Class of 1907
EXTRA! EXTRA! EXTRA! LIFE HISTORY OF PRESIDENT JIM O'NEILL!
"You are quite right; it is time I reported. Here goes.
"Last spring I resigned my position in the University of Michigan to accept the headship of the department of speech in Brooklyn College, New York City. Brooklyn College is the youngest of New York's three municipal colleges: City College (for men), Hunter College (for women) in Manhattan, and Brooklyn College for both men and women in Brooklyn.
"This is the most interesting position I have ever held, in spite of the many interesting aspects of my work in Dartmouth, the University of Wisconsin, and the University of Michigan. My present department is one of the two or three largest in the United States: a staff of twenty-three men and women, well over three thousand individual student registrations in the department each semester, and around one hundred and eighty separate sections of work in the various courses and clinic groups. We are interested and active in every aspect of speech from acting and public speaking to phonetics and the correction of speech disorders, such as stuttering and lisping.
At present the college is housed in rented space in office buildings in the Borough Hall section of Brooklyn. My office is in the Chamber of Commerce Building at 66 Court St. In the summer of 1937, however, we move to an entirely new campus out in the Flatbush section of Brooklyn, about four miles southeast of Brooklyn Bridge. There a group of buildings are now being built that will make one of the best, and best looking, college groups in the country. They are four-and- one-half-story buildings of colonial exterior and up to the minute interior.
"By the way, probably the most active man in this whole enterprise, except of course the president of the college, Dr. Boylan, is E. R. Seelman, Dartmouth '98. Mr. Seelman is a member of the Board of Higher Education of New York City—the governing board of the three city colleges. He is the vice chairman of the Administrative Committee of Brooklyn College, and owing to the ill health of the chairman (Dr. Howe, editor emeritus of the Brooklyn Eagle) the duties of the chairmanship have fallen to Mr. Seelman for some time.
"I 'retired' from my farm in Michigan a year before I resigned from the University. My retirement was a sort of strategic retreat—if you know what I mean. I retired in good order with no loss of life and with the commissary department functioning regularly. That would be called victory by some who went through the Mid-western manifestations of the recent depression. And furthermore I am not cured! I would still rather spend time and money—if I had it—on a Guernsey dairy farm than in any other way that has yet. been discovered for disposing of large quantities of both.
"The last two summers we—my wife and I and our five sons and one daughter —have spent on the sea shore at Wakefield, R. I. The children have learned to appreciate the food, the sights, and sounds, and even the smells, of the seashore. They have learned to be apparently as much at home in the water as on the land. So far as my own performance is concerned I still feel that an expert might detect in my aquatic form some indications of my youth in the hinterland, possible only of my youth in the long ago, but I like to think that it is the former.
"Last September we took up our residence in Brooklyn, at 133 Eighth Ave. We have a large apartment one block from Prospect Park. There are times when we miss the great open spaces, particularly the three younger boys. But we try to counteract that as much as possible by using the facilities of Prospect Park and the Botanic Gardens, and by driving to the country on Saturdays in good weather. If there are important aspects of living in the metropolis that we ought not to like, we have been too busy to discover them.
"My oldest son, John, will graduate from Erasmus Hall High School in June and expects to enter Dartmouth next September. My second son, Jamie, is attending the Portsmouth Priory School, at Portsmouth, R. 1., and has his fifteen-year-old heart set on going to Annapolis. My daughter, Margaret, is attending the St. Saviour's Girls High School, here in our immediate neighborhood, and the three younger boys, Hugh, Richard, and Paul, are all in the grades of the same school.
"Well, Dick, I suspect that this is as long a report as anyone ought to inflict on you. It covers the major events of my recent years. All of the men of 1907 have lived long enough by this time to know that major events are of relatively little importance in a man's life. It is the detail, the filling, the intricate patterns of daily existence, that really matter; and this sort of material is largely non-negotiable. I can only report in sum a very satisfying existence. I seem to have been very happy and very busy with matters that seemed, each in its own time, to be well worth being busy about.
"I should like much to see members of the class and other Dartmouth friends at any time. My office and residence addresses are both given above. My office telephone is Main 4-8544, extension 3; my home telephone is Sterling 3-3514.
"With every possible good wish to you personally, and to all of the members of the class."
Secretary, 80 Federal St., Boston
