1902

I suppose most of us who have not seen our classmates for over forty years think of them, as I do, as in the hey-day of health and youth. It is doubly hard for your secretary remembering you all so full of ambition with life ahead, to get letters showing that the great experience is over and the ills of old age are the lot of too many.

For instance, I shall always visualize "Rock" (Sewall) Newman as of grand physique towering over our heads at all class meetings as though like Hercules, he could hold the world on his shoulders. And then last year I get a letter that he was sent to a hospital for an operation but was too sick to undergo it and had to have blood transfusions, which improved his condition, so he was kind enough to write me a wabbly letter. Previous to t'his, "Rock" had worked like a dog, spending ten months at eight hours a day, in the Fore River yard, as well as running his office, a mica mine in Grafton, N. H., and a shop in Enfield, N. H. I still believe his grand body will pull him through.

It's not only the ills of the body that I learn about but those, of the spirit. So many of our classmates have lost their wives, which to me would be worse than not going on myself.

I know all of us wish to send our sympathy to Bob Leach who over a year ago had this tragic loss. I will .quote from his letter: "In 1939 I married for the second time a beautiful girl, who lived in Boston but loved the country, so I built a place here on Webster Lake, insulated, hot water heat. We planned to fish, run a small farm, and hunt for eight months, and during the four winter months to travel. First winter we were in Mexico, next in South America down in Chile—then the war, and the last two in an apartment in Boston. On January 10, she had breakfast with me and seemed in perfect health. I went to the Glenwood factory and when I returned at 5 P. M. she sat there dead. Had heart trouble but never let me know it." Only time can help Bob in such a catastrophe.

7 Ship Channel Rd., Portland, Me.