Golden Reunion Message
The Alumni Luncheon Address from Fifty Year Class at Commencement Ceremonies of Last Year
FOR MOST PEOPLE the year 1888 means blizzard, the great March storm that paralyzed the whole East. To us, however, the June blizzard of that year, the letting loose upon the world of our college class, was an event vastly greater. When we left the old campus we sure were going to overturn things. We are not so cocky now. Fifty years has a deflating effect, and so has the walk we took yesterday about the town. At every step we were confronted by "believe it or not" sensations, until like the Queen of Sheba viewing the works of Solomon, there is no more spirit in us. Old Rip Van Winkle who slept 20 years has nothing on us. Viewing the new Hanover, we feel as if just awake after a century at least. We can't find anything as it was. We hunted in vain for the old white church, for Pa Leeds' mansion, the Rood House, the college pump so deadly to us as freshmen, "bedbug alley," Prex's garden, now a fashionable suburb. We found sidewalks far down into Rum Hollow and it was told us as a commonplace matter that the Hanover climate had been domesticated. Actually it was told us that last winter snow had to be hauled into Hanover on trucks—told to us who for long months used to hear the blast howl around Old Dartmouth Hall, and heap unbelievable drifts over Norwich Flat and the June.; told to us who lived and shovelled through the great blizzard when the campus paths were canyons open only to the sky. All this has been changed, they say. Old Boreas has been caught and made a college trustee, "the Great White Cold is now a faculty member with classrooms on Mt. Washington, and the phrase "the pipe and the bowl and the song by the fire" is to be edited out of the "Hanover Winter Song." Saga stuff it is surely. You poets of '3B should get busy. It should bring a Pulitzer prize.
Two-thirds of our class came from New Hampshire and Vermont. When we entered in 1884, there were in the four classes 318 men, and of these one-half were from New Hampshire alone. Only 48 of the student body came from outside of New England, and these were mostly sons of alumni. In the words of Richard Hovey, Dartmouth was the college of "the lone and silent North, the college built on the New Hampshire granite, a "vox clamantis," indeed "in deserto." Compared with the early Harvard and Yale, Dartmouth was what Edinburgh was to London in the eighteenth century: an outpost of culture on the northern border. Behind the little college which Wheelock had moved into the cultural aridity of upper New England, lay a vast, Scotland-like area, ragged with mountains, stern nurses of free men. To the breakers of this granite land, "Vikings of the North" Hovey called them, and to their sturdy sons, the Websters, the Than Stevenses, the Salmon Chases, Dartmouth was a God-sent opportunity. To the glory of the old college, it can be said that the greater part of those sterling individualists the early alumni, would never have found college training at all but for this outpost of culture on the northern frontier. Bear lightly on the goo gallons when you think of Eleazer Wheelock. In his heart and brain was born the Dartmouth College which for more than a century and a half has been the strong molder of free men.
I have told you that two-thirds of our class came from this virile North. It is needless to say more about them. They came from small towns many of them or from small hillside farms. For most of us Dartmouth was our only chance for a college education. Finances with us were of small-town size. Should I tell you men of '38 how little it cost in money some of us to get through our four years you would dismiss it as a tall tale. But the price we paid in hard work, in utmost economy, and even in privations, was no small one.
PRAISE FOR FACULTY
We were indeed crude ore when Swazey first hauled us into Hanover, ore which I fear any other refinery but Dartmouth might have looked upon as hardly worth assaying. But Dartmouth knew to the full our needs and our possibilities. After 50 years spent in college class-rooms, I personally can testify that no college anywhere or at any time could have given us better training for the life that was to be ours. Never have I seen a faculty better fitted for its work. There were no young instructors to practice upon us. First and last we sat in the class-rooms of major professors. We were taught only by scholarly masters, the most of them of national fame. Would that I had time to expand this tremendous fact.
During our four years a literary renaissance was in progress in the college, a breath of the new literary period following the war. There had just come to Dartmouth that vital personality Charles F. Richardson, and in another department was the novelist Arthur Sherburne Hardy. A new library was building. In every classroom an atmosphere eager and creative. We had in our class a veritable school of poets: Byron Forbush, who published a volume of lyrics in his senior year, Dan Lawrence, a genius, too soon taken by death, and there were others. '88 indeed furnished nearly half of the poems in the first volume of Dartmouth Lyrics.
We have had few brilliant stars in our class, but our average of excellence has been high. None of us has rolled in riches. The fact that nearly all of the class have been teachers at one time or another tells our financial story. Even as undergraduates we were teachers, many of us. The long winter vacation gave opportunity for a tenweeks school, and though it meant grinding toil to make up six weeks of lost work, we did not hesitate. I suppose it was good for us. Certainly it was good for our schools. We educated Cape Cod.
NOTABLE CAREERS
Some of us made teaching our profession, notably Gilbert Sykes Blakely, who long was principal of the Evander Childs High School in New York City.
Ten of the class entered the ministry. Only one, however, is alive to-day: the Reverend John Lew Clarke now retired after a life-time of good work. It is always safe to have a minister along. We are hoping to keep him to render safe our 75th.
Of lawyers we have had a notable quota, headed by our valedictorian Lee F. English long attorney for the Santa Ffe road and by Frank E. Gove professor in the Colorado State School of Law.
But our honor roll has been most brilliant in the areas of business and engineering. With us to-day is George F. Hardy, leading paper-mill engineer of the world. Of our class too was Luther White at the time of his death General Superintendent of all the Federal Prisons; and .the late A. A. Fisher, long Superintendent of the United States Railway Mail Service. And I must not omit the genial Warren F. Gregory, late President of our class, a leading publisher of Boston.
But as I single out these names, there comes to me the uncomfortable conviction that there are many others in the class who have been just as worthy of golden mention. But my time is limited to ten iron minutes. Permit, however, this Parthian arrow as I close: on the average, one out of every four of our class has sent a son to Dartmouth,—l 6 sons in all.
One of the deepest impressions still with us of our four years at Dartmouth, "those swiftest and gladdest years of all," came to us at the time of our "sing-out," when was rendered that old hymn which for more than a century has been one of the college traditions: "Oh that each in the day of his coming may say, 'I have fought my way through; I have finished the work that thou gav'st me to do.' " That defines the Dartmouth Spirit, as we felt it in our day. We men of '88, 25 of us still alive, have indeed found life to be a fight, but we have not shrunk from it, or faltered, or whined. We have been conscious at every step that we are Dartmouth men. Not one of us is unemployed even now, and not one of us in on the dole, or will be. We come to you on this hill-top today with no mournful "About to die we salute you." As class poet 50 years ago I took as our slogan, "About to live we salute you." It is still our slogan and will be: we are Dartmouth men. As we anew our journey pursue, we are leaving with the fullest conviction that the college we love is in strong, safe hands, as of old, that the traditions that molded us are still held vital; that the New Dartmouth that has so astonished and thrilled us, is our Old Dartmouth brought up to the full in every department to meet the demands of the new day.
PRESIDENT OF THE CLASS
