Manager of College Finance
For Twenty-Six Years Halsey C. Edgerton '06 Has Been A Key Man in Dartmouth's Business of Education
THAT DARTMOUTH, WITH THE CONTINUED support of the alumni, which has been so vital in the past, will emerge from this war even more successfully than from the last, Halsey Charles Edgerton '06, now rounding out his twenty-sixth year as treasurer, has no doubts. Shrewd Yankee that he is, he doesn't underestimate the hard time ahead, but having weathered hard times since childhood he finds them challenging and takes them in his deliberate and determined stride. A man of few words, his quiet confidence conveys still more than he says, for he has always been too busy to elaborate on facts.
His inherited reserve and his habitual absorption in his work together with the first requirement of his job, which in his own words is "sitting on the lid," have sometimes created a false picture of this expert man of affairs of Parkhurst Hall, whose incessant and painstaking labors make liberal education pay its way. He passes friends without seeing them when he has something on his mind, which is likely to be all the time, and he answers idle comments in monosyllables, when he answers them at all. He seldom talks of anything on which he's not informed, and he can be as stubborn as any born and bred Vermonter in clinging to old concepts of whose truth he is convinced. But beneath the shell that sometimes may seem to be the man are an alert and well-schooled mind, an ability to adapt his views and methods to new conditions, an ingrained respect for accuracy and painstaking attention to detail, a chuckling humor, warm sympathies and unaffected kindliness that cause him to give freely of his time to others and to consider their proposals thoughtfully even when he disapproves, an intense fidelity to his complex and exacting work, and a knack for doing anything that may be needed to save the College money or improve the plant.
For years his efficient execution of his varied responsibilities has made him one of the busiest men in town. His day begins before nine in the morning and often lasts until he's reminded to go to bed. Meanwhile he is completely occupied with innumerable concerns of the College and the town, and not infrequently with individuals who seek his sound advice on problems of their own.
As treasurer of the College, he is responsible to the trustees for its fiscal policies, including building programs as well as budgets and all properties, endowments, and investments. With Dartmouth's total assets amounting to some $37,500,000 that in itself would seem a full-time job. But in addition he is president of the Dartmouth National Bank and of the Northfield (Vt.) National Bank; vice president and treasurer of the Hanover Water Works Company; treasurer of the Mary Hitchcock Memorial Hospital, Twin State Airport, Inc., and the Hanover Country Club; trustee of the Dartmouth Eye Institute; Pine Park Commissioner; trustee of trust funds for the Town of Hanover; and director of the Granite State Electric Company and the Split Ballbearing Corporation. Formerly he has also been director of the Hanover Improvement Society, trustee of the Outing Club, graduate treasurer of the Athletic Council and the Council on Student Organizations, treasurer of the Graduate Club and the Class of 1906, president of the Eastern Association of College and University Business Officers and of the Hanover Rotary Club, director of the New Hampshire Tax Research Foundation, and chairman of the finance committee of the Town of Hanover. In his earlier years, among other things, he also practiced accounting on the side.
A DAY'S DUTIES
Such a list of offices is only suggestive of the varied activities with which his days and nights are taken up. Recently a Saturday morning found him—besides attending to his correspondence and other routine matters—arranging about the financing of planes for the Civilian Pilot Training Program, placing boiler insurance, conferring on a program for selling defense bonds in Hanover, selling stumpage on a small lot owned by the College, settling a question about a trust account, attending to affairs of the Dartmouth National Bank, enter- taining a government official, and advising one man about real estate, another about securities, and a third about adjustments in his financial obligations on joining the army. Any day he may be busy with as many or more other matters, each different from the last: gifts and bequests, tax problems, mortgages, all kinds of insurance, stocks, bonds, legal questions, rural and urban real estate near and far, changes in old buildings and plans for new, furnishings, landscaping, fire hydrants and water mains, parking areas, snow clearance, heating, lighting, plumbing, paving, redecoration of dwellings, the Hanover Inn, the Dining Association, financial reports, almost anything even remotely relating to College funds.
Max A. Norton '19, as bursar, handles all the accounting—including salaries, wages, annuities, group insurance, student bills, scholarships and loan funds, and preparation of the figures for budgets and financial reports. Willard M. Gooding '11, as superintendent of buildings and grounds, manages directly everything to do with the maintenance and operation of the plant and is actively involved in all construction. These men are themselves about as busy as the treasurer, and in their work they are largely independent; but the treasurer is the ranking officer of the financial administration, the final responsibility to the trustees is his, and Halsey Edgerton has never been a man to dodge responsibility.
HELPERS ON THE JOB
Until the office of bursar was created in 1926, he executed all its duties too. By that time his work became too much for any man—even him, aided by the late Earl C. Gordon '12. In his office now he has the assistance of Donald L. Barr '18, in charge of securities, and Gordon Bridge '24. So with some further delegation of his duties he might rest on his labors now and then if he were other than the man he is. For him the treasurer's job in general, besides sitting on the lid, has always been "to keep Dartmouth's finances on a reasonably even keel by doing things nobody else has time to."
What if any time he may take off, except an hour or so some evenings for his wife and two lively boys, and an occasional vacation when he briefly disappears, is one of the mysteries of the town. Work has been his consuming interest all his life. It gave him gray hair by the time he was in high school, but he's flourished on it ever since, getting from it as much satisfaction as others find in play.
He's always liked to fish but now he "doesn't get the time." Though he's a member of the Lake Mitchell Trout Club in Sharon, Vt., he functions chiefly as its treasurer; and though he's fond of salmon fishing in New Brunswick, he's only been there half a dozen times. He's tried salt water fishing north and south, says it's not for him, always keeps an eye out for a new Des and Crunch story in the Saturday EveningPost. He used to do some mountain climbing, doesn't any more. He helped to found the Hanover Country Club, saw to the enlarging and landscaping of the course, enjoys a duffer's game, only gets a chance to on and off. He's traveled widely in this country—on business, made a trip to England and France "to look around," and visited Bermuda, the West Indies, and Panama where the heat is said to have made him loaf.
Once in a while he'll take in a movie without remembering much of what he sees, and maybe once a month he'll read a mystery story to relax. He's collected books on Dartmouth and finance, reads them and periodicals when he can. His radio is silent except for Raymond Gram Swing, to whom he always listens when at home, and William L. Shirer, whose Berlin Diary kept him in an easy chair for several hours. The only pastime he really now allows himself, aside from playing with his children or bringing presents home, is taking motion pictures of his family with a Cine-Kodak Eight.
A good deal of his spare time, when he's had any, has been given to the Masons, which he joined in his second year in Tuck School, going to Lebanon because there wasn't then a lodge in town. When the Bezaleel Lodge, named for Bezaleel Woodward, the third treasurer of the College, was formed in Hanover in 1908, he became its secretary and five years later master. He's also served as district officer, and as grand master of New Hampshire, the first Hanover man to hold that office since 1826.
For five or six years he gave his free hours to the preparation and writing of a book (Dartmouth College Gifts and Endowments, 1940) containing data and essential quotations from instruments of gift for endowment and plant funds since the College's foundation. Part of the field had been treated similarly, but he wanted the College to have a complete, reliable, and handy record. To its preparation he and Mr. Gordon gave nights, Sundays, and what he calls holidays—poring over musty files, reviewing and analyzing old accounts, examining all relevant documents, and often doing the equivalent of two days' work to write a sentence.
Meanwhile, as always, he was often occupied with finding the right answers to complex questions affecting estates and trusts. The varied nature of bequests in itself presents perplexing problems to the treasurer besides those of wills and investments. To Dartmouth in his time have come palatial homes with park-like grounds, tenements, farms, vacant factories, wool hoarded since the Civil War, cash to be invested, and stocks and bonds of companies throughout the country. One day he may be checking boundaries and stumpage or deciding on improvements needed 011 the spot, another he may spend consulting with the College's legal advisers about technicalities, and any day he is likely to be searching out the facts on which decisions of great import to the College
will eventually be made by the trustees. The complicated problems he now has to meet with the increase in taxation of estates and the confusing way law varies from state to state are in themselves enough to give another man, even with his fund of knowledge, a chronic headache.
But Halsey Edgerton, nearly fifty-eight, is as clear-eyed and spry as any of his Yankee forebears whose sturdy constitutions he inherited along with their cast of mind and attitude toward work. On both sides of his family he stems from seventeenth century New Englanders (the Edgertons arrived in Saybrook, Conn., in 1632, four years before Thomas Hooker and his followers founded Hartford) and from men and women who in the late eighteenth century made their way up the Connecticut valley by ox-team to Vermont. Though some of the Edgertons afterwards tried life in New York state, his grandfather returned to Vermont; and though his mother's father (Halsey R. Brown) as a young man visited Wisconsin, he was too much of a Yankee to remain. Among the Edgertons and Browns were one or two professional men and occasionally a representative to the legislature; but mostly they were businessmen who developed the Vermont knack for cultivating opportu- nities at hand, and who while minding their businesses found time to serve their communities in various offices as well.
By the mid-nineteenth century, both his grandfathers had established themselves in Northfield in the heart of the state. There his father (Charles A. Edgerton) was born, married Flora Smith Brown, and made his home too. And there in one of the valleys of the Green Mountains Halsey Charles Edgerton was born (June 29, 1884), grew up, and received his first training in finance.
At one time Northfield, as the headquarters of the Central Vermont Railway, had been one of the most promising towns in the state, but then the C.V.R. had moved its shops and offices, and Northfield had developed into the quiet little home of small businesses and Norwich University that it has remained. In the 'eighties and 'nineties, it had a population of only two or three thousand, it had long ceased to seem important, and its life was rural and largely self-contained. But its businessmen con- ducted their affairs with as much attention to detail as if their town had fulfilled its early promise. Their painstaking methods and their conscientious application to their work taught young Halsey Edgerton more than he learned from books.
By his boyhood the Northfield National Bank, of which he is now the president and his brother Alson B. Edgerton '17 vice president and cashier, had become a family institution. Not only his father but also both his grandfathers served the bank as president, and he himself was schooled in it from childhood. When he was still hardly tall enough to see over the counter, he was already busily at work emptying wastebaskets, tidying up, and learning what was expected of an efficient clerk. By the time he was in high school, he was doing about everything the bank required; and when he made an error of a cent or two, which can't have been often, he was working hours into the night until it was corrected. Always his father insisted on accuracy in detail, even to returning in person by foot and after hours a penny due a customer. And always the boy was learning all there was to know about banking in Vermont. So as a freshman in college he was not in the least fazed when he had to entertain a bank examiner in Northfield and a few weeks later, while substituting for a cashier in Chelsea, the same examiner in another and unfamiliar bank.
As a boy in Northfield he also learned how many different things he could accomplish in a day. Besides his schoolwork and his banking, there were regular chores to do at home. There was a horse to care for. There were pigs and chickens. There were pigeons and rabbits of his own. There was the family farm land to be cultivated—on a stony hillside about a mile away. There were strawberries to be raised and peddled if he wanted pocket money to celebrate the Fourth. There was the bareback riding of which he was fond, the fishing that he's always loved, the hiking up Tater Hill and sometimes Camel's Hump with its glimpses of Lake Champlain and the Adirondacks, and in winter skiing on barrel staves he shaped by steaming them over a boiler on the kitchen stove.
After finishing high school, he spent two years at Norwich University, with reveille at six and taps at ten, formations for everything, and emphasis on instinctive precision. Such discipline bore out his father's teaching, and before he left he was—quite characteristically—not merely a sergeant but quartermaster sergeant of the corps.
Then with his brother Malcolm J. Edgerton, who had also been at Norwich, and who is now an investment banker in New York, he transferred to Dartmouth, both entering as juniors in the class of 1906. His father had been at Dartmouth with '79, and he, himself, was seeking the kind of training he could get at Tuck School. If he could have afforded to come earlier, he would have entered with his class. Failing that, and harboring no grudge because on his arrival his room in Reed Hall lacked both a door and windows, he crammed for Tuck, won a Phi Bete key in the process, shortly made a place for himself in Hanover, and remained.
Perhaps his class had some effect. For years more members of '06 than any other came back to work for the College, among them Professors Childs, Guyer, Kelly, Meservey, and Parker, to the library Harold G. Rugg, and as trustee Edward S. French. Or perhaps it was Halsey Edgerton's Yankee knack for cultivating opportunities at hand.
At any rate, within a year he was working in the Dartmouth National Bank, then located in a building where Robinson Hall now stands, and within two he'd moved upstairs in the same building to become part-time assistant in the office of the treas- urer of the College. There he worked throughout his second year in Tuck, and after taking his M.C.S. in 1907 he stayed on—as auditing clerk, then auditor, then assistant treasurer, and after 1916 treasurer. When Homer Eaton Keyes '00 resigned as business manager of the College in 1921, the duties of that office were also assigned to him.
Only two of Dartmouth's treasurers have served longer terms than Halsey Edgerton has to date, and none has been so influential in the development of the College and the town. Coming into office in the same year as President Hopkins, he has played a vital part in the growth of Dartmouth and Hanover into what they are today. The building and remodeling programs, of whose planning and execution he has had general supervision, have increased the College plant to four times its former size and, like the landscaping he has supervised, changed the whole appearance of the town. The value of the plant has increased from $1,750,000 to $7,500,000 and little—from trees, shrubbery, drives, and walks to classrooms, offices, and dormitories—has remained the same. Always the difficult problem he has had to solve has been how to get the desired results with the funds available, and sometimes—as with dormitories and faculty houses and apartments, which are managed as investments—how also to ensure an adequate return on the funds involved. At the same time he has had to meet the many problems relating to the enormous increase in gifts and bequests during President Hopkins' administration when the College's endowment has grown from 14,000,000 to $19,- 500,000 in investments that must be followed constantly.
Halsey Edgerton has grown with the job. Back in 1908 when he was still only an auditing clerk troubled by the lack of method in the general field of college accounting, he quietly introduced a system of accounting and reporting still used as a basis for the present. It furnished more details, provided analyses and classifications, and made possible the publication, beginning in 1909, of an annual report summarizing income and expense in appropriate groupings and available for alumni use. He only says his system, which he has adapted from time to time, "seemed to give better results." Others say that whereas corporate accounting is in itself complicated institutional is infinitely more involved, and that he has introduced and developed for not only the College but also its affiliated organizations a system of accounts which provides an internal audit all the time. His quiet introduction of the system, his adaptation of it as need arose, and his casual comment are all typical of the way that he has worked in the many fields of his concern.
With characteristic understatement, he's sometimes said, when pressed, that probably no college business officer anywhere has a more varied assortment of functions to perform. What those who know him say is that few can be as well suited to their work and that he, himself, is one of Dartmouth's best securities.
Treasurer of the CollegeHalsey C. Edgerton '06 has a diversified and responsible career as headman of the College's business affairs.
ASSISTANT PROFESSOR OF ENGLISH
