Who's Who in '05

Walter P. Emery is a man of many addresses. He has had no less than 15 of them. This is in spite of his having worked 40 years with only one employer. These multiple addresses are plainly due to merit on his part, for this employer was none other than the nation's biggest and one of the best managed, the American Telephone and Telegraph Company and its subsidiaries.

Walter came to college from the titt'e town of Auburn, N.H., where his father was judge and county squire. In the absence of a high school there, he had to work two years in order to earn an education at Pinkerton Academy, for he wanted a college education. At the academy, he ranked high in scholarship and extra-curricular activities as well as in stature, for he is tall and rangy. Being permanent President of his Class, President of the Debating Society, Captain of the Track Team, and Manager of Football should have qualified him for Pinkerton's Hall of Fame. He probably could have entered Dartmouth even under today's selective standards, which would have screened out a substantial part of the Class of '05 and (lest we seem to claim a monopoly!) of the Classes of '04 and '06, too!

At college too, modest and friendly, he did well in scholarship and made the track team as a hurdler. A very severe attack of typhoid fever in his senior year at the academy had sapped his energy and limited his former power for the middle distances.

Upon graduating from Dartmouth, Walter heard of a job in Pittsburgh with the Bell Telephone Company, borrowed $50, went there to apply, and won it. His success was probably due more to his courage than to being a college graduate. As assistant to the manager of a large central office by day and manager on the evening shift, he was greatly helped by an older chief operator ably running the job. This subordinate taught the manager the business!

Then the district manager of a poorly run district of 20 offices decided to desert his job and family. Walter was given his position and successfully restored good management by hard work.

Up to this time he had been working two years, first with the Central District Printing Telephone and Telegraph Company, then as Assistant Manager of the Highland Telephone Exchange, and finally as District Manager of Hill Telephone district, all in the Bell system.

Transferring to Boston in 1907, he soon found himself Assistant Traffic Engineer of the metropolitan area for a sister company, the New England Telephone & Telegraph Com- pany. During a reorganization here, he was assigned to prepare and issue the Company's operating practices for the Traffic Department, which means "service" department, and to direct the training of new men for that department.

Six years later (having married Miss Lucie Newcomb of Quincy in the meantime), Walter became District Traffic Manager, with headquarters in Worcester. Four years later, just before World War I broke out in 1917, District Manager Emery was called to the general staff at Boston headquarters, in the capacity of General Supervisor of Service, to'ensure quality of service in the face of anticipated war problems and to strengthen weak spots. Almost immediately, however, he was assigned by the Chief Signal Officer in Washington to select and train switchboard operators who could speak French for overseas duty in France. Although there is a difference between Canadian and Parisian French, Walter set up a training center in Lowell, where large numbers of alumni of the Province of Quebec dwell. His group screened 7,500 and inoculated, vaccinated, trained and shipped the selectees.

In 1919 he was promoted to the parent company at its Broadway headquarters in New York—The American Telephone & Telegraph Company. In the Department of Operations and Engineering, he now did much the same type of traffic work on a nation-wide, as he had done on a regional scale. Also, he converted scientific developments into practical use. And here he found and worked with his old friend of the Class of '03, Morton French. Confronted with the problem of measuring the quality of customer service in using the new dial telephones, Emery designed an accurate measure of quality. He also demonstrated to groups of company men, experienced in the old system, from top executives down, how the dial system operates. Walter and two assistants gave this demonstration or course throughout the United States and Canada.

-Thus, over the years, Walter Emery played a major part in maintaining and improving both local and long distance telephone service day by day in America.

But he also shared in making effective the more spectacular phases of modern communication. Radio service, for instance, between ship and shore, in coastal waters, in harbors and on the Great Lakes; between ordinary telephones and moving vehicles on land; between land telephones and overseas; transmission of pictures by telephones; automatic recording of press correspondents' news reports —all these services in their operation reflect his handiwork.

In World War II Emery served the top ranking officers of Army and Navy in providing or inventing special types of military communication, often new and difficult.

Meanwhile he had found time to serve his College Class for five years, from 1925 to 1930, as Class Treasurer and Alumni Fund Agent.

The last of Walter Emery's numerous addresses is his present one. Having long been in one of the upper echelons of nearly a half million fellow employees, he retired at 65. His home is on the Peconic Bay shore of Long Island, in a village of some unpronounceable Indian name, where he and Lucie are happy in doing things they don't have to do. They emerge occasionally for some Dartmouth gathering, or to visit New England. In 1915 they lost a child at birth, and Mrs. Emery was barely saved. Walter's story would hardly be complete if Lucie's notable attainments were not also uncovered. Highly educated in pianoforte and organ music, she has long been a professional musician and teacher of music in Quincy, Mass., her one-time home, Boston and South Orange, N. J. She is talented, too, in painting and sketching. And Walter, friendly and impishly interested in everything that goes on about him, hasn't a gray hair yet.

WALTER P. EMERY 'O5

FIVE-CLASS DINNER 1901 —l 902—1903—1904 1905 The annual dinner of these five Dart mouth classes will be held Wednesday May 2, in Boston. The details: Place: Schrafft's, 19 West Street Time: 6:30 p.m. Date: Wednesday, May 2, 1951