1922

Of another woman Dorothy Parker once said that her clothes looked as if they had been made by loving hands. The paragraphs that follow are awkwardly cut and have bunchy seams but they have been done by loving hands. No other treatment of Bob Booth would be tolerated by his loyal following. In one way or another, since he first appeared in Hanover, he has strengthened constantly the ties binding us all to him.

The design of the current series of the Marshall Dictionary of American Biography has apparently been to catch the subject in a moment of great activity and pin him to the paper. With RPB the treatment will have to be a more gradual depiction of steady, undramatic usefulness to his vicinage, wherever.

After graduation he took the Tuck School degree of M.C.S. in 1923 and during that year and the next he was an instructor in economics, at that time an occupation followed by almost anyone who did not know what to do next. Then for a year he was secretary to President Hopkins, who has always been one of his warmest friends. During this period he lived in one of the Howe Library apartments, then at their most brilliant period of housing the great (Larmon, McCarter, Rugg, Hamilton, Frost at al.). It would have been natural for him to remain in Hanover as did brother Ed, 'lB, now professor of English, but he left Hanover to fit for the second oldest profession and 1925-1928 were spent at Harvard Law School. He worked part of his way, a diversion hard to fit in with the rigorous course of the Law School. Other things he did at H.L.S. were to break his leg and to win a bet of $100 from Law School Secretary Dicky Ames that RPB could not go a year without smoking. He won the bet but lost the peace because he has never smoked since.

Those knowledgable in the minutiae of Western affairs will recall that Bob had "gone East" to Dartmouth from Omaha, a populated place in Nebraska situated on the Missouri River thirty miles east of Wahoo and near Elkhorn Junction. Returning to that area to risk constant Indian fighting did not appeal to RPB. Au contraire. Au very contraire—he settled in Manchester, N. H., thought at that time to have come full circle in the Industrial Revolution. He entered in September 1928 the law office of Wyman & Starr, now Wyman, Starr, Booth, Wadleigh & Langdell. Of the five partners in that firm four are Dartmouth men. It would follow that they have one of the finest practices in northern New England.

And now let us prove what we said about usefulness in the vicinage. While RPB has been working like a nailer at his law, here are some of the public activities he has carried on: In 1932 he was appointed Judge of the Municipal Court of Bedford, N. H., the Manchester suburb where he lived until lately. This court sits once in a while if so be it a motorist transgresses or there occurs a light case of larceny. Bob is head of the Manchester board of the USO; he is one of a three-man Navy committee to select New Hampshire V-12 candidates; he is on the Executive Board of the U. S. Eastern Amateur Ski Association, where he is very active in policy formulation; he was in 1939-1943 president of the Council of Social Agencies; he was for five years president of the Manchester Y.M.C.A.; he is a member of the New Hampshire Board of Bar Examiners; and Bob has done so many other community jobs that they cannot all be counted or recounted here. For the past two years he has been a member of the Dartmouth Alumni Council. His ten years' diligence as Class Agent of the Alumni Fund is known to every classmate. What may not be known is that a mimeographed news letter which he got out in the summer of 1922 from Hanover was the precursor of THE TWENTY TWOTER, the Workingman's Friend.

Lois Rundlett of Concord, N. H., daughter of the famous Dartmouth pitcher, Louis J. Rundlett 'Bi, and Bob were married August 16, 1929. Thomas Eyre was born July 28, 1931 and Alan Rundlett was born March 20, 1934. Tom is now five feet three, 130 lbs., and Alan just five feet, 100 lbs. The Booths, and now their children, have been ski fanatics. There isn't a slope in northern N. E. they haven't descended in one way or another at 60 m.p.h. Since gas rationing the Booths in summer have been taking long (300-400 miles) bicycle trips during their summer holidays. They are making full use of their luck in living in the finest region of the United States.

All this and more, here barely and dully sketched, has been the busy, useful and intelligently lived life of RPB—the sort of life we were educated for.

ROBERT PLUES BOOTH

Secretary, 1837 Arlington St., Bethlehem, Pa. Treasurer, 16 Sunset Hill Ave., Norwalk, Conn.