1932
After the long summer vacation there is naturally a comfortable accumulation of material for the column. That, classmates is a platitude; it is, unfortunately, not a truism. You fellows are just about as good correspondents as I am. Of course, I have an advantage over you, because I write to all of you with one fell swoop of the typewriter. That gives me a feeling of satisfaction, I guess, that makes it easier to get off one lengthy letter a month. I think I can fill this one up with a miscellaney collected since last May, plus a few words about my own vacation, which just ended and was delightful.
A comment on the results of the Alumni Fund drive is in order. Warren Moore de serves all kinds of credit for having led his team of assistant agents to new highs in number of contributors and amount contributed. Warren said that we could have done much better, and that he thinks we will next year. I agree, but we must understand that doing better means awfully hard work for the Class Agents, even though it would be easy for each one of us to do our part in making the record better. Here's the point: the average gift in our class came to $18. If all those in '32 who contributed this year (i.e., 79% of the class) had given four additional dollars, we'd have made our objective. The most in- teresting statistic is that if we had all (i.e., 100% of the class) contributed the amount of the average gift actually given, we'd have just made the objective. Perhaps this is overemphasing the importance of the objective, in view of the fact that only about half the classes reached their objectives, but we are so far down the line in this respect (47th out of 64 classes, with those coming after us almost all later classes) that it is the best place for us to try to improve.
I spent all of August on a little lake near Poultney, Vermont, with my family. After the State Department turned over the European Recovery Program to Mr. Hoffman's ECA, I had a breathing spell and could take advantage of a large part of the 26 days of leave that I and the other bureaucrats are entitled to every year. The law allows us to carry over only 90 days of accumulated leave at the end of the year, so I've been losing about 20 days annually since I first built up my maximum in 1941. I really enjoyed that month. My son Michael learned to swim and dive in the first three weeks (he's eight, but this was his first real chance) and Julia (age 6) learned in one day after the plastic tube sprang a leak and she couldn't use it any more. Alice Rebecca at 22 months loved the water and everything else so much that there wasn't a moment of relaxation during her waking hours—but that isn't news to most of you. We all drove up to Hanover and back one day—long enough to enable me to become a complete Dartmouth man by getting my picture taken in front of Dartmouth Hall with my wife and children. The rest of the time I whittled, surprised myself by playing a couple of rounds of golf, and swam and swam and swam.
I know a good deal about Carl Baker because he keeps making the public press. I haven't seen him in fifteen years, so I can't tell how good a likeness that picture in the N. Y. Herald Tribune was, but it looked mighty like a 15-year-old picture. It appeared in the book review section along with a review of Carl's book entitled Shelley's Major Poetry:The Fabric of a Vision, 307 pp.; Princeton Universty Press. To me, writing commentaries on poetry is much akin to music criticism, a kind of language unto itself, one that I understand only in snatches. Obviously Carl has established himself at the top of the field, a real achievement. It qualifies him well to write a review for the N. Y. Times of a book like Red Wine of Youth: A Life of RupertBrooke, by Arthur Stringer. It's one of those reviews that summarizes the contents and comments on them so convincingly that they make one feel well-read after scanning the book review sections. I learned from a release by the news bureau of Middlebury College in Vermont that Carl was a member of the cast in a presentation in Middlebury last August of Chaucer's The Pardoner's Tale. Now that we know so much about his progeny in the liter ary field, Carl might let us have a few words about those in the family field.
Rumor hath it that the John Kellers have moved into a house on the corner of Hanover and School Streets in Concord. The aptness of the address reminds me of the similar appropriateness of the location of the Yale Law School—on Wall Street, in New Haven, turning out qualified Wall Street lawyers (adv't for C. R. Maxwell and K. LaVine).
One of John Clark's editorials in his Claremont Daily Eagle was reprinted in the NewHampshire Union last June. A copy of the reprint came to me; like the other items John puts out it made me want to keep up with his commentaries. This one was a description of the way Alcoholics Anonymous worked in a specific case, a really interesting way to describe the activities of that organization of fortunate folk who have been able to put Satan behind them.
Nothing appears herein about the questionnaire distributed last spring because I have not had an opportunity to review the results. In case anyone did not send one in and can find it, please do so now—send it to me, and include your name. It will be in time for final tabulations if you act soon after this column is published. Next month I plan only to comment on some of the contents.
Secretary, 3909 North sth Street, Arlington, Va. Treasurer, 607 Front Street, Hempstead, N. Y. Memorial Fund Chairman, 99 White Plains, Bronxville, N. Y.
