Members of the Board
The second in the series of biographical sketches of the members of theDartmouth Board, of Trustees follows.The first, that of John R. McLane '07,appeared in November.
2. W. W. Grant'o3
THE ONLY WESTERNER now on the Dartmouth Board of Trustees is an influential citizen of Denver, Colorado William West Grant '03. Active in the legal and political affairs of his city and state, Mr. Grant has nevertheless generously contributed time and effort to Dartmouth, serving from 1925 to 1931 on the Alumni Council, from 1930 to 1941 as one of the Alumni Members of the Board of Trustees, and since 1941 as one of the Board's five Life Trustees. He is a member of the Trustee Committee on Investments.
A prominent lawyer and member of the law firm of Grant, Shafroth and Toll, Mr. Grant is also one of the leading Democrats in his state. Though he prefers, as he has said in a 1903 Class Report, "quiet with some opportunity for reading and study," he has found that "in my professional life I have been assailed by conditions that have made for constant activity." Space does not permit a listing of all the organizations—legal, political, civic, business and charitable—with which Mr. Grant is connected as officer or member. But
to name some as a cross section of his he is past president of the Colorado Bar Association and of the Colorado Civil Service Commission, is a member of the American, Colorado, and Denver Bar Associations and of the Denver School Board, has served several times as temporary and permanent chairman of the Democratic State Assembly, and is Diocesan trustee and a member of the National Council of the Episcopal Church. At present treasurer of the Democratic State Central Committee for Colorado, he declined the Democratic senatorial nomination for the 1944 election. Recently, under President Hopkins as chairman, he has been appointed one of the national vicepresidents of Americans United, an organization formed to foster world peace and to combat fascism. He had been Colorado chairman of the Committee to Defend America and Citizens for Victory. Dartmouth granted him an honorary A.M. in 1930.
Four different sections of the country have at various times been the setting for his own and his family history. His father, William West Grant, said to be the surgeon who performed the first appendectomy, enlisted from Alabama in the Confederate Army at the age of sixteen. Mr. Grant, himself, was born in the Mississippi River city of Davenport, lowa. In his youth, his father moved to Denver where a branch of the family had been settled since the sixties. From Denver, Mr. Grant came east to attend Dartmouth and Harvard Law School. He went south to complete his law training and to receive his LL. B. from the University of Virginia in 1906, and in the same year he came north again, to New York, to marry Gertrude Hendrie of Denver. At Dartmouth, Mr. Grant was a member of the Aegis board, Casque and Gauntlet, and Psi Upsilon.
Mr. Grant has three children. His two sons are both Dartmouth men. Edwin Hendrie '30 operates a large ranch and dairy farm near Denver, and William West III, now a Lieutenant Commander in the Navy, Cincpac staff, is a lawyer and a member of his father's firm. His daughter, Melanie Mortimer, is the widow of Robin A. Hunter, a Captain of Commandos in the British Army who was killed in France on D-Day. She works with the British Red Cross in London.
Besides politics, golf and travel, Mr. Grant has another hobby which is rather unique for an American. He has developed, from his liking for horses and riding, a great enthusiasm for hunting and is joint master of the Arapahoe Hunt, one of the registered hunts of the United States.
In summing up the effect that Dartmouth's liberal arts training had on the trend of his later life, Mr. Grant has said that he received "the disposition to face facts and retain a sense of relative values.... to some extent I attained mental discipline and certainly I acquired a point of view."
