1902

For the past month my heart and mind have been full of unhappiness with the result that I have discovered the meaning of such words as happiness, joy, relief. About the first of the year the eye surgeon decided that it would be well for my dear wife to have a small cyst removed from the lid of her left eye. When the surgeon removed this growth, the laboratory found it was malignant. We were vastly disturbed, of course. To assure no recurrence the surgeon decided he had best operate again. So this week there was another operation which proved there remained no malignancy. She is home again, for which I am devoutly thankful. "My cup runneth over. Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me all the days of my life."

In the midst of my unhappiness came a copy of Art Ruggle's small volume, The Placeand Scope of Psychotherapy. Art will never know how much he helped to raise the morale of your secretary. I have already read and tried to digest this resume of a group of lectures Art gave some time ago. Bless his dear heart! I wonder if you all know that we have in Art one of the truly great leaders in psychiatry and a great humanitarian whose every move is prompted by his love of his fellow men.

Another boost for my morale came in a letter from Roy Hatch. He sent me Ed Murrow's book, This I Believe, also a statement regarding his own belief - a truly lovely thing. He is trying to induce me to write my own "this I believe." I don't feel that I am quite mature enough at 74 to state a final belief. A young fellow like me ought to be a bit ashamed if a year later he holds the same belief as today.

To me that would mean that I had been standing-still. But Roy, too, is careful to make it plain that his statement is not final. However, I hope to send some sort of a statement to Roy.

I brought Stella home two days ago with every promise of a prompt recovery. And this morning came a letter from Jim Huntington with some enclosures and information about himself and his life, such as I would like to have from every classmate.

Some of you may remember that a year ago Jim retired - supposedly - from doctoring "and went to live at the old family home in South Hadley, Mass. Supposedly, is right. The care and upkeep of the old home is one man's job, in itself, but, in addition, Jim has been active in establishing the Northampton Subcenter for collecting and distributing blood in connection with the Red Cross program. This was the first organization of its kind to be established in the U.S. Our friend Jim is the physician of the unit. This means that five days a week he is traveling all over Western Massachusetts on blood collecting expeditions often up and away before dawn. In addition to all this, our Jim is completely responsible for all medical phases of the program and must be constantly in touch with the donors from the time they register until they have refreshments at the canteen after giving blood. Up to the time of this report the unit had collected 31,439 pints of blood. Our classmate is a busy retired medical man. Personally, I am pretty proud of a record such as this. Dartmouth certainly does inculcate the spirit of service.

Secretary, 210 Columbus Avenue, Coronado Station, New Smyrna Beach, Fla. Treasurer, 73 Tremont St., Boston 8, Mass.