Prof. Meservey Dies
WITH the death on May 8 of Prof. Arthur B. Meservey '06, the College lost a distinguished member of its faculty, known to alumni and colleagues for the integrity of his scholarship and an outstanding ability to impart his knowledge to his students. He had been ill for a long time and had been confined to Dick's House since before Christmas.
Professor Meservey, who was 67 last November, joined the faculty as an instructor in 1911 after three years of study at Oxford University as a Rhodes Scholar. He became an assistant professor in 1916 and full professor in 1928. His courses in recent years have dealt with X-rays, experimental physics and the physics of photography. Throughout his years of teaching he was able to combine travel with his interest in photography, and participation in outdoor activities was a life-long pleasure. As he wrote to a class secretary, "I have to get into the mountains occasionally with a pack to feel that the world is right."
Professor Meservey traveled widely in Europe, Canada, and the United States. Upon his several visits to England he worked, over extended periods, with leading scientists in Cambridge and Oxford laboratories. A member of Phi Beta Kappa and the American Physical Society, he contributed to several physics journals. As chairman of the Department of Physics at Dartmouth he was in charge of the plans for the recent -laboratory additions to Wilder Hall. This past year, before illness made him inactive, he was a member of the faculty planning committee for the William Jewett Tucker Foundation.
Professor Meservey was born in New Hampton, N.H., and there attended the academy of which his father was principal. In later years he became a Corporator of New Hampton School in which he always maintained an active interest. In 1913 he was married to the farmer Miss Anne White of Hillsboro, Ill.
Besides his wife, Professor Meservey leaves a daughter, Mrs. Ellen M. Gellermann of Hanover, N.H.; two sons: Ed- ward B. Meservey '38 of New York City and Robert H. Meservey '43 of Fort Belvoir, Va.; and three grandchildren.
Funeral services were held May 11 at the Church of Christ at Dartmouth College, and burial was in Hanover.
At the White Church service on Sundayafternoon, May 11, a tribute to ProfessorMeservey was delivered by his classmateand faculty colleague, Francis L. Childs'06, Winkley Professor of the Anglo-Saxonand English Language and Literature.The tribute follows in full:
The strength of a college depends in large measure upon the devotion of those who serve it. For half a century Arthur Meservey gave himself freely, fully, whole- heartedly to Dartmouth College. During his four years of active, vigorous undergraduate life as an intercollegiate debater, member of his class football team, and high-ranking student, he brought to the College the best he had to give, and he absorbed from the College the best it had to offer. The loyalty to Dartmouth that he then developed remained with him throughout his life.
After two years of teaching in a preparatory school and three years of advanced study as a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford University, he returned to Dartmouth to take up his life work as a teacher of physics, and for forty-one years he pursued his calling with exemplary fidelity. His special field of research and instruction was that of X-rays; over the years large numbers of medical and other students took his courses with great profit to themselves. The fine X-ray laboratory in the Mary Hitchcock Memorial Hospital owes its beginnings to Arthur Meservey, who for twenty years, single-handed and with the meagerest of facilities, conducted all of the technical side of the X-ray work at the hospital.
The larger part of his time as an instructor and professor in the Department of Physics, however, was spent in the elementary and intermediate courses, where his personal interest in the welfare of the individual student, his patience with the slow or the ill-equipped or the confused pupil, and his willingness to give unlimitedly of his time to the understanding of their difficulties made his teaching most fruitful. He was particularly effective as a laboratory instructor because of this sympathetic interest in the individual boy, and special knack he had for putting his finger directly on whatever the student had done wrong and leading him out of his mistakes into right processes and conclusions. These interests and skills were notably successful in the case of the foreign student, of the physically handicapped youth, of the young man perplexed by personal problems, all of whom awakened in Arthur a prompt and continuing interest.
He was loyal to his department,— an understanding colleague who cheerfully shouldered whatever burdens came his way. The last great departmental task which he performed was to serve as Chairman of the Building Committee for the new addition to Wilder Hall. His meticulous checking and rechecking of even the minutest details of the plans and specifications, his constant oversight of the work as it progressed, his willing, good-humored, understanding cooperation with all who had charge of the actual construction was an important factor in the successful completion of the project. One of those Eellow-workers said of him: "He was the finest man to work with I have ever known; and he was such fun!"
In the larger context, too, of the college faculty as a whole he played his part well. His efficient service, marked always by calm and considered judgment, on various standing and special committees, his regular attendance at faculty meetings, and his sincere interest in whatever problems concerned the welfare of the College are all gratefully remembered. Student organizations found a helpful friend in him, from the Dartmouth Outing Club to the Dartmouth Christian Association. As an undergraduate he had been an active member of the Christian Association, and upon his return to Dartmouth as a teacher he accepted the onerous task of treasurer of the Alumni Committee that raised funds for the support of the Association, a position that he held for twenty years; during that time he was the main liaison between the alumni and the Christian Association and stood as a pillar of strength to the graduate secretaries of those days.
Beyond the College itself, Arthur Meservey's loyalties to the community in which he lived were strong to his church, to his friends, to his family. Here in the Church of Christ at Dartmouth College we are particularly conscious of his long and devoted membership, his willing performance of committee and other duties, and especially his faithful service for two separate terms of six years each as deacon, an office which he did not assume lightly, but all of whose manifold tasks he performed conscientiously and efficiently.
Within his family circle and in this village in which he lived, his kindliness and his constant concern for others rather than for himself, his sturdy dependability and his sincere humility shed a quiet glow upon all those with whom he came in con- tact. Through thick and thin, in good fortune and in adversity, he met life squarely. He was ever the same, a man of strength and fortitude.
But he was also a man of joy. He rejoiced in family love, in the relations of friendship, in the great outdoors of this North Country, in the beauty of nature, of art, of music, of literature. For a report published by his class sixteen years ago he wrote a letter composed while he was on a skiing expedition with his sons in the White Mountains. These sentences from it have lingered long in the memories of his classmates:
"There must be about 200 cars parked along the Pinkham Notch road this weekend, and there are more aspects than one to the enjoyments of a ski trip. I found a perch above the trail today in a sheltered spot and sat on my skis, while people went by at my feet, boys from 10 to 60 and girls from 16 to 65. Some of them sprawl and slither and swear, others roll and tumble and grin, and others go by with speed and grace and ease which are beyond belief until you see them. Just beyond the trail snowy pointed tops of spruce and fir trees punctuate the foreground, and in the background rise the slopes of Wildcat and of Carter Dome. Nowhere have I seen a bluer sky than I saw this afternoon behind the top of Wildcat, and floating low in the blue were snow clouds, white above and gray below, snagging themselves from time to time on the summits of the Carter Range and dragging their shadows after them over the frostladen forests of the lower slopes. Farther to the left the trees on the flanks of Washington were visible, while the upper slopes were hidden in swirling snowstorms driven by a 90-mile wind. There was too much wind on the headwall of Tuckerman's ravine today for any fun, but tomorrow - well, tomorrow we shall try again."
Born and bred a New Englander, Arthur loved this country-side; he felt himself a part of it, and he made it a part of himself. Its people, too, he loved, and their homely ways of speech, their dry and salty humor, their stalwart adherence to the principles in which they believed, were also his. He had the granite of New Hampshire in his muscles and his brains.
But he was no provincial. The third Dartmouth graduate ever to be awarded a Rhodes Scholarship, he gained from his three years at Oxford not only the sound scientific training that fitted him for his profession, but, by his intimate contacts with men of other nations than his own and by his extensive travel throughout Europe during his long vacations, a widening of horizons that made him truly a citizen of the world.
This, then, as I look back over a friendship of fifty years now brought to its close, is the man I see in Arthur Meservey, and this, I am confident, is the man all of you who have had the high privilege of knowing him also see.
ARTHUR BOND MESERVEY '06
