Class of 1899
At the Union League Club in Chicago on December 15 there was a pre-Christmas dinner party. Present were Pope and A. Smith '9B; Prouty 'OO and Kendall '10; Eastman, Wason, and Kendall '99.
Note the most recent acquisition of the class. No, you guessed wrong. Not another Ninety-Nine descendant, but something more ancient than that—a gavel made from the wood of the Old Pine. It is an authentic history that accompanies it, for Dr. Patterson, Percy Drake's brother-inlaw, a Medical College contemporary of ours, gave it originally to Percy. And now Percy has generously passed it on to be handed down among the treasures of the class.
It may be that the gift was prompted by a prophetic instinct on Percy's part, an intuition, we'll say, that there might be assemblies concerning Ninety-Nine where more than ordinary authority would be needed to make the right prevail. The dignified Saturday Night Club of Baltimore on a recent occasion might have been grateful for a gavel so potent as to preserve its deliberations inviolate. Present on this occasion were such distinguished persons as Mr. H. L. Mencken, editor; Mr. Israel Dorman and Mr. H. E. Buchholz; Mr. Gustav Strube, former conductor of the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra; Mr. Alfred Knopf, publisher; Associate Professor Max Brodel of Johns Hopkins; Dr. Franklin Hazlehurst, surgeon; Dr. Christian Deetjen, roentgenologist; and our own Ray Pearl. There had been an early evening of music, where each member of the club played his own instrument while rendering the first Haydn Symphony and the overture to Mozart's "Don Giovanni." The record does not show who wielded the baton in that peaceful performance; enough that the spirit of harmony prevailed. But when at a later hour they continued their session with discussion of the more weighty topics suitable to such an assemblage, there arose for the first time in the history of the club the need of some such harmonizing instrument as the aforesaid gavel. For the privacy of the meeting was interrupted by an invasion of well-intentioned but uninvited and unwelcome debaters on alien topics. Nobody who is acquainted with the mettle of Mr. Mencken and Dr. Pearl could dream that such an interruption would be allowed to pass unchallenged. History does not record in full the details of the dispersal of the invaders, so that the scribe cannot draw on his memory of primeval cane-rushes, salt-rushes, and football-rushes to garnish his tale. But the reader may be assured that right did prevail triumphantly. But who knows how much of the interruption to the serene proceedings of the Saturday Night Club might have been avoided if only this ancient gavel had then been available to lend invincible and spontaneous force to Ray's own formidable presence?
Read now of the doings of the younger set:
Lloyd Wason is in Northwestern University.
Arthur H. W. Norton, son of "Doc," was graduated from Texas Chiropractic College, San Antonio, on December 15 last.
Genevieve Benezet is engaged to Richard David Butterfield, son of Mr. and Mrs. Ernest Warren Butterfield ('97) of Hartford, Conn.
Sally Drew is engaged to Robert Satterlee Hurlbut, son of Mrs. S. Byron Satterlee Hurlbut and the late Professor Hurlbut of Cambridge, Mass.
William M. Beal is engaged to Janet Grant, daughter of Mrs. Edward C. Grant and the late Mr. Edward C. Grant of Winchester, Mass.
Secretary, 41 West Kirke St., Chevy Chase, Md.
