Members of the Board
The Dartmouth Board of Trusteesincludes the President, not an ex officio but customarily' an elected member;five Life Trustees; nominated andelected by the Board itself; five AlumniTrustees, nominated by the alumni andelected by the Board to five-year terms(limited to two); and ex officio the Governor of New Hampshire. In the seriesof brief biographical sketches beginning this month, and to be continuedin subsequent issues, the MAGAZINE presents the ten Life and Alumni Trusteeswho constitute such an important segment of the large alumni group rendering service to Dartmouth.
THE SENIOR MEMBER of the Dartmouth Board of Trustees, if one does not include President Hopkins, is now John Roy McLane '07 of Manchester, N. H., who first came on the Board in 1926 and who since 1931 has been one of the College's five Life Trustees. For all but the initial six months of that 18-year period he has served as Clerk of the Board, a post in which he succeeded the late Dr. John King Lord '68. Today he also holds the important place of chairman of the executive committee of the Trustees.
Mr. McLane is senior member of the Manchester law firm of McLane, Davis and Carleton, which serves as counsel for Amoskeag Industries and other large corporations, and he is widely recognized as one of the top leaders of the New Hampshire bar. The nick- name "Judge" by which he is known to a multitude of Dartmouth friends does not stem from this impressive legal career, however, but was given to him by his grandfather in baby days and was carried through school and college. Coming to Dartmouth from Milford, N. H., where he was born in 1886, Mr. McLane was Phi Beta Kappa, manager of football, letterman in baseball and tennis, and a member of Sphinx and DKE. From Dartmouth he went to Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar, as a consequence of which he adds a B.A. (Oxon.) to the Dartmouth A.B., Harvard LL.B., and Dartmouth A.M. after his name. He took his law degree with honors, at Harvard in 1912, and from that year until the present has practiced law in Manchester.
Active participation in Dartmouth alumni affairs began almost as soon as Mr. McLane's New Hampshire legal career. He was a member of the Dartmouth Alumni Council from 1913 to 1918, secretary of the Manchester alumni association from 1919 to 1927, and class secretary in 1917-18. The job of Alumni Fund class agent for 1907 has been his continuously from 1915 until now. One of his great Dartmouth interests has always been the Outing Club, on whose board of trustees he has served since 1937. To him belongs a large share of the credit for the DOC development at Moosilauke, where of a winter week end he can still be found skiing with other members of his skiminded family.
Mr. McLane's father, a native of Scotland, was Governor of New Hampshire, and hence an ex officio member of the Dartmouth Board of Trustees, from 1905 to 1907. The present Trustee has likewise been prominent in Republican affairs, as a member of the liberal wing, and in 1932 he headed the state delegation to the Chicago convention. He is a trustee of St. Paul's School in Concord, N. H., and is a director of the Boston and Maine Railroad and the National Life Insurance Company of Vermont. During World War I, Mr. McLane was associated with President Hopkins in the industrial relations branch of the War Department.
In 1915 Mr. McLane married Elisa- beth Bancroft of East Hebron, N. H., a graduate of Smith. They have three Dartmouth sons: John Jr. '38, varsity skier, who is now at sea as a Lieutenant (jg) in the Naval Reserve; Charles B. '41, ski team captain, who is a First Lieutenant with the U. S. Army in France; and Malcolm '46, now in England as a First Lieutenant with the Army Air Forces. There are also two daughters: Elisabeth, Smith '42, who is the wife of Dave Bradley '3B of skiing fame; and Mary, who was 16 this summer. These are by no means all the Dartmouth connections in the McLane family, but space does not permit their tracing here. Suffice it to say that one of New Hampshire's leading families is also one of Dartmouth's, and that if being a Life Trustee of the College depended on such a thing as Dartmouth family ties, Mr. McLane would probably still be senior member, clerk, and executive chairman of the Board.
