1920
Chalk up Number 4 for college presidents, past, present and future, from the ranks of 1920! Charlie McKenzie becomes president of Mary Baldwin College, Staunton, Va., next July 1, thereby joining the goodly company of Joe Brewer, one-time president of Olivet, Sam Stratton, present president of Middlebury, and honorary classmate Ernest MartinHopkins, who was Dartmouth's freshman president when we were Dartmouth's freshmen.
Running a business errand in Raleigh, N. C., on the morning of February 2, your reporter picked up Jonathan Daniels' News andReporter, and learned with the paper's 130,289 other readers that our Mac had accepted the proposition from Mary Baldwin. With a viewhalloa and a yoicks, we took up the scent and were off on the trail. Turned out that Mac had an unlisted phone in nearby Chapel Hill, the better to polish off his new volume, PartyGovernment in England; but a considerate mother-in-law lent a helping hand and enabled us to set the record straight then and there. The McKenzies are only recently back from a three-year stay in England, dedicated to research at the University of London School of Economics. Before that Mac had most recently been dean-ing at Westminster College, Fulton, Mo. Now, after thirty years of college teaching and administration, he ends up in the happy position of president of a fine women's college, which had the good sense to be founded some years ago, as Augusta Female Seminary, by another Dartmouth man.
Doc Miller is planning what the WorcesterTelegram of January 31 termed "an iceman's nightmare." Complete with pictures, the paper showed Doc lining up equipment for a late winter sortie into northern Labrador, where few human beings have ever been and where temperatures are commonly 400 or 500 below at this time of year. Apart from the weather, the treacherous flying conditions, and the unpredictable nature of the ice which must be crossed, the doctor rates the sled dogs - half Siberian husky and half wolf - as the greatest hazard of the trip. "We lose people quite often when their dogs turn on them and tear them to bits," he observed jovially in the course of the interview. Last year's activities, as reported by Doc:
"I took my family to Great Britain and the Continent this past summer for a nine weeks' trip through Ireland, Scotland, the Orkney and Shetland Islands, the Hebrides, England, Holland, Germany, Austria, Switzerland, and France. Did considerable fishing on the lakes and rivers of Ireland, Scotland, and the Orkney and Shetland Islands, plus extensive mountain climbing in southern Austria and Switzerland.
"Paul and Sylvia Sample spent last weekend with us here in Worcester. Paul came down to be one of the judges of the Worcester County Show at the Worcester Art Museum. He and Sylvia are both looking splendid."
If you sat down for a quiet hour with the January issue of The Country Gentleman, you no doubt noticed that the handsome cover portrayed a winter logging scene by Dartmouth's artist-in-residence Sample.
The class files bulge thicker than ever with the sayings and the silences of Sherm Adams. While the Boston Globe on February 7 was telling of Rachel's resumption of social activity ("the couple has moved to a new location in Tilden Street"), the New York Herald-Tribune and other papers were covering Sherm's "Fear Deal" speech, pleading for Republican unity in this "portentous year" and drawing from his Biblical learning the apt phrase, "Except these abide in the ship, ye cannot be saved." One week later the same paper ran Sherm's picture in its editorial section, and reported, through Bert Barcharach in its This Week magazine section: "According to a reliable source, Presidential Assistant Sherman Adams wears some of the clothes he sported at Dartmouth thirty years ago." Sherm's talk "in a new tone of confidence" before his old cronies of the American Paper & Pulp Association - at the Waldorf-Astoria on the 18th — was fully reported by all metropolitan papers. His statement that, given proper support for the Eisenhower program, "the next Congress will be composed of a majority of the President's party," was counter-balanced by the warning that "if it (the program) is rejected, the party of the President will lose its control in Congress and we shall be faced with a frustrating situation."
James Reston of the New York Times, headlining Sherm as "The No-Man in the White House" in his column for February 21, pointed out that his role of "lightning rod" gives Sherm "the tough assignments (such as breaking the news to Clarence Manion) and is now beginning to draw the fire." Further, Reston said, "Adams is the No. 1 No. 2 man of the Eisenhower operation.... The man who now lives in the White House.. . looks to Adams not only for good administration but also for policy guidance.... President Eisenhower himself retains such popularity throughout the country that the politicians of neither party like to attack him personally. Instead they turn on Adams.... This does not bother Mr. Adams. Like his own New Hampshire hills he is both rugged and bleak: a small, spare, wintry type with steady blue eyes and a head of white hair cropped short like a drill sergeant's. Like so many men about the same age as the century (he is 55) he has a weakness for the tough guy, slightly cynical humor of the Twenties, and a capacity for plain talk that is often slightly abrasive. He is not good at suffering fools gladly, and in Washington, where the ratio of self-inflated fools is high, this is a serious handicap."
Grandchildren: For Roy Davis - Suzanne Louis Davis, born February 7 in Coronado, Calif., daughter of Frances and Lt. Leroy S. Davis Jr. USN '47; for Dot and Bun Harvey - Sarah Baldwin, daughter of Jane, born in December, and Jennifer Harvey, daughter of Bob '47, born in January.
The passing of Phib Bennett, recorded in the In Memoriam section, was a great loss not only to 1920 but to Dartmouth men generally. John Wallace '35, a fellow vice president in the National Shawmut Bank of Boston, has mentioned the high esteem in which Phib was held by all his colleagues and has conveyed to 1920 Mrs. Bennett's thanks for the expressions of sympathy received from members of the Class. Mugs Morrill, Bun Harvey and GeorgeMacomber represented 1920 at the funeral services.
Sunny Sunergren, who has been connected since 1920 with the Boston insurance firm of Fairfield & Ellis, was admitted to partnership in the firm on February 1.... Cy Rounseville has retired from his long-time association with New England Laundries, but remains president of the Troy Co-operative Bank and vice president of the Union Savings Bank, both of Fall River, Mass.... As predicted by his fellow-townsman Gerry Baron, Hub Duffy has filed in Ohio as a candidate for the Democratic nomination for lieutenant governor at the May primaries. Hub's petition is said to bear 4000 signatures from 74 counties....
Arch Lawson has established Lawson Products Corp. at 70 Pine St. in New York, and has likewise crossed the state line from New Jersey to New York for his new residence, a rural retreat on Rymph Road, R.F.D., Staatsburg, N. Y.... Practicing what they preach, Lennen & Newell took full-page space in New York papers February 5 to "submit a progress report for the year 1953 and to date Our credo," they say, "is people - better people, happier people." And in that connection they tell how on June 1, 1952, Hike Newell brought to the firm his long and brilliant record as a top-flight advertising man and agency operator. The firm, in its first full year as Lennen & Newell, billed more than $32,000,000 worth of business.
Secretary, Blind Brook Lodge, Rye 17, N. Y.
Class Agent, 438 E. Elm Ave., Monroe, Mich.
