Back to Hanover in December

As we move away from our old moorings at our Alma Mater and sometimes have little fears that it is all in the past, I think we ought to buy a railroad ticket and go to Hanover in a part of the year when the real College, with its men and women and bricks and mortar, and most of all the boys, can be seen as they are without the crowding and the bustle of the early summer at Commencement time, with everything on wheels moving and honking as they arrive and leave.

I think every "old grad" should also go to a big game when the spirit and the spirits are setting a fast pace. I think every "old grad" should go in the summer after college. I think every "old grad" should go and go! I have just been back and I want to tell my classmates what I got for my $40.00 worth of ride and grub and fruits of the vine.

I rode up from the June on the bus at about 45 miles per hour. Got off at Lebanon St. to call on our fraternity house plumber, because we have got a "busted" steam drum in our heating boiler, which he fixed up, and I wanted him to help me bet it would go until summer. We talked about heating and plumbing and insulation and fireplace dampers to save coal. I told him about three new heating plants I had just finished to take care of 395 families and by using my purchasing discount I was able to save $100 on our new boiler.

My next visit was to the Workshop to see the cob-webs that are on my loom, on which was made the suit I was wearing. Also picked up a shuttle which I had loaned them before someone pinched it. This Workshop is an interesting place. Here 700 boys go to make what they want to make and to learn to use tools like power saws and jointers and turning lathes and not get their fingers cut off. Lots of other things are being.done there in the Workshop. The Hanover women are making silverware and doing tapestry-kind of fine weaving, and lots of other craftwork. They presented me awhile back with a pair of silver cuff links with fishing flies in them; the flies being made by one of the professors at the Hobby Shop which is in the same building. I am having some faucet handles made at the Workshop using Teakwood to replace some "busted" plastic ones.

The Workshop is happily tied in with the New Hampshire League of .Arts & Crafts, of which the late Dean Strong was president, and with which our classmate Jim Pringle was very closely connected; being one of the original commissioners appointed by Governor Winant in 1931. Jim continued his interest for many years until his death.

My next visit was to Tommy Dent, Asst. Prof, of Physical Education. I wanted to talk with him about the boys in my fraternity who live across the street from him. Wanted to ask him if they raised too much hell and found they didn't. Found that Tommy likes them. I also wanted to talk with him about the new, big river, and I want to quote him. He said, "The old-time log drivers on the river settled their grub difficulties by an agreement that salmon should not be fed them Wore than twice a week." He also said, "The old records show many names on the river like Salmon Rock or Salmon Hole." These two quotations tell more about the future river fishing possibilities than I could write in ten pages. I quote him again. He said, "There would be no difficulty in bringing the Atlantic salmon back if the dams had fish ladders." Of course, it would require a hatchery upstream. The new dam at Wilder has the foundations for a fish ladder already built. Let's go to Bellows Falls and to Hoiyoke and open up 250 miles of this beautiful river to the finest sport fish there is—Atlantic salmon. Shad will also go up the river if this is done.

Then I visited one of the financial men at his home Sunday to talk about improvement on Main St. which he is very much interested in. He asked me to show him how to make one definite improvement in a property under his trusteeship in the business part of Hanover.

I went to see Jim Campion to talk about selling homespun cloth, if and when, I get the students making it. He said yes in a minute. Then he said, "Let's go upstairs, I want to talk about Main St. improvement and other town improvements." Every "old grad" ought to know Jim Campion. He is a fine fellow, has thousands of customers outside of Hanover. Wish we had more like him.

Then a very short visit with President Dickey to get his interesting reaction to my efforts in developing homespun weaving by the students who need work to help pay for college expenses. Our brief discussion about earning money brought out the strange coincidence of his effort and my own when we were boys—each of us had earned money by selling dandelion greens. His were the wild weed kind. He was very much interested in my relating the use of a seed-sown crop in rich garden soil with an easy harvest of ten bushels in a few minutes. I have felt for a long time that a student would be benefited by doing some money-making work in the creative arts—not just for fun as most of the work in the Workshop is now being done.

I have provided the College with a full homespun-making equipment, the best one that I developed during my extensive work in the worst part of the depression. All that is needed there now is knowledge and the nerve to make the first piece of cloth and proper guidance in teaching those who want to learn.

My experience during the depression, with my tenants all new to this kind of work, was to spin the yarn for and do the weaving of 600 suit lengths of good homespun cloth which I sold with little effort and no advertising. I hope to report results in Hanover later. When I get my new clock with 48 hours in the day, then I may get time to help more than now with only a 24-hour day. I hope my efforts may help some rugged individualists like John Henderson was—only the 1950 model—to pay his way through college. President Dickey and I talked about this. Just before leaving we had half a minute and talked about fishing in the new, big river. Just then his nine-year old boy came in to say he had caught a trout—not a very big one. He had been eavesdropping.

I had one more very interesting visit with the Thayer School professors in the conference room at their morning coffee hour. The talk was about my engineering work like the New Orleans Courthouse, a heavy, reinforced, concrete structure built on 90 feet of mud, designed by Thayer School graduates and supervised by them, and flat-grade sewers in South Georgia—the flattest in the United States. The visit was only a few minutes. Then they started to shake dice to see who would wash the dishes. I offered to shake but they said, "No, you're a visitor and can't." I visited the new ALUMNI MAGAZINE building to talk about class notes, etc.

I had a very interesting visit at the home of a professor where I was lifted up by the talk about their beautiful pieces of fine, old furniture made by very early New Hampshire craftsmen. We talked about the way to grow a garden. I boasted of ours, all full of weeds and having beautiful flowers. Theirs is free from weeds and has beautiful flowers. For a few minutes the professor's wife went to the piano to interpret a concerto, I think, it was by Grieg—one which she had been working on for sometime. I shall not forget that visit. Wish others of my class had been with me.

My forty dollar trip was timed to preside at the director's meeting of a fraternity corporation where about 12 of 25 directors, legally supported by enough proxies, did the annual business job of running a fraternity financial-wise.

Here the older men of alumni sat down with the boys and we asked each other "what the hell" face to face so that we would not be asking the same question behind each others backs, as might be done if we didn't have these meetings opened to the officers in the active chapter. Our business was finished just in time to join the boys downstairs in that new element of college living—a brief, well-run, decent "cocktail" period before dinner; not the sophisticated "hour" that some clubs have where everybody gets "piffiicated." This is a new element in sophisticated entertaining and it will require watching.

While we were at the meeting upstairs, part of the house was changed from the formal, large living room to become a big dining room set up for 80 and all decorated and ready to go,—sofas and chairs all re-arranged. Got to take your hat off to the quick-thinking, quick-acting modern college boys with their big square shoulders and happy smiles and awful big feet, some of them havetwenty of them at the party were over six feet and 200 pounders and up. Dinner was fine—roast beef, two slices per, not one. The boys ran the show. Everybody informal in dress and no "stuffed shirts." A senior, keen, quick and witty, took over as soon as the dessert was finished. In setting the stage for his lead, he put on a good show, hunting through his pockets for his notes, he emptied them of enough stuff to start a pawnshop, including a pencil 18" long, a stop watch and a small music pitch pipe to use instead of a Bronx cheer, and finally pulling out the lost notes which he threw on the table and never consulted. The boys tried to help him out in his dilemma and gave snappy suggestions. Everything was snappy beginning with a statement by a new initiate—brief and to the point. Then on up through the classes to the alumni. When he said, "An old guy wants to 'yap,' or nice words meaning this, X raked about half of the junk in front of me and said, "I have never made a speech in a pawnshop and feel a little behind the eight ball." They liked my story of how we got our first pool table back in 1896, using money my grandfather gave me one time when he sold a steer, making stipulations that this money should be kept invested with such additions as I made to it until I was 21. I told them how I loaned sioo of this money to the chapter and that "Poddy" Parker and I bought the first pool table—the one we are still using. The chapter paid me back with interest and I told them, as I had found them honest in business in the early days, I had continued to deal with them.

As soon as the dinner was over the tables just disappeared and the chairs with them, and two young members started by turning the grand piano around with the help of about 10 strong-armed boys, taking it out of the corner and placing it in a position where 60 boys and 20 older men could get near it. I suggested that, if they would remove a sort of bird cage looking thing from the inside of the piano, I thought it would help.. 'Twant a bird cage but looked like one "mushed" up.

These two boys have written fifteen songs and the whole group was so enthusiastic about it that they sang and sang and sang. One of the songs, "Snow Has Come to My Home," is to be sung by the Glee Club this year. While the piano was being moved, a keg of beer was tapped and the suds on the pitchers began to settle enough to pour the amber fluid.

I know the spirit of Richard Hovey still lingers on in Hanover. His wonderful poem, "Oh, a song by the fire," is as eternal as youth, and his great song which he wrote for a fraternity convention, "It's always fair weather when good fellows get together, with a stein on the table and a good song ringing clear," belongs to this age as well as to Hovey's time in Hanover.

That's the way I spent my forty-dollar weekend early in December 1949. I think I saw a picture of the College as it is and I think it is worth recording. I wish you all could have seen what I saw.

A senior and his wife wanted to drive three of us alumni to the June for our train. They allowed seven minutes and we got on the rear car just as the train started. Snappy ending to my visit!

HAND-SPINNING MACHINES, ELECTRICALLY DRIVEN, are the interesting invention of William H. Ham '97 (right) who recently received a patent, and completed sixteen of the machines. Developed for making homespun yarn like that produced by the old "wool wheel" and the Saxony foot peddle known as the "flax wheel," eleven of these machines have been sent to the Industries of the Blind. The work can all be done by feeling, and the blind make excellent spinners. These machines will spin any kind of fiber, at three times the speed of the old ones. With Mr. Ham is Robert Belknap, who built the spinning machines. It is no wonder that when Bill comes to Hanover for a Winter Weekend, as described in this issue, he appears in the finest of homespun attire.