Squash Little '91 "Constant Champion"
HIS DEATH JUNE 6 LEAVES BEHIND DARTMOUTH MEMORIESAND A PROFESSIONAL CAREER THAT WILL LIVE
THE MAN loved to battle. His whole career is the story of a winning fight against odds. He stood six feet, three; he was possessed of giant strength; football men in the earlier days of Dartmouth prowess on the gridiron grouped themselves about him and struggled with opponents much better trained and organized than themselves. Facing certain defeat against stronger teams, there was in those games little hope of victory but a great sense of exaltation that comes only in a battle that taxes every fiber of muscle and every particle of nerve. That in itself is not so important, except as the spirit of the man was consistent in this as it was in everything he did.
To fight for a weaker and more unfortunate side of humanity than himself was his greatest pleasure. His bulk, his stature, his brains all went into it. He took up a neglected group of people, built up his interest in them through a successive period of training and practice, at the Taunton State Hospital in Massachusetts, at the McLean Hospital in Waverly, at the Laconia State School in New Hampshire where he was superintendent. All this was in itself fruitful, it was the battle of new science with old superstition and convention, but it really marked the way to his greatest work as superintendent of Letchworth Village, an institution for the treatment and care of the feeble minded in New York State. The best twenty-five years of his life went into it. He went there when the institution didn't even have a single building; at the time of his death it had become the greatest institution for mental defectives in the world, with some three thousand members of the community.
Friends tell wonderful stories of his strength of body. The tributes to him from all sides, college mates, men in public life, professional associates, members of his own staff, residents of the institution, have all been published in a little booklet which serves as a special issue of the (Letchworth) "Village News." They are perfectly amazing. And they all seem to express one common quality, which lay outside his ability, tact, administrative power, and friendliness; they all sense the huge driving power that he put into the work. The essence of this was spiritual; the physical strength was but a reflection, or perhaps better an expression, of it. No one, not intimately connected with the work of a doctor in
this modern age, can realize the terrific strain attendant upon the doctor's work. It is well to call the work a profession, coldly, and to compare it with crafts like carpentry or metal shaping. It is well enough to think of a doctor who handles hundreds and perhaps thousands of cases in a lifetime as being impersonal and as calmly scientific as the chemist who notes actions and reactions.
The fact remains that the doctor is subject to the most terrific tax of physical strain and mental anxiety, amounting to almost torture. The quality of sympathy implanted in all men is constantly fighting professional spirit no matter how practiced or experienced the doctor may be. To stifle and disregard the calls upon one's sympathies is at times almost necessary in the medical profession, but no matter how hardened the practitioner may be, he can never be wholly deaf to calls which come from hearts wrung with anguish and pain. In such a work as oquasn was aouig, there is the constant necessity, a highly dramatic power, of putting one's self in the place of the patient, sensing his troubles and seeking for him the light of recovery amidst the discouragement of his own disease, a work so gigantic that it breaks down many able men who do not possess the stamina.
With conditions as they were, with the opportunities at hand, with the environment and necessary training, the exact qualities which he possessed were the only qualities which could see the thing through to victory. It took brawn and brain and courage and sympathy, and it took indomitable fighting. When one visualizes Squash Little and his driving power and strength, one thinks of him as one does of Tolstoy, rising by power of mind and body above the crowd of his followers. To be a constant champion is one of our highest ambitions. Squash Little was this, and the cause which he championed was the cause of the ill-treated, the little understood, the terribly unfortunate people classed as "mental defectives," and he stood and battled for them as a friend for a friend.
CHAMPIONSHIP TEAM THAT "SQUASH" LITTLE CAPTAINED IN 1894 First row: McCornack, Folsom, Patey, Hunkins; second row: Dodge, Abbott, Little(Capt.), Clark, McAndrews, Lakeman, Folsom; third row: Morrill, Mason, Pollard (Manager), Gaverly, Lewis; fourth row: Joslyn, Randall, Huff, Bowles, Wilson, and West.
