Class of 1902
Here we are again. After a long summer vacation (i.e. vacation purely in the MAGAZINE sense), we now figuratively reassemble to look ourselves over, and note what has happened in the meantime. The yarns that will be spun around our imaginary fireside will be varied in content and in length, but we hope that before the next vacation (MAGAZINE, again) comes around every one will have had his chance to tell his tale. You see it is a sort of Wayside Inn setting, only we are quite prosaic in more senses than one.
In the loss of Rube Peckham, one realizes that we seldom know half enough about our own men. Rube never wrote much, and we had no adequate picture of the situation. Yet far from being indifferent, Rube was keenly interested in the class and in the College. Mentally alert to the last he carried on with a courage that we all may envy. Perhaps we'll never know whether we could have helped him more than we did, but we surely hope that no one in time of need will ever look in vain for a word of cheer from his classmates.
The annual secretaries' meeting in Hanover in May was officially reported in the June number, and of course you all searched the photo on page 11 to see if your representative was there. He was, but it's dollars to doughnuts you didn't recognize him. But all I am trying to tell you is that Hanover is a fine place, and May is a beautiful time to visit there. Really I could get along for the whole time I had to spend, even without attending the meetings.
THE SAGE OF HANOVER
Some of my experiences will interest you, even though months late. Of course I had a good chat with that always invigorating individual whom Larry Griswold calls "The Sage of Hanover," Bill Murray. Bill can give a digest of events in small compass, enough gossip for spice, enough truth to go on record, and no malice at all. The two Helens, mother and daughter, were there, and both in good health. Donald on his graduate fellowship was picking up a Harvard accent.
Then I paid an early morning call on Julius Arthur at that house at 2 Chase Road, which I defied you to locate some months ago. Well, it's down east of the old Thayer School building where there were no streets in our time, but none the less it's a lovely place. Some of you fellows don't seem to realize how Hanover has opened up of late. Of course the acreage was there in our time, but most of us didn't know the half of it. However, that's not telling you about sitting down in Julius' front room, with Julius and Helen just as natural as if they hadn't been mostly in Asia since 1910. Being early I had a look at the whole crowd, except Sambo, who had an eight o'clock class. Now I can understand why the Browns have been so happy to have had the year all together after having been quite scattered.
I missed Mose Perkins, who could have told a tale. It seems that last winter he tried to see if he could go through a bridge when his car skidded. He went through all right, but the car caught on the ice and only the rear went into the water. Mose was taken out unconscious but is all right now, and would have told me all about it, but we just didn't get together.
Of course I did go to the meetings as was my duty, and perhaps the greatest feeling of pride in one's college comes out when they begin that roll-call of class and club secretaries. The call began at 1870, .and very few classes failed to answer from that point clear down to 1937. Incidentally the Oklahoma association was represented by Jim Irvin, Arba's son, whom I was glad to meet.
As I left the meeting I found my brother's younger son Sumner, waiting to tag me and keep me out of mischief. Sum is a freshman, or he was then, and he took me over to his room. And where do you suppose he took me? Of all places in the world, No. 6 Crosby Hall. It was the first time in over thirty years that I had entered that den of wickedness, and I fully expected to see ghosts of—well I won't go quite so far as that. But if anyone had told me in my freshman year that some day a nephew of mine would room in Crosby Hall, I probably would have said that either Crosby Hall or the Farwell family would have to change mightily if that was to be at all possible.
The next day, Saturday, as I was getting ready to leave I found that everything was going on. Whom should I meet at the Inn but Denny Lyons, up to see his son Billy. (Aye, there's a lad). And just then in comes my nephew. Says I, "Sum, do you know this classmate of yours, one Billy Lyons?" And it started me to thinking when those two kids admitted that they didn't recall having laid eyes on each other before.
Denny Lyons ought to give lessons to some of you. I don't believe his belt, is one-half inch longer than it was the day he graduated, and what is more his head with all it has done and might be proud about carries the same size of hat. Then along came my own brother, whose path hadn't crossed mine for a long time, so I came away feeling all the more that if you will only go to Hanover in May you will surely have your youth renewed.
Commencement visitors to Hanover included Edson, whose younger son graduated then, Joe Holmes, Ducky Drake, and Percy Dorr. But don't think that all the next generation of 1902 are going to Dartmouth. For example, Betty Dorr has just finished freshman year at Smith, and did it in such fine shape that she was placed on the Dean's list. That phrase wasn't known in our day, or at any rate not exactly in the sense that the girls' colleges use it today. If any of us were on a list that Chuck made out, it was understood definitely not to indicate high academic praise.
FELLOWSHIP FOR MISS FARWELL
Then Alice Farwell made the Dean's list at Wheaton, where she graduated in June. Alice has a fellowship for study in Germany this year, but she postponed her trip just ten days before she had a quite unplanned operation for appendicitis.
Bob Goodell's boy also won another of those fellowships for study in Germany.
Dr. Art Ruggles is now a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Tom Barnes and George Hubbard were elected in May to the board of governors of the very live Dartmouth Club of Northern New Jersey.
Kendall Banning has resigned the editorial direction of the economic review, Public Utilities Fortnightly of Washington, D. C., which has occupied him since 1928, and has retired to his home in Old Lyme, Conn. K. B. writes:
"This is the first rest I have had sinceleaving college. All my life I have, in mymagazine editorial capacity, been the creature of schedules and routines, and mypresent freedom is giving me a welcomerespite. I am taking advantage of it bydoing some writing which I have longcontemplated but never before been in aposition to undertake. At least I have consistently carried out my boyhood purposeto edit a magazine, and have occupied theeditorial chair steadily since graduatingthirty-two years ago."
If one were to comment on that note, he'd probably ask for Kendall's definition of "steadily." As a matter of fact the busy editor actually has done a lot besides editing, and if he diu all of them while sitting in a chair, he has had some most remarkable chairs. I like the picture of K. B. loafing, because I know that his definition of "loafing" would seem to me more like a definition of increased activity.
I have some more changes in address for you to enter on your list:
R. B. Clark, 2273 Beechwood Boulevard, Pittsburgh, Pa.
R. C. Clark, Bellows Falls Trust Co., Bellows Falls, Vt.
L. R. Hill, Main St., BelmOnt, N. H. B. R. Whitcher, 113-28-205111 St., St. Albans, L. 1., N. Y.
Now that makes me up to date as far as my ante-summer supply goes, and from now on I shall be obliged to depend on what the postman brings. Here's to the hope that he may bring good tidings from every one of you.
Secretary, 130 Woodridge Place, Leonia, N. J.
