puts on a better show than the players, piling into the thing with all the oldtime spirit, pulling the teams apart and more than likely threatening to run away with the ball himself.
We've seen Tom Dudley's new house that he bought, located on a beautiful spot on a hilltop outside of Concord, N. H. And we stood on the foundations of the home Al Frey was building south of Hanover last summer, looking west on a forest wilderness that we wouldn't have believed existed. The boys are still getting on. One of the Boston papers had a picture of the new layout that Harry Noyes has selected for himself in a Boston suburb, and you can take our word for it that an acre or so means little or nothing to Harry.
As it is, we've long since run out of the special paper Al Cate sent us for this purpose. Perhaps we talk too much. Perhaps he expected us to write on both sides we almost said "on account of the depression." But if we can't do anything else, we can at least quit without starting on that subject at all and with our own particular, unreasoning brand of optimism still untamed.
R. M. P,
Secretary, 774 Great Plain Ave., Needham, Mass.
