More Than Professor

Harry Richmond Wellman '07 Is Business Man, Personnel Officer, Adviser on College Affairs, Salmon Champion

lIFE WAS SIMPLER in the old days. Markets belonged to the Crown, and kings jealously guarded their business rights. Before the twelfth century in England the word market was not commonly used, and in the Middle Ages business was for the most part transacted in weekly or semi-weekly markets and the annual mart or fair.

The origin of the word fair in itself shows how life if riskier is grimmer nowadays and how it has changed from the serene rhythms of happier centuries. The derivation is from the Latin feriae meaning holidays, and markets were usually held on a holiday or a saint's feast to take advantage of a large gathering of people.

So little did business as we know it today permeate the lives of the Greeks that, according to Cicero, they utilized the religious games for trading purposes, and the implication seems to be that here was not boost and blurb for inflating an already inflated condition but the necessity for finding a medium to make men and women at least a trifle trade minded. The Romans also took time out from the annual feast at the Temple of Voltumna in Etruria to do what we moderns call a little business.

In our brave new world we creatures in it have the high privilege to see how money and marketing dovetail into every cup of coffee we drink, every suit we wear, the car we drive, the girl we marry, the house we build, the children we raise, the grave into which we are eventually lowered, too tired with the strenuousness of the twentieth century to make further effort.

And so a professor of marketing, Harry R. Wellman, in a business school, Tuck, if he is to be the best influence, is something more than a professor of marketing. The faculty on the other side of North Main Street have what on the surface at least seems to be an easier work: they appear to immerse themselves more narrowly in literature and language, in art and music, in folklore and religion, in social patterns and group behaviour, in electrons and

elective affinities, in sulphuric acid and the speeds of light; and even the men in the Division of the Social Sciences can often let pass the intricacies of modern business organization and the future of the undergraduates in the labyrinth which is life except so far as it affects what idealist call the literature of the soul.

The task of the Tuck school educator is at once more specialized and more general. Professor Wellman, for example, must be first a business man with sensitive fingers always at the pulse of American industry and be able to comment on what the pounding or the fluttering means. If he is to do that, he must keep in touch with the leaders of business throughout America, in itself a full-time job, and "in touch" seems too easily written, for it sounds casual; Professor Wellman could hardly get the information he must have if high executives did not trust him enough to talk with freedom off the record.

It follows as the night the day that a professor of marketing must not become too much involved in the local scene to prevent him from becoming footloose and talking at business dinners and conferences and hearing what goes on in the corridors and hotel rooms when decisions are made and weaving together the loose strands of theories and facts in the dining rooms of the powerful.

Such is the picture viewed from one angle. The lens must now be sharpened and focussed on detail, and that is a story in itself, which Mr. Wellman in his lectures gives to his students.

VERSATILE CAREER

Considered from another perspective, the professor of marketing must be a chameleon changing from professor to father confessor to business man to personnel officer and make these lightning adjustments with Houdini nicety. Or, more simply, he must be a genial executive—philosopher or a philosophizing business man shrewd as an old-fashioned Yankee horse trader with an X-Ray glance and as kindly as a father giving his son a gold wrist watch on his twenty-first birthday.

It may be as difficult as it is unwise to try to salt the tails of any of the numerous wild titles which one could give to this professor of marketing, but to an outsider the work he does as personnel officer might seem to be the kind that brings him in his most enduring satisfactions. What more lasting contributions can there be for others' happiness than to help them see themselves steadily and to see themselves whole, avoid the meretricious, and to determine the good? And yet were the outsider to praise Mr. Wellman too exclusively for his afternoons and evenings at the Tuck School and at his home thrashing out the problems students bring him about making the right decisions about their careers, he would not praise him enough for being that rarity in the modern world: a universal man. And Mr. Wellman's versatility seems remarkable in a highly specialized and confused world.

He has done nearly everything: some things brilliantly, other things well, and the remainder at least pretty well. This is the place to give a few facts about the unusual diversity of his life in a country where a jack of all trades is no card to sweep the board.

Born in Lowell, Vermont, June 7, 1881, Harry Wellman got a late start in life and following his graduation from Brigham Academy in Bakersfield, Vermont, he did not enter Dartmouth until he was twenty-two years old. So old a freshman is a wise freshman, and he became even more mature as he had to eke out his existence as best he might, and as best he might meant washing dishes, tending furnaces, mowing lawns, pushing wheel chairs at the World's Fair in Saint Louis in 1904 and playing a piano in concessions, working in a serving room and night checking in a grill, holding down a summer job at the Franconia Inn, and selling in a clothing store.

Such diverse and such strenuous jobs might wilt many of the tender blossoms of the present generation, but Harry Wellman had a reserve of energy which could not become exhausted in merely providing for three square meals a day. He had enough left over to keep himself brisk enough in the classroom, and the classroom did not keep him from effervescing about the campus. He was able to plaster on his chest as many honors as is decent for any student: he wrote the music for the first original Dartmouth comic opera, The Founders; he was assistant secretary of the College Club; chairman of the Prom Committee in his junior year and chairman of the excutive committee in his senior year; a member of The Dartmouth board and The Aegis and Palaeopitus and Delta Kappa Epsilon and Casque and Gauntlet.

Tucking a sheepskin under his arm in 1907, Harry R. Wellman, Bachelor of Arts, took' a job as supervisor of dormitories for the College, which further stimulated his interest in college problems and policies that is so marked in him even today. He has strong ideas based on definite principles about student living quarters and how buildings should be planned and administered.

At this time President Tucker told Harry that his greatest gift was personnel work, which was news to Harry. In the same breath the President said that he was going to ask Harry to be good enough to help the College make the difficult transition in the change of administration (Dr. Nichols was going to take over) but that thereafter Harry should try to find something for his life's work in the field of human relations.

These remarks put a bee in Harry's bonnet, and in 1909 he became Secretary to the Retail Trade Board of the Boston Chamber of Commerce with the deliberate intention of looking oyer the city and its businesses to find out where he could best apply his energy. Here he got to know all the important business leaders and laid the basis for his extensive knowledge of how and when to market products. In 1910 he became Secretary of the Trade Extension Committee and engaged in various other trade activities for the next couple of years until he resigned to become Assistant to the Chairman of the Board of Port Directors, a commission which the Chamber of Commerce had been instrumental in establishing. Never a man to glance at the hour hand, let alone the minute hand, at 5 o'clock afternoons, Mr. Wellman set up a plan of organization for the Port Directors and created for himself a reputation for solidity as well as for brilliance.

The question now facing Mr. Wellman was whether he should decide to use his talents with an old and conservative firm where promotion must be slow or with a rapidly expanding firm where the work would be body-punishing and brain-fagging and the rewards financially appropriate.

He decided to go with William Filene's Sons Company and run their men's advertising a while although he had an understanding with the Walter M. Lowney Company, which was then well in the red and needed the most drastic sort of reorganization. This thorough overhauling it got from the restless Wellman hands and from 1913 on he threw into this work all his ardor and his hopes, which resulted soon enough in prosperity for the business and for himself a salary consonant with the title of Vice President in Charge of Distribution.

If such a career was interesting, still more so was the war job which Mr. Wellman found himself in, a challenge to his tact and ability to face a new situation the like of which he had never known or even remotely imagined. At Camp Meade he took charge of Ordnance, which meant that he had under his at first bewildered eye the men who could not fight: those of the hernia, those of the flat foot, those of the crossed eye; and the others who were not allowed to fight even if they could: the sexual perverts of all kinds ranging from Broadway pimps to great hulking farmer boys who heard about "buddies" and got caught for the first time.

Working with Harry Wellman on these maladjusted persons were psychologists and psychiatrists, who knew a lot about emotional abnormality, and as Harry Wellman did not and could not allow himself to speak with assumed preciseness concerning situations he was fuzzy about, after he had listened to the professionally- trained talk filled with technical phrases, he sat up nights reading books on the handling of inverts and perverts and the methods of bringing them back into the ranks of those we like to call the normal, where they can live usefully and happily instead of parasitically and neurotically. The seeds of Professor Wellman's major proposal about the proper treatment of sexual degenerates after the War should be over, which he made to the Government of the United States, fell on stony ground. He believed, and the psychologists seemed to be with him, that the good work of rehabilitation and adjustment should be continued after hostilities ceased, that any policy which threw the socially unfit back into the competition of a hard business world where they were unadapted was shortsighted and foolish. But if the Washington officials were unwilling to feed a lot of flatfeet and hernias unable to lift a shovel, still more reluctant were they to hand out free meals to homosexuals who ought to do a man's work in a man's world, and they simply tossed them all back into the civilian life and hoped not very sincerely that what could not be seen need not be worried about.

The work with these unfortunates and his association with trained students of eccentric and pathological behaviour so absorbed Harry Wellman and so. filled his mind with the thoughts of how necessary it was to be of service in more ways than building up a business and making a lot more money that he lost a taste for the pattern of life which was his as vice president of a now sound and wealthy firm.

So dull did business indeed seem that he felt like trying an entirely different line of endeavour and would have looked about for a business offering new and heretofore unsolved problems in human relations if he had not been offered a professorship in marketing in the Tuck School. There he found himself and found happiness, for in addition to the regular work of teaching (and he discovered that he was a born teacher) he engaged actively in selling and advertising plans for several of the larger corporations. Setting up for himself the sound pedagogical principle that his usefulness in Hanover would end just as soon as he lost contact; with modern business conditions, he took what forcing was necessary to keep up all of his former outside associations such as the Sales Managers' Club, the Association of National Advertisers, and other similar organizations.

Consequently you may find, if you look, published monographs on various subjects concerned with marketing like the one he read before the Associated Advertising Clubs of the World in Atlanta, Georgia, in 1921, called The Known Value of Colorin Advertising.

In this paper Professor Wellman admitted that color did have a definite value in selling goods but he regretted the extreme lack of taste which many advertisers were showing in magazines, and in the following words he ridicules it:

"Pink beans reporting on a sage green background in a stomachless purple dish! Poisonous greens playing tag with watery pink hams, or, worse yet, a translucent salad oil dripping down past a beautiful layer cake to its absolutely geometrical point of contact with a frying pan; the same masterpiece flanked by a pair of innocent looking eggs that have just escaped the ambushing lettuce. You do wonder, indeed; first, why the idea, and why, for heaven's sake, add color to it!"

The effect of these many business connections was what one would anticipate: organizations outside Hanover have tried to gain that most efficient Professor Wellman "who ought to be a business man," and in point of fact for one reason or another he has been resigning regularly but has been persuaded, often at the last moment, to change his mind. He wants to resign right now, he says, and go to Florida, live in a primitive shack, fish, and write the book that has been scribbling itself in his brain for many years and has kept him cerebrally nervous, and the only reason he does not wonder why he is still in town is that he knows that the book is going to get written some day, and so there is no great rush about doing it at any particular time.

Being still a professor, Mr. Wellman likes to talk about teaching methods at Dartmouth. His pedagogical theories are surprisingly simple, and they are therefore deceptive, as all difficult processes are deceptive to those who know Only a little about a subject. To hear him talk, you might believe what he says: Good teaching is fifty per cent good ventilation. Open up the windows; let the wind blow in from Oak Hill where no skier ever fell asleep; the cobwebs will not stand the strain; the boys will listen: you are a teacher.

The second rule is that you should try to play a role, and that role is not a professor's. A good professor is half preacher, half vaudeville actor; and a good actor will not try to play the part of a teacher long. Professors as professors are dull.

MORE THAN FRESH AIR

Apropos of this point Mr. Wellman tells a story about Jimmy Hamilton '22, now head of the business side of a large hospital in Connecticut and formerly manager of the Mary Hitchcock Hospital in Hanover, who had been asked to talk to the Tuck School students. Preparing his material he spent many hours getting it shipshape, but in the classroom before he began to lecture formally, he made a few preliminary remarks in which he got so absorbed, and so did the students, that the bell rang before he got to his carefully compiled notes and to the blackboard where he was to write down figures. Disconcerted, not to say mad, at the bell impertinently bringing the hour to a too speedy close, he threw down his chalk and said, "Damn!" (Damn was not the exact word, but let that pass.) The students hinged back their necks and roared with laughter. Mr. Wellman's comment is,

"There was a man who could teach because he wasn't a professor."

The third rule is that a professor should keep his most interesting material for the end of the hour, for the ventilation system might not be one hundred per cent perfect.

The fourth rule is to remember that only a share of the students' outside time is yours, that students even if they like you will balk before too much and lose their morale, that they will usually cooperate fully if you are sympathetic and if you face them with a reasonable assignment.

The fifth rule is to know your subject fully but not too minutely. That is to say, the scholar as scholar is usually a poor teacher. Let him think too long and too deeply in the classroom, the meeting of minds is lost, and nothing gained, except a quixotic honesty and a pursuit of a truth that may later turn out to resemble nothing so much as a creaking windmill in an ultra-modern plumber's shop.

Talk to Professor Wellman about personnel work and you immediately discover that the Tuck School tries to be more than a training school for young men with greedy appetites for money, lots of money, to enable them to live up to their position, which begins at a vulgar $25,000 a year and runs up with only a little encouragement of their imaginations that fatten on such rich diet without disciplined exercise. He has a hatred of beautiful parasites who think in terms of what they can wangle or bluff or threaten from the riches of this country, who define success in terms of what the advanced civilization of the United States can give them in terms of lovely girls, fine drinks, sleek cars, and ritzy yachts. Such adjectives offend Mr. Wellman's aesthetic integrity.

For this very reason he tries to keep the boys in Dartmouth from jumping into too many "practical" courses, especially when they evaluate them in terms of future dollars and cents. Professor Wellman advises them to elect as many "cultural" courses as possible, because in terms of human happiness and community well-being such studies are in the last analysis the most practical.

As a personnel officer, he believes that more important than his task of finding Tuck School students jobs is his duty of establishing confidence between them and him with a view of helping them discover what they should do in the work of the world. They must be made to see that they have an obligation to choose the work which will be best for them as individuals, best for the reputation of the Tuck School, best for their future families, best for the groups in which they will be living, and, as long as we are going this far, best for the country.

So much of Professor Wellman's work is done in strict confidence that he is chary about giving examples, and this one is without names and without strict attention to details, since the situation is so typical. Hallowell Cabot Salstonstall comes in for an interview with the personnel officer, who sees that Mr. Salstonstall is passing and who has confidential information from his instructors that he is as crisp as a ten-dollar bill in his thinking about what interests him but that he has no interest in his studies.

After some desultory talk, Professor Wellman comes down to brass tacks and tries to get the man to speak out. "What's wrong?" "Well, Sir, if you press me for the truth, I should like to tell you that I hate Tuck School and that I think all my studies are simply lousy. I shouldn't be here."

Students can talk like that to Professor Wellman; he is human, they say.

And Mr. Salstonstall is not surprised when the personnel officer replies, "Sure. So far so good. But if you don't like us, for goodness sake, why are you here? What do you want to do?"

Here Mr. Salstonstall brightens up, a smile crosses his face in a twisted way, and he says, "If you want the plain truth, I don't care a rap about living up to my name and I want to be a dirt farmer and raise a couple of horses and three kids and wear overalls and be happy."

Professor Wellman allows that this is a decent ambition, indeed a laudable one, and asks why he does not do something about it.

"Do something about it!!!" the student puts back his head and tries to roar with laughter but is able to emit only a sour chuckle. "Listen, Sir, you don't know my old man."

"Neither do you," says Mr. Wellman, "if you speak in that fashion. And if that is all the trouble, you wait and see how understanding he can be if you talk to him in the right way."

Hereupon Professor Wellman puts through a long distance telephone call to the father by way of a feeler, which is followed by a long letter with comments from the Tuck School professors, and, to make a not very long story less long, young Salstonstall finishes out the year bravely because he has been promised that if he does, in due course he will find himself with a wife, a pair of overalls, plenty of dirt, a horse, the expectation of a son, a sublime feeling of happiness, and, provided he has the energy of which he boasts, eventually one of the finest farms in the state of Vermont.

It is mildly surprising to learn that Professor Wellman's chief concern is not in placing good men, for there are always one or two or a half dozen jobs each year for high-ranking students in such establishments as Filene's, Jordan's, Macy's, the First National Bank. They do well as a matter of course, and Dartmouth's reputation as a trainer of sound, sober, and bright business men is reestablished and continues without much worry to Harry Wellman.

Rather the average student, the C man, is his worry, for in this hard-driving world the C man, though he may have admirable qualities as a citizen, as a husband, and as a father, may not suit the high standards required in the most successful businesses. With extreme tact Professor Wellman has to unearth a job where the man can find himself and keep his self respect and do well enough to keep up the reputation of the Tuck School, by no means an easy assignment.

Forced to think in terms of ideal education and the ideal life after graduation. Professor Wellman has always been more than usually interested in plans whereby we can make Dartmouth a better college. At the time Professor William A. Eddy, now President of Hobart College, and Professor Russell R. Larmon were working with a committee on a survey of social life at Dartmouth (1934-36), Mr. Wellman prepared what was to become known as the Wellman plan and submitted it. (The Committee examining it had on the board Dr. Ruggles '02, now a trustee, Jim Mathes '11, now head of his own advertising agency; Colonel Drake '02, now head of Gulf Oil; Jock Brace '25 of the First National in Boston; Sid Hayward '26, Al Dickerson '30, Bill Fitzhugh '35, Phil Guyol '35, Jack Hill '35, Paul land '36, A1 Gibney '36, and A1 Butler '36.

Running to twenty typewritten pages of challenging points of view, this report created a lot of discussion at the time, but it was held by the Committee and never published and still lies in manuscript in the office of President Hopkins.

Briefly and inadequately stated, Professor Wellman's analysis and plan for reform are as follows. His diagnosis of maladjustments is based on the conditions facing Dartmouth in the 1920's, which have since become altered for the better.

In the first place, Mr. Wellman was much disturbed by the mushroom growth of Dartmouth after the War, which resulted in a sort of chaos in which indifference was the keynote. The Faculty, the students, and the townspeople all showed that the machinery for directing the morale and habits of the community had broken down.

THE WELLMAN PLAN

The mainspring of the Wellman reform plan is based on group segregation. The College should be separated into two groups: freshman-sophomore and juniorsenior. For the sake of ultimate integration the Administration should construct just below the Tuck School a group of buildings, including dining hall accommodations, to house majors in all of the Social Sciences, and to accommodate up to 250 persons.

On the other side of the new campus, the Administration should build a similar group that would house the Foreign Languages, Arts, etc., to the number of 250 persons and that would also provide dining accommodations. By a slight rearrangement, the College architect could group the Physics, Chemistry, and Natural Science Buildings by using Wheeler Hall and by building one other dormitory with eating facilities for the accommodation of all undergraduates majoring in the pure sciences.

Such a scheme would leave the present campus with its classrooms available to freshmen and sophomores to the number of about 1,500. Our present classroom accommodations are just about adequate for them. The dining and social arrangements for this group would be taken care of by an improved Commons or the Union idea.

Mr. Wellman believes that the advantages of such a plan are that the freshmen and sophomore classes would become better acquainted and would constitute in effect a separate college and that it would be possible for the faculty and administration to organize groups and carry on the training of these two classes in whatever way might be desired.

The juniors and seniors who qualified and who were ready to continue their major studies would automatically be grouped in their own center. This center would provide eating accommodations, social and group organizations, and would, or should, allow a much closer acquaintance and comradeship than is now possible in the College. These smaller groups would undoubtedly develop real group morale and would be serious contenders in all intramural activities. In their field of studies the spirit of camaradie would be enormously strengthened and the spirit of competition whetted.

The by-product might be the most important product of all: a much greater solidarity among Dartmouth men as alumni.

Concerning college grades and the often commented upon indifference of college students everywhere in this country to study enough, Professor Wellman would have liked to raise the standards at the end of sophomore year and drop the loafers, even though this greater severity might seem to be working towards a junior college.

The effect of the segregation plan, if adopted, would be marked on the fraternities and decidedly beneficial. They would consist largely of freshmen and sophomores because the juniors and seniors would have their social needs satisfied in their own groups, and very possibly fraternities might become only freshmen and sophomore clubs.

So concerned was Professor Wellman at the disorganization caused by the emphasis on the movies, the radio, the out-of- town parties that increased in frequency all the time because of the large number of automobiles owned by the students that he was forced to his solution of group segregation as the only possible solution for the split between the faculty and the students leading to demoralization in the students and to indifference and cynicism in professors.

A NEW SPIRIT

But since the time of this report, written under the stress of the sordid Twenties, Professor Wellman, though he has not lost faith in the soundness of his plan, is somewhat reassured by the difference in spirit shown today by both professors and undergraduates. He believes that we are now in the midst of a renaissance and he dates the beginning about 1934. The faculty is feeling its duties more keenly and wishes more seriously to cooperate with undergraduate activities outside the classroom, and the students are more earnest, more intellectually curious, more gentlemanly in their amusements which are kept within more civilized limits.

For twenty years Mr. Wellman has been following the development of the College closely, and his interest shows no signs of flagging. A major topic for discussion in the immediate future is going to be the question as to whether the calendar ought to be changed to enable greater concentration of work for both faculty and students. Harry Wellman, anticipating the confusion resulting from so drastic a possible step, wrote a long Vox Populi to TheDartmouth, April 14, 1939, in which he asserted stoutly that the machinery of the present time was adequate but that we were running it too fast. We have become the victims of high powered propaganda, he suggested, and asked that we give the College back to the students.

An indication of what he is driving at one can easily see by his discussion of Carnival in the midst of a long list of attractions outside the classroom thrown out of focus by overwritten publicity.

"Hardly are the blue books dry when girls and girls and girls flock into Hanover —for the houseparties. Camera men, newsmen, scouts, visiting firemen, the public, students (?) from other colleges, the world and his wife arrive for Carnival. It's now 'the thing to do!' Oh yes! We go through the motions of starting the second semester work but no one does any work. Why mustwe have Carnival? When the Outing Club was offered 'a week at Carnival,' they objected to so much time 'because students would leave town and would not attend Carnival.' Who wants Carnival, the Outing Club or the students? Let's find out."

There is one way to get Professor Wellman off the subject of education, and that is to bring up the question of salmon or any other kind of fish. He used to spend his summers in New Brunswick but is now favoring the more primitive Newfound- land and the kind of country so wild that when you want to go fishing, you stand in the middle of the only railroad and wave your arms. The engineer stops, you hop aboard, and ride as far as you want to try your luck, and then you ride back with him at night.

This is the country where the women give birth to a child every spring and think they are sissies if after bringing the youngster into the world in the morning, they do not get up on their feet the same evening and go out into the sheds to milk the cows. This is the country of bullocks doing horses' work hauling carts. This is the country where the people are so poor that they dress in rags and tatters and treat Harry Wellman as a god because he likes to bring down for the boys a couple of dozen pair of trousers from Montgomery Ward and because he brought down a ping pong set that made their hearts pound with excitement for months on end. Such a country is infinitely richer because of its poverty than Nova Scotia which is more civilized although to a New Yorker it might seem primitive enough with the chance of casting your fly into a stream right from your automobile from the side of a road. Convenient though this method is, the better fishermen eschew it, for the simple reason that in such streams fish live no longer or, if they do, they have lost their faith in man-provided meals.

If Newfoundland is Harry Wellman's last love, New Brunswick will always have her charm, and one reason is that there he caught his prize fish. Like the good fisherman he is, he will tell you the story, but first he will say something about another story—a twenty-eight pound salmon, and that is another episode entirely.

This one, accurate to the last detail and therefore worth while being repeated as remarkable in its lack of embellishment, goes back seven years, but the record still holds. Some men love the Restigouche, but Professor Wellman loves the Southwest Branch of the Miramichi River, for it was there he caught after four hours and five minutes of terrific battle a fish.

NO NEED TO EXAGGERATE

The scales, which were accurate to a hundredth of an ounce, showed that this silver salmon weighed thirty-five pounds and two ounces. And this, gentlemen, makes Professor Harry R. Wellman champion of that river, and any disputants to the title may take the matter up with him.

Since no such fish has ever been caught there equal to this, Mr. Wellman has reason to gloat over the fact that he used only an eight-ounce dry-fly salmon rod, a heavy trout line, and a number six double- hook Dusty Miller fly (and the fly was tied by Everett Price of McNamee, N. B.).

The guide, Thomas Wilson also of McNamee, measured the fish, and it was of the short, thick type, thirty-nine inches long and twenty-one and a half inches in girth.

Mr. Wellman started fishing on September 14th, 193 a, on a day not considered good salmon weather, though the sky was overcast, for there were frequent puffs of westerly wind. After about fifteen minutes of casting, the fly reached a swirl fairly well down the current. The strike was immediate and hard, and the salmon leaped from the water, made two complete circles around the pool, dashed up through the pool, and jumped again. Then it dashed to the bottom, fouling the line on the end of a reef, and returned to the place where it was first hooked. As the pool was quite small, the guide was able to release the line on the first attempt, though it was scored on both sides and burned for about thirty feet, which prevented it from being used again on a salmon of large size.

The fish was hooked about 8 o'clock, and after the first run, it sought deep water under the rapids near the head of the pool. Here it stayed for over an hour, only moving when forced to. Then it made its second run but confined its activities to upstream. In fact, it went as far upsteam as it could, and its back and tail showed well out of water when it turned.

In spite of the fact that his line once had been fouled at the lower end of the pool, Harry Wellman thought that the only way was to tire the salmon or get him down the pool. This he did by exercising a strong side pull, which caused the fish to turn its head slightly. In straightening out, it would drop back four or five inches. Harry worked it down the pool, inches at a time, only to have it dash back to the head of the pool three times.

Finally at noon the fish began to roll, and the last time was brought down, floating peacefully under the gaff. There was nothing then for the fisherman to do except sit down on the bank and rest, tired after the battle that had lasted for four hours and five minutes.

That is the story of Professor Wellman's silver salmon, the largest ever caught on the Miramichi, and the record one for the continent in the season of 1932.

A bachelor, Mr. Wellman lives in Hanover in the attractive house built by the late Homer Eaton Keyes 'OO, the art critic and connoisseur, at the end of Rope Ferry Road and across from the Golf Club. With an enormous fireplace the spacious living room seems even larger because of the care Mr. Wellman has exercised in avoiding bright colors and because of the steps leading down into it from the hall. On the north porch overlooking the golf links he likes to have a cup of tea in the early evening to refresh him after a hard morning of teaching and an exacting afternoon of continuous conferences. Only occasionally is the quiet disturbed by the cursing of a zealous golfer whose bad shot was not his own fault but the fault of the club or an unevenness in the ground. You know how those explanations go.

On the living room side table you would have found in December Kitty Foyle, the natural history of a woman, by Christopher Morley, the most recent Masefield novel, and the new Tomlinson story, and you would have heard Mr. Wellman remark that he did not like it so well as Gallion's Reach to which he returns often. On the center table you would have found the Simon and Shuster book, A Treasuryof Art Masterpieces with comments by Thomas Craven and heard him remark that on Sunday last he had given himself a double dose, the symphony in both ears and the art masterpieces in both eyes.

But that picture is less characteristic, at least to those who do not know him well, for Harry Wellman suggests the business man turned professor, gray hair, a high color, a flashing smile by the side of genial phrases often cast in the Hanover vernacular which undo any formality, a staccato reaching for his perpetual cigarettes, and an endless fund of reminiscenses.

There is one subject, however, on which he is as silent as the Newfoundland countryside beyond the last hamlet: the men he has helped, and they run into the thousands. "It was all done and said in confidence," he explains simply.

And this is in keeping. He was born in Lowell, Vermont, and now at the age of 58 after a successful career as business executive, professor, and personnel officer he does his fishing in Newfoundland to which he returns year after year, he says, because it reminds him of the country round his birthplace. No, Harry Wellman, who has straightened out so many confused minds at the opening of careers in business would rather tell you about his Utopian college and after that about his silver salmon.

HARRY RICHMOND WELLMAN He has a Utopian college in mind and meanwhile has brought practical business to hisTuck School teaching and keen human interest to students starting their business andprofessional careers.

WINTER'S POOL ON THE CODROY RIVER Sandy McInnis' camp on the South Branch of the Codroy River in Newfoundland, headquarters of many a pleasant summer for Harry Wellman, and center of unexcelled waterfor salmon fishing.

THAT 35-LB. SALMON

ASSISTANT PROFESSOR OF ENGLISH