Two Dartmouth Men Who Helped, a College To Grow

THE influence of two Dartmouth graduates in the transformation of a small country college into the nation's 20th-largest university was emphasized by the recent dedication of two prominent buildings on the campus of The Pennsylvania State College to the memory of Joseph Moody Willard '87 and Fred Lewis Pattee '88.

In October 1950, the college library was named the Fred Lewis Pattee Library, and in June 1951, the Penn State Class of 1910 placed a portrait of Joseph Moody Willard in the college's newest classroom building, Willard Hall.

Penn State remembers Professors Pattee and Willard as two of its best-loved teachers and scholars, leaders in guiding the college through its long-delayed era of expansion. The two Dartmouth graduates, both New Hampshire men, joined the Penn State faculty within a year of each other in the early '90s, when the college was a feeble institution of less than 200 students.

As they debarked from "Parker's Boat," the combination train that travelled the narrow-gauge railroad from the county seat at Bellefonte, ten miles distant, Pattee and Willard found a college setting not unlike the familiar Hanover Plain. Located in Nittany Valley, in the mountainous geographical center of Pennsylvania, State College in those days was aptly said to be "equally inaccessible from all parts of the Commonwealth." The principal and all-purpose college building was an ungainly five-story structure of native limestone, quite unlike graceful Dartmouth Hall, but it faced the long line of the Seven Mountains and Mount Nittany and its attendant range, a somewhat more rugged counterpart of the Norwich hills. Where the plain dropped away: beyond the village of State College, the men from Dartmouth might have half-expected to find the Connecticut River flowing in the valley.

Pattee and Willard became Penn State professors at a turning point in the growth of the college. As Pattee wrote thirty years later, "It was a period that required creative builders, men of vision, men of steadiness and caution in moments of perplexity, men willing to sacrifice themselves for the College and the Commonwealth. It was a glorious opportunity such as comes to few men." He was writing of his friend Willard, but his words may be paraphrased to include himself: "They threw themselves into it with all their sturdy New England souls, to Penn State they gave all the great endowment of their inheritance and of their training, and the College forever will be the richer because they clave to it in the days that were dark."

At the close of their service on the faculty the college had become a vital, substantial institution, well on its way toward becoming the great state university of 11,000 students it is today.

Joseph Moody Willard was born in Orford, New Hampshire, on February 1, 1865. He attended St. Johnsbury Academy in Vermont, and then went on to Dartmouth where he graduated with the Class of 1887, Phi Beta Kappa and cum laude.

After three years of graduate study at Johns Hopkins University, he was appointed assistant professor of mathematics at The Pennsylvania State College. He had hardly begun his career as a teacher when his chief died, and he was made head of the department of mathematics, a position he filled until his death thirty years later, in 1923.

Professor Willard's personality soon endeared him to the students, who gave him the affectionate nickname "Josie." Because of his Yankee proclivity for dropping the "r" sound in certain words and adding it in words which have no "r," he was also called "Deltar-X" and celebrated in the Penn State song that sings of the sophomores who "have gone out of Deltar's calculus."

"Josie" Willard was an inspiring teacher, respected for his high standards of scholarship and his insistence on clear thinking. His faculty contemporaries, in recalling his outspokenness and his ability to sum up in a terse statement a whole argument, tell how he quashed a committee proposal to institute a conglomerate course in mathematics that would include in three credits the elements of algebra, geometry, and trigonometry, with the terse remark, "I'm not at all convinced that hash is better food than meat and potatoes or that it is as palatable."

During an interregnum in the presidency, Professor Willard was one of a committee of three who administered the college until an acting president was appointed. Through many years of his service, he was a member of the Council of Administration and had a hand in shaping the policies out of which grew the Penn State of today.

Dartmouth recognized the merit of "Josie" Willard's devotion to his profession by conferring upon him the degree of Master of Science in 1913. President Nichol's citation read: "Joseph Moody Willard, student of pure and applied mathematics, gifted teacher, wise counselor."

Professor Willard married Miss Henrietta Nunn in 1897. They lived their entire married life in a house on the Penn State campus near where the Fred Lewis Pattee Library now stands, and there their two children were born. Mrs. Willard lives now in the Borough of State College. The son, Edward L. Willard, is district attorney of Centre County, and the daughter, Dr. Mary L. Willard, is professor of chemistry in the college.

Fred Lewis Pattee outlived his Dartmouth colleague on the faculty by 27 years, and his influence went far beyond the Penn State campus. Born in Bristol, New Hampshire, in 1863, he worked as a farm boy and printer's devil before attending New Hampton Institute and Dartmouth. For four years after receiving his Dartmouth degrees—the A.B. in 1888, and the A.M. in 1891—he was principal of Coe's Northwood Academy, in New Hampshire.

In his first year on the Penn State faculty, Professor Pattee was the entire English department, and in his special field of interest, Literature, the college library contained only one novel. When he left Penn State with emeritus rank, in 1928, the English department which he headed numbered thirty members, and the library had acquired thousands of novels.

The chief facet in Professor Pattee's brilliant reputation was his work in American Literature. His books, Historyof American Literature and American Literature Since 1870, created a furore in the field of literary scholarship and resulted in the recognition of American Literature as a worthy subject of study on a par with the traditional study of English Literature, and in his own appointment as the nation's first Professor of American Literature.

Fred Pattee began his literary career as an undergraduate poet at Dartmouth. The enormous output of his lifetime of scholarship and writing included two collections of verse, more than 25 titles in the fields of English and American Literature, three novels, the editing of a dozen volumes, numerous pieces for magazines, and two books with a religious theme. His fame is still bright among Penn State undergraduates as the author of Penn State's Alma Mater," which was adopted by the college in 1901.

The manuscript of Professor Pattee's autobiography is a cherished possession of the library which bears his name. The work is in three parts, dealing with the hill country of New Hampshire where the Pattee family lived for five generations, the history of Penn State during Professor Pattee's 34 years' service on the faculty, and the evening years of his life in Florida, where he died in 1950, at the age of 87.

Penn State has had other devoted faculty members from "classic Dartmouth's college halls," but memories of Fred Pattee and "Josie" Willard are especially green on the Nittany campus, for they earned places among the "strong men" who breathed vitality into the college.

JOSEPH MOODY WIIIARD '87

FRED LEWIS PATTEE '88

TWO BUILDINGS AT PENN STATE HONORING DARTMOUTH GRADUATES are (left) Willard Hall, the college's newest classroom building, and (right) the Fred Lewis Pattee Library. Willard was Professor of Mathematics. Pattee, who retired in 1928 and died in 1950, was Professor of American Literature.

Mr. Maloney is Executive Secretary in the office of President MiltonS. Eisenhower of The PennsylvaniaState College. He took that positionin September 1950 after being atKansas State College for four years,successively as English instructor, assistant dean, and registrar.