Graven Laycock: A Dartmouth Tradition
A Sketch of the Dean Emeritus, Who Has Settled into Retirement after 38 Tearsof Active Service and an Avalanche of Honors
As HE STOOD up to receive the highest academic honor that his alma mater could bestow upon him, 450 gowned seniors, as one man, arose with him in sincere and spontaneous tribute. It was an emotional moment for everyone present, and in all the years that Craven Laycock had experienced the affection of Dartmouth men, no finer testimonial had ever been given to him. Had this Commencement morning scene been planned in advance by some master dramatist, it could not have revealed more clearly that here was more than a retiring dean receiving the accolade of good and faithful service. Here, also, was a man mellow and kind, who as a second father had won the devotion of the young men with whom he had come in contact, who as the possessor of wit and the hero of innumerable anecdotes had been accepted by them into an intangible fraternity, and who, more than anything else, as a living symbol of the Dartmouth spirit had been accorded a certain sanctity.
"Craven Laycock '96," President Hopkins began his salutation, "during fortytwo years you have been associated with this College; sixteen years you have taught herein; for twenty-one years you have carried the responsibilities and devotedly fulfilled the vitally important functions of the Dean's office; such is the skeleton record, and if there were no more to it, it would have been meet that for your loyal service the College should give recognition at this time. More, however, should be said, even though it is possible to say little of what is due. In college work, the intelligent mind, when supplemented as is yours by the loving heart, is increased in worth beyond reckoning; and when under the domination of these you have gone forth to paint a verbal picture for constituencies near and far, yearning for a view of the changing College, your like as an artist has not been known and your persuasiveness as an evangelist has been beyond compare. For all these things and in behalf of Dartmouth men—faculty and trustees, undergraduates and alumni—l confer upon you the honorary degree of Doctor of Laws."
Another chapter of Dean Laycock's life in Dartmouth came to a close as the purple hood of the Doctor of Laws slipped over his head. His life for 42 years had truly been a Dartmouth life: as an undergraduate, a teacher, an administrative officer, and always as a lover and expounder of the Dartmouth heritage. Dean Laycock did not enter Dartmouth until he was 26 years old. Born in Bradford, England, on September go, 1866, he was one of the youngest of a family of 16 children, eleven boys and five girls, one of whom was adopted. Along with his brothers, Craven started to work in his father's Yorkshire textile mill at the age of twelve. Life must have been hard, but Dean Laycock still looks back on the English countryside with nostalgia. "Devonshire in spring is heaven," he murmurs with closed eyes. "It is unbelievably beautiful." Dean and Mrs. Lay cock have made it a ritual to visit England every fifteen years. The next trip is due in 1945.
The Laycock family crossed the Atlantic to Canada in 1880, and in the following year moved to Lawrence, Massachusetts, where Craven worked for seven years in the mills of the Pacific Corporation. Bymeans of the money he had saved, he dropped his job in 1888 and entered Tilton Academy, in Tilton, N. H., to study for the ministry. It was at Tilton that he first met Miss Florence Hill, who became his wife twelve years later. There he also became the friend of the late Judge Fellows, in whose office he studied law following his graduation from Dartmouth. This friendship grew out of Craven's frightening the judge's horse into running away. The Dean was astride a bicycle when the runaway occurred, and because he was riding on the sidewalk the judge fined him in court. The bicycle frightened the judge's horse a number of times after that, but the young man was always in the road and therefore safe from Judge Fellow's wrath.
DEAN LAYCOCK graduated from Tilton in 189 a as salutatorian of his class, and entered Dartmouth that fall. As an undergraduate he was interested in public speaking and debating, along with English; and with his sonorous, English voice, he enjoyed a certain campus fame as an orator. He devoted his time to this activity rather than athletics, and won a Phi Beta Kappa key in his studies. He was pledged to Delta Kappa Epsilon fraternity, and in his senior year was a member of Casque and Gauntlet. Upon graduating from Dartmouth in 1896, he was made an instructor in public speaking. Four years later he was promoted to assistant professor, and in 1910 he was elevated to the rank of full professor, receiving the honorary Master of Art's degree in the same year. During the summers immediately after his graduation from college, Dean Laycock studied law in the Tilton office of Judge Fellows, and was admitted to the New Hampshire bar in 1904. He also took a year of post-graduate work with Professor Churchill of Andover to improve his public speaking.
Oratory, to the future dean, was the substance of life, and he delighted to teach it. He was a disciple of the grand style, and still is, for that matter. Today, he has little patience with the prevalent emphasis on logical content to the almost complete neglect of delivery and manner. "Of course you have got to have something to say," the Dean fumes, "but the art of public speaking lies in knowing what to do with your voice and your body, in sensing the attitude of your audience, in knowing when to seize the moment and strike home. What good does it do to have the finest message in the world, if people won't listen to you?" .
CRAVEN LAYCOCK has won his place in the line of Dartmouth orators that goes back to Daniel Webster. When asked for the secret of his great speech-making, he will tell you that no one blanket method can be laid down. "Individual method is the basis of good public speaking," the Dean advises. "The one real essential is to know your conclusion in advance, and to say it and sit down when the right moment comes. It is not difficult to say good things as you go along—in fact,, the best things usually come spontaneously—but too many speakers spoil their general effect by not knowing when to shut up." The Dean never prepares his speeches completely. He knows in general what he is going to say, but he likes to keep his addresses flexible and not "woodenly set." This flexibility doesn't preclude thorough preparation, however, and the Dean will admit that he has often spent as much as a week in working up a speech. "Small audiences assist the speaker too," Dean Laycock asserts, "and it is a great sensation to watch the faces of your listeners, to see them drinking in every word and gesture, and to know that you have the power of sending them into a frenzy of emotion." The thought of stirring up listeners usually reminds the Dean of the War days when he was selling Liberty Bonds. "Oh, what a lot of hokum I handed out then," he groans. "I'm really not proud of it now, but I guess everyone was in the same boat."
The Dean has had the jitters before only three speeches in his life. The first time was just before the funeral address for the late President Tucker; the second before the dedication of Memorial Field; and the third just prior to the testimonial dinner in New York last year. The second occasion also sticks in the Dean's mind because it was then that he forgot to include one of the best rhetorical questions that he ever thought up in forty years of speechmaking. "I went home and wept after that," he confesses with a twinkle.
Craven Laycock, the professor of public speaking, was drafted for administrative work as assistant dean in 1911. In that year he gave up his law practice in Hanover, and two years later he took over the full deanship to launch himself upon the amazing career that was to make him known as "the Dean" or "Craven" to every Dartmouth man of the last two decades. He admits that he was pretty rough at the start, but experience taught him to drop his unfeeling attitude toward undergraduate culprits and to administer discipline with a good deal of regret. During the course of many years and thousands of cases, Dean Laycock has evolved a pretty definite philosophy of college discipline. "Young men need a good deal of rope," he holds, "for there's no joy in a regimented life. But they don't have to be ungentlemanly or ignore the rights of others in order to enjoy themselves. If a fellow does get into trouble, the whole matter should be treated as a family affair. After all, we speak of the College as being in loco parentis. If the fellow knows he has done wrong, admits it, and is ready to take his medicine, he deserves to be treated like a man. If he squirms when caught and tries to lie his way out of it, he deserves to be treated for what he is."
The Dean is fond of illustrating this general point of view with two cases that happened while he was in office. The first story involves a student from Minneapolis who came to Dean JLaycock to get the usual permission for traveling time before a college recess. "Are you going home?" the Dean asked, and when the student assured him that he was, the permission was readily granted. About an hour later the same student stood before the Dean. "Well?" Dean Laycock queried. "I lied to you, sir," the young man confessed. "I'm not going home for the vacation. I thought about what I had done all during the last class, and I just can't go through with it. I suppose I could have torn up my excuse blank, but I wanted you to know that I'm ready to take my punishment." The Dean blinked away his amazement, and finally said, "Young man, you haven't lied to me at all. In fact, you never came into this office. Now, if you will forget the whole business, so will I." They shook hands on it, and the Dean had made another friend for life. During his farewell tour last year, Dean Laycock met the same young man and found him still bubbling over with gratitude.
The other story involves a student who came to the Dean with a telegram of excuse. Following out one of his hunches, the Dean suspected that the wire was false, and played sleuth for the better part of a day to prove that it was. When confronted with the evidence, the student lied himself into hotter water, whereupon the Dean shook his famous finger and said, "You're out of College." Nothing could change that verdict, for according to the Dean's code, it was inescapable.
THESE TWO STORIES are told by the Dean to illustrate his idea of discipline. Many others have been told and relished on the campus to illustrate the fact that "Craven" is a prince of good fellows. The one about the Dartmouth student who was afraid that a Yale man was stealing his girl is a favorite. It seems that the student in question entered the Dean's office with a worried look just after Christmas vacation. He had just come from home, where the field of battle had been left in clear possession of the Yale student. "I want to go back home and save her," he told the Dean, "but I haven't any cuts. Will you excuse them?" The Dean thought the request decidedly irregular, but he hadn't entirely forgotten his days at Tilton, and he was equal to the occasion. "If you get the girl," he came back, "I'll excuse the cuts, but if you don't, you'll have to take overcuts." And with a wave of his hand he dismissed the joyful undergraduate. Some time passed, and the Dean had just about forgotten the incident, when into his office walked a radiant young couple. "I got her," the young man beamed. The Dean's bewilderment showed on his face, and the youth had to explain, "You promised to excuse my cuts if I won her from the Yale man." The whole story came back in a flash, and after a pleasant conversation, the Dean sent them on their way with his blessing.
Another story, which the Dean sometimes tells himself, substantiates the campus rumor that he let students off if they had an original alibi. This time the young man entered the office and said that he wanted to go home for the week-end.
"Welf, go ahead," said the Dean. "Why come to me?"
"I have no cuts left."
"I see. Why must you go home?"
"Well, my mother is giving a dance, but that isn't the real reason. You see, I have a dog up here, and the dog has fleas. I want to take the dog to a specialist at home and get rid of the fleas."
"Young man," said Dean Laycock, "you are the champion liar of Dartmouth College. In recognition of your special ability, I am going to let you go home. And if I were you, I'd leave that dog at home."
The boy protested so earnestly that the Dean looked up the case and found that he was telling the truth. The conclusion has it that the Dean called the young man to his office early the following week and apologized to him.
Another famous alibi is that given to the Dean in the days when chapel was compulsory. On the seventeenth stroke of the chapel bell the doors were locked, and any unlucky individual who didn't arrive on time was credited with an absence. A student who couldn't afford another cut came into the Dean's office one morning, announced that he had failed to make chapel, and asked to be excused.
"You didn't cut yourself while shaving?" the Dean asked sarcastically.
"No, sir. I was in such a hurry to get into the chapel, that I skidded on the ice, and by the time I got to my feet the door was locked."
Even the Dean could appreciate the genius of that one, and the legend claims that the student was excused.
ON MORE than one occasion the Dean helped out his boys. He loaned one student fifty cents to pay for a broken window, about which a Vermont farmer had lodged a complaint, and then there is the time that he effectively stopped a Norwich woman. Norwich, just across the Connecticut River from Hanover, was a source of numerous complaints about Dartmouth students. The phone in the Dean's office rang one afternoon, and a feminine voice said: "Mr. Laycock, I want you to come over here right away and send your students back to Hanover. There are exactly 21 boys swimming in the brook behind my house, and they are all naked."
"My dear madam," replied the Dean, "how do you know that there are exactly 21 boys over there?"
The complaintant hung up, and that was the end of that.
The Dean wasn't always the victor in the battle of wits with students. He once met his match in the days when a whistle was blown to call off college classes because of severe weather. On that certain day a frightful blizzard made it practically impossible for anyone to go outdoors, so the whistle was blown calling off classes. One hardy soul clumped into the Dean's office shortly after the whistle and demanded, "Did you have that whistle blown?"
"Yes," replied Dean Laycock.
"And you call Dartmouth the 'mother of men?" the student asked.
"Certainly we do," the Dean answered.
"Grandmother of men I call it," the student snapped and walked out.
The Dean's contacts with Dartmouth undergraduates haven't been confined to his office, by any means. He was the central figure at football rallies for many years, and the mere announcement that the Dean was going to orate was enough to pack Webster Hall. Stirring up football fever was a chore that he loved, for he had served on the athletic committee of the faculty and loved the game. "Football is the greatest of all college games," he was quoted as saying as recently as two years ago. The famous Laycock speech about "going up to the line, up to the line, and —over" aroused many a group of Dart- mouth men before the annual "peerade" to Harvard or Yale.
The oratorical powers of the Dean have always been in demand by Dartmouth alumni as well as by undergraduates, and in fulfilling this demand he has covered many thousands of miles throughout the country. As the evangelist of Dartmouth, he has renewed Dartmouth associations for thousands of graduates and has "sold" the College to a legion of prospective students.
THE DEAN'S farewell tour to alumni clubs from one coast to the other forms a separate chapter in the saga of his Dartmouth life. Starting on November 1, 1933, at Springfield, Mass., he visited 28 alumni clubs between that time and May 24, 1934, and was royally and sentimentally feted at each point. The first half of the tour took in Springfield, Hartford, Boston, New York, Albany, Syracuse, Buffalo, Cleveland, Detroit, Chicago, Milwaukee, St. Louis, Tulsa, Pittsburgh, Harrisburg, Philadelphia, Atlanta, and Washington, D. C. Laudations and gifts in every city signified the unparalleled devotion which Dartmouth men have for their favorite spellbinder.
The first half of the tour was probably featured by: the aeroplane ride from St. Louis to Tulsa. Traveling at an altitude of 12,000 feet and a speed of 140 miles an hour, the Dean experienced a real thrill for his first time in the air. He claims to have been stone deaf for a half hour after he touched ground in Oklahoma, and it is significant that the return ticket was turned in toward railroad fare.
After a brief rest in Hanover, the Dean sailed for Los Angeles aboard the S. S. Quirigua on March 8. A short stay in Panama, and he continued to California on the S. S. Talamanca, opening the second half of his continental tour at Los Angeles on April 3. San Francisco, Portland, Seattle, Spokane, Denver, Omaha, Des Moines, and Rochester, Minn., followed, with the dinner at Bridgeport, Conn., on May 24 bringing the entire series to a close.
While in California, Dean Laycock made the rounds of the movie studios, and was photographed with Jean Harlow and Clark Gable. Before the shutters clicked on the Laycock-Harlow grouping, Miss Harlow admonished the Dean, "You must look at me when the cameras begin." Belying his age, the Dean came right back: "Gosh, Miss Harlow, can't I look at you now?"
Another young lady whom the Dean almost met in California added interest to the far-western junket. The Dean had hardly settled in his Los Angeles hotel, when the phone rang and a feminine voice asked if anyone had arranged to take him driving. The Dean didn't recall the name of the person phoning, but he gathered that the invitation was part of the entertainment by California friends; so he replied that no one else had arranged to take him driving and that he would like very much to go. An all-day drive was planned for the following day, and the Dean undoubtedly would have gone and today might have been the embarrassed owner of a bogus oil well, if Leon Rothschild '24, secretary of the Los Angeles alumni club, hadn't dropped in to check up on things and learned of the Dean's plans for the following day. A few phone calls soon brought to light the fact that it was a racket, and to this day the Dean doesn't know whether to be flattered by the assumption that he had enough money to buy an oil well or to feel hurt that he should be mistaken for a backwoodsman from New Hampshire.
As a sort of summation of his entire farewell tour, the Dean spoke at the alumni luncheon of Dartmouth's 165 th Commencement on June 16, 1934. At that time he spoke of "the wealth of the cumulative years, the wealth of affection that one gets in seeing thousands upon thousands of young men coming in with open eyes, anxious faces, passing before one, developing, enlarging, then looking to the future and going out, giving wonderful assurances of accomplishment."
YOUNG MEN and affection. Unknowingly, yet how well, did Craven Lay cock sum up his own life in Dartmouth College. Now, as Dean Emeritus, he is rapidly becoming enshrined in tradition and sentiment: the grand old man of Dartmouth. The shiny nose on the Laycock bust in Baker Library already attests to the present undergraduates' insistence that the Dean must be kept a warm and living personality, not a mere historic figure. Perhaps the closing scene of this saga of Dean Laycock should be that in Dartmouth Hall when he addressed the new freshman class last fall. Every inch of space jammed with rapt young men; every listener swayed to applause, deep silence, cheers or laughter, as the Dean willed; a tumultuous ovation as the speaker came to his close; and finally, a jam of students around the Dean, shaking his hand, asking questions, delivering the regards of fathers, or simply waiting to hear another witticism. It is a picture of the Dean in his element. Young men and affection.
Dean Laycock photographed (left) as he received the honorary Doctor of Laws degree last June, and fright) as he chatted, following the Commencement ceremonies, with President Hopkins and Werner Janssen '21, who received the honorary degree of Doctor of Music at the same time.
The now-famous bust of Craven Laycock in Baker Library. The nose has been rubbed shiny by superstitious undergraduates anxious to "hit" their examinations.
The Dean, the Dean, and the Dean, the Man Craven in serious mood (left) as he gives voice to Men of Dartmouth, and in his characteristic jolly mood (right) as he bandied remarks with Miss Jean Harlow during his farewell tour in California last spring. When the cameras clicked for the latter photograph, the Dean is reputed to have told Miss Harlow that "this will give the undergraduates something to talk about."
The Dean caught (left) in a familiar pose at the football practice field, (center) while delivering the main address at the alumni luncheon during Commencement last June, and (right) as he distributed diplomas to graduating seniors for the last time before his retirement. Shown with Dean Laycock in the center picture are (left to right) William T. Gage '64, who died recently, Martin J. Dwver '34, Carl F. Woods '04, and President Hopkins.
