Class of 1904

Here's someone willing and able to divide that grandfather stuff with WitheyWayne A. Perkins. Perk sent me a letter you would all enjoy. If statistics mean any thing, there was a period in his life when he was just a few jumps ahead of the sheriff—witness, Erlon C., born June 24, 1907, Phoenix, Arizona; Sumner E., born August 24, 1908, North Yakima, Wash.; Barbara W., born October 22, 1912, Blackfeet Indian Reservation, Montana. That's stepping some with a baby carriage and the other necessary impedimenta. Now Barbara has a son, Rexton Cleary, born July 25, 1931, and Sumner brought Perk up to Withey's record with a daughter, Gloria Ruth, born January 18, 1935, which happened to be the fifteenth birthday of our daughter Deborah. Perk says, "One of myfinest experiences was the return to Hanover last June after an absence of thirtyyears. Of course the changes about the College plant are very marked, but this ismerely a physical change. The cordialityand spirit of genuine friendliness exhibitedby all the old classmates in 'O4 was far beyond my expectations. Many of them Icame to know in the few days we were together, far better than I had known themin College."

RUSSELL STILL IN ONTARIO

Walter H. Savory Russell, stingy with words as usual, admits that he is still in business at Port Arthur, Ont., and wishes to be remembered to everyone. Incidentally he is greatly indebted to this town of Waterville, N. H., for here Mrs. Russell was born, and the Elliott-Russell wedding was celebrated in this house. This recalls a funny one—at the end of our fifteenth reunion Lin Durgin offered to bring Walter and myself to Plymouth across country from Hanover. Much to our chagrin, yet true to all our natural tendencies, we directed Durg from the back seat up a road that finally petered out in a meadow with only one house in sight, some six or eight miles in the woods from the through road we had persuaded Durg to leave.

Bill Gray and Old Man Gout have been having a six weeks' bout, scrapping it out all the way from the Gray homestead to Dick's House and back again two or three round trips. It was my good fortune to spend an hour or two recently with Bill in the cozy chimney corner of his living room, and right now Bill is on top. He's as pleased with a new diet list as the Rood House boarders used to be with oyster stew Sunday nights. Somewhere in* the fight, with Bill a little groggy, a new gout specialist from the city appeared. When he learned that Gout and Bill had been occupying the same bed for more than thirty years he conferred another degree on the Tuck School Dean and started in to complete his thesis by the accumulation of first-hand facts. It's to the everlasting credit of the Bill Gray we have known for nearly thirty-five years that the gout has never been able to even scratch that placid, sensible, and lovable disposition, which has won him such an enviable place in Hanover life, and in the hearts of a widely distributed host of friends.

At the time when you are reading these notes the bookstores will put on sale a romantic and adventurous historical novel about the Green Mountain Boys. The historical facts are correct in this book of fiction, That Bennington Mob. It is the first novel of Henry Barnard Safford. The hero, named Safford, is an ancestor of this doctor of ours, who all these years has been a successful practising physician and surgeon in New York City. I am assured by good authority that Dr. Safford hasn't deserted the old profession for the new one, but that he will continue both. Isn't this an interesting manifestation of the Northern New England influence of college days?

Chick Weston, modest Springfield lawyer, who admittedly practices law to get a living, has spent more than twenty years in active boy and girl work. For several years he has been counsel (unpaid) and a director of Hampden County Improvement League. This is a county organization which maintains in rural communities classes for both boys and girls in gardening, live stock and poultry raising, sewing, weaving, and other home industries. In Junior Achievement work as treasurer and executive committee member of his local group and a trustee of the national group, he has been actively interested. They maintain each year from 100 to 150 clubs of boys and girls, meeting weekly, and doing woodwork, leather work, metal work, and home economics for girls. In addition, as a Kiwanian he has the management of the boys' clubs sponsored by that organization. Chick finds real satisfaction in the fact that his long-time interest in boys and girls has been of real service during our period of hard times in helping the boys and girls just beyond school years with leisure work and thereby keeping their interest in something constructive and consequently worth-while. This brief story will enlighten you as to the great community interest and the good work done outside his profession, but Chick still has time for his real hobby which is fishing. For the past five years the Westons, father and son, have spent every spare minute fly-fishing in Vermont and Maine (we have both flies and fish in New Hampshire, Chick), but they don't stop at just fishing, they repair their rods, tie their own flies, instruct local classes in fly-tying, scour the country for material for flies, and then dye the materials. This past year, at the age of sixteen, Weston junior made and sold as many flies as his spare time would allow him to make, and during the summer he had a good position as fishing instructor in a boys' camp in Maine. This," by the way, was the only course in fly-tying and fly-fishing given in any Maine camp, and the interest was so great that he was obliged to conduct a class for the camp counselors. This master of streamcraft says, "As to my hobby, fishing, know thatduring these years when the economic upheaval has staggered us, and taken awaymany of the props we thought firm, thatsame interest in fishing and all that goeswith it has kept me sane and able to dispelthe worries."

Why isn't this camp where our young Isaac Walton conducts his courses for personal enjoyment in the woods of New England the place for your boy this summer?

Ike Charron was put to bed by the family doctor on January second for several weeks of treatment and observation, but he has bounced out again and is now covering his office duties on a part-time basis. Intimate years of companionship with Ike {provides a background for the prophecy that he will continue to keep several jumps ahead of the medical fraternity and soon be back on a full-time basis of cheerful living.

The Willis family are spending part of February in Florida. It's the first time in his life that Ned has ever left home in February without taking a pair of snowshoes and all the equipment that goes with it, so I won't be surprised to learn later that he has been snowshoeing in a bathing suit on some Florida beach.

I am sorry to record the fact that Robbie suffered the loss of his mother after a very brief illness. According to the Boston Herald:

"Mrs. Addie Kilburn Robinson, 74, of 11Orchard Street, Belmont, who maintaineda photographic studio in Boston andgained a national reputation for her photographs of celebrated persons, died suddenly at her home Tuesday evening, Jan-uary 29."

If your memory still exists, you will recall that these columns a month ago advised a journey to any place where the Dartmouth skiers might be found in action. Well, the Austins took the prescription, and the only bitterness of it was the brain-truster type of scoring which placed Dartmouth third in the final result of the meet because in individual competition the boys could only take firsts and seconds. It was our first Carnival,—other columns in this number will tell you of the skill, prowess, speed, and grace of Goldthwaite, Hunter, Durrance, and Woods, but I would like to bring you the contrast between the winters of our intimate knowledge and the present ones in Hanover. Imagine, if you please, the gayest Commencement crowd you remember, dress them in a motley variety of colorful winter costumes, and go with them at night to the outdoor arena at the golf course for the opening ceremony of the Carnival. Two or three thousand persons, spellbound with scenic effects, dog teams, wonderful skating and ski stunts under flood lights, with the big pines of the Vale of Tempe as a background. Rockets illuminating the entire location in varicolored brilliance. On the campus and in front of all the fraternity houses beautiful figures carved in ice, many of them with the fidelity of reproduction and artistic skill of real sculptors. The entire town overrun with skiers, skaters, hay rides, single and double sleighs, horseback riders, and thousands on foot trudging through knee-deep snow to the top of Balch Hill for the slalom and downhill races, and later way up across the golf course to the ski jump, where more than a hundred contestants rattled down the icy run to thrill us with their bird-like flashes through the winter air. After something more than a century and a half, Dartmouth has discovered what winter is for. Eighteen hundred pairs of skis in College; Amherst, Williams, Norwich, Middlebury, Harvard, Bowdoin, McGill, Yale, Princeton, New Hampshire, Maine—all contestants in the Carnival program. Try to match that with a couple of peerades to Boston and Montreal, a few poker games, and an occasional basketball contest.

I am convinced that there are elements of news, interesting to all the class, creeping into these notes from time to time. We can have more and better news of the gang if some of you will exercise those atrophied right hands in telling me the worth-while things you know of your intimate friends in the class.

Under the new schedule of weekly class luncheons recently announced by a committee of the Dartmouth Alumni Association of Boston, you may find at the Parker House Thursdays from noon till three o'clock men from the classes of 1901-02-03- 1904-30-31-32-33-34. See you there some Thursday.

Secretary, Waterville Valley, Waterville, N. H.