1926
As we settle down to write these notes on a wintry Saturday afternoon early in March, our thoughts wander off to the rest of you spread all over the country, to the probable variety of your activities this same afternoon, and to the different climates you are enduring or ignoring or enjoying as you engage in them. Some of you may even be sitting in the sun at a ball game in Florida, or playing golf in Texas, or even watering your lawns and praying for rain in Southern California. Here around Boston we have just finished shoveling away our umpty-umpth snowstorm of the season, and there are still a couple of feet of the white stuff around to remind us of the ten feet that have joined us at frequent intervals since last November.
Yes, it has been a rugged winter in these parts. There could be no more pleasant respite from it all than to emulate our wandering thoughts and join Sid Hayward who is about to start off on a trip across the country. Fifteen meetings in twenty-three days lie ahead of Sid as he wends his way to the Pacific Coast, in the course of which he will undoubtedly have the pleasure of sitting around with a goodly number of you gentlemen and gleaning many an elusive item of news for the greater edification of the rest of us, including we hope, this column!
We are already indebted to Sid this month for forwarding a welcome and long-awaited letter from King Dickason out in Tulsa. Back in 1941, King and Irene drove back to Hanover for our 15th reunion, bringing with them daughter Marie who was then seven. Now they are beginning to think about a similar trip in 1951, when the passenger list will be enlarged to include young "Dick" (L. King, Junior) who joined them to make it a foursome on March 31, 1942.
It is a pleasant life that King leads out there in Tulsa. His business, a continuation of the Dickason-Goodman firm, includes retail furniture, lumber and building materials, and residential and commercial construction. That sounds like a pretty large order for the head man to handle, but King says he has an excellent organization and they do most of the job for him (the sign of a real executive!). He finds time, anyway, for an occasional game of golf (probably that's what he's doing this afternoon) and once or twice a year he and Irene and a group of friends manage to go afloat on the White River, where the fishing is good, the scenery is lovely and the life is delightfully lazy.
King's letter also tells of a visit he had a year or two ago with Heck Norcross at Heck's cotton plantation down in Tyronza, Arkansas, which gives us the first word we have had on or from Heck in many a long year. The word is all to the good .... a charming wife and three sons ranging down in age from 14 to ten to two. According to King, the operation of a cotton plantation calls for "working like thunder nine months of the year and loafing the other three, which is practically the reverse of farming in New England," a statement we suspect some New England farmers might be inclined to debate.
For some time now we have been planning to tell you a bit about the doings of HenryBlake here in Boston, and this month our good intentions are galvanized into action by the publication recently in the good old BostonHerald of a feature article about our same modest subject.
When Henry went off to the wars (Lieut. Commander and senior duty officer at the Naval Air Transport station in Honolulu), he left behind him what had been a thriving lecture bureau, but when he came back he found the bureau had just about disintegrated. Looking around for a business to buy he ran across The Boston News Clip, one of the oldest news clipping bureaus in the country, which happened to be available. So he bought it, with no knowledge whatsoever of what he was getting into or of the high rate of failures in this apparently risky line of enterprise.
But there has been no failure for Henry. Since he took it over the business has flourished and grown so fast that he has had to move into larger quarters twice and he still needs more room. There are some sixteen major clipping bureaus in the country and they work on a sort of cooperative basis, each concentrating on the material in its own region and supplying clippings to the others. Henry's region is New England, in which there are more than 350 daily and weekly newspapers, every edition of each of which is scanned and clipped by a corps of expert readers according to the orders of the clients. And Henry numbers among his clients these days a very healthy and permanent list of leading schools, colleges, churches, business firms, railroads and airlines in addition to the larger but ever-shifting number of individuals who want to keep tabs on what the press is saying about them. The hours are long and the details are nerve-wracking at times, but Henry takes it all in stride and gives every appearance of thriving on it.
NOTES AND COMMENTS. Dr. Win Edgerly moves from New Rochelle to 16 Park View Drive, Bronxville, N.Y., with offices at 393 7th Avenue, New York City.
Ray Sterling, a long-term talent scout for Dartmouth in the Orange, New Jersey, school system, has moved up from head of the history department at Columbia High School to prin- cipal of the South Orange Junior High School, to which his mail can be addressed.
Bob Hodgdon has relocated from Berlin, New Hampshire, to 30 Prospect Street, Taunton, Massachusetts, and Don Robinson has done the same from Rahway to 398 East Dudley Ave., Westfield, New Jersey.
Speaking of New Jersey Robinsons we hear that Gib Robinson had a hurried and unexpected trip to Hanover early in the winter when his young son broke a leg while attending the ski school.
Less than a year ago we reported MontyColladay, our globe-jumping diplomat, safely on the way to his new post in the Consulate General's Office in Sao Paulo, Brazil, an assignment that sounded fairly permanent as foreign service assignments go. Now, however, he shows up with a new address: American Consulate General, Port-of-Spain, Trinidad, 8.W.1., so there must have been a quick and unexpected change of signals.
Secretary, 140 Federal St., Boston, Mass. Class Agent, 1 North State St., Chicago, Ill.
