1899

Another classmate with a distinguished career in the field of education and letters is now enjoying well earned leisure. Gordon Hall Gerould retired as head of the, English Department of Princeton University at the end of last June. Jerry, it may be recalled, was awarded the Parker Fellowship at Dartmouth and was sent to Oxford by our beloved Clothespins. There for two years he worked on medieval manuscripts, attended lectures on the literature of the Middle Ages and read old English poetry. In his second year he was sent to Paris for four months' study at the Sorbonne. When he came home in 1901 he got a job teaching at Bryn Mawr College and was put in charge of courses for undergraduates and graduate students. After four years in what was then a kind of intellectual hotbed for ambitious young scholars, he came to the attention of President Woodrow Wilson who invited him to join a group of preceptors in a revolutionary experiment in education at Princeton. Since then his life has been closely associated with the life and growth of Princeton. In 1938 he was appointed Holmes Professor of Belles Lettres and in 1942 took over the Chairmanship of the English Department where he carried on up to the time of his retirement. He became a member of the Fellows of the Medieval Academy at its foundation. He has edited many books on English literature, wrote four books of fiction and is author of several other books, his two latest How to Read Fiction (1937), and The Patterns of English and American Fiction (1942). In 1910 he married Katharine Fullerton, then a teacher at Bryn Mawr who had a distinguished career of authorship up to the time of her death in 1944. Now that he has more freedom we hope to see him oftener than in past years.

In Bainbridge Island in Puget Sound, adjacent to Seattle, there is a bright and enterprising weekly newspaper of ten or twelve pages, the Bainbridge Review, of which the publishers are Mildred and Walt Woodward. The secretary and some other classmates are fortunate subscribers because one of us has now earned added fame as a columnist. He writes the first column on the front page of the Bainbridge Review under the title "The Old Man Says." The Old Man has so much to say that the column is usually carried over to one of the inside pages. The writing is rich with reminiscence, anecdote and homespun philosophy. Of reminiscence here is an example:—

There are a lot of memories that the years have decorated with old lace and perfumed with lavender about where I went to school. Why I can remember a gorgeous creature who was in the senior class when I entered high school. She gave me my first idea of what a woman can do to a man. I wrote her a letter declaring my feelings and proposing honorable marriage. I don't remember that I missed any meals, but I certainly felt badly when I overheard her reading, between laughs, my tender message, to a group of her equally vociferous and laughing friends.

And another:—

You see, I went out with a classmate in college. There we were, watching a ball game, and it had been such a long time since we'd watched a game together. In the meantime we both had raised children and grandchildren. He was several up on me scoring it that way, but he is quite a bit older than I. 111 catch up with him yet I remember when he first came to college. He was red-haired, frecklefaced, and his legs made a parenthesis. He had that contagious grin that made friends. His worldly possessions he had in a bag. He roomed right next to me. He had taken care of himself since he was 13 years old. He was older than most of us, not only in years but in experience. He had been all over the world it seemed to me.

Not hard to guess who that is. About a visit to his brother, who lives in a little town in Montana, The Old Man writes: "The brother is getting interested in raising rabbits for fun," and commenting on their famous fecundity he was reminded of this story:—

An Irishman was elected to the city council on a program of economy. He waited his chance. It came when a fellow councilman said, "We should get more pleasure out of our many lakes. I make a motion we buy 20 gondolas." The Irishman jumped up. "Not so fast there, my friend. We should not be wasting the taxpayer's money. I amend the motion to read 'buy two gondolas'— and let nature take its course." That's what my brother is going to do—buy a pair and let nature take its course A number of funny little things happened at a ball game. A nice looking couple came in at the sixth inning. You could see that all was not sweet between them. The man said, "What's the score?" Somebody said, "Noth- ing to nothing." "There," she said, "you don't need to be sore—we haven't missed a thing."

The secretary's granddaughter, Patricia Mary Read, daughter of Winter and Genevieve (Gannon) Read, was married August 10 to Lionel Roy Carpenter at Forest Hills, L. I. Both not quite out of their teens, but with an auspicious start that augurs well for a bright future.

- If you like to read news of classmates and their families, send us some about you and yours.

GORDON HALL GEROULD '99, authority on medieval literature, folklore and fiction, whose retirement as chairman of the English Department of Princeton University was announced at the end of June.

Secretary, The New York Times 229 West 43rd St., New York 18, N. Y. Treasurer, 34 Brighton Rd., Worcester, Mass.