1897

With round-robin letters and heresay evidence which has been carefully studied, I feel we can tag our classmates with some of the important things which they do outside of their everyday jobs. Some of these are quite far reaching.

Roy Ward has been working for a long time in cleaning up the pollution in rivers. Parallel with the efforts of his group in the medical profession have been those of the manufacturers, especially in the Connecticut River Valley, to clean up the water, so that it will be usable in shops making airplane engines, and not poison the river with manufacturing waste.

The combined results have now left the Connecticut River in such an improved condition that the Water Commissioner of Connecticut wrote me: "The condition of the river insofar as pollution is concerned will be taken care of sufficiently to allow the salmon and shad to return to the river by the time other obstacles such as the various dams can be corrected." Roy has worked for the health of the people, not for fool fishermen like Erdix and me.

Other movements are predicated on other advantages of clean water besides health. Right now the Connecticut River is being fought over by various interests and by the politicians who have for a long time been seeking to develop an authority in the Connecticut River Valley similar to the Tennessee Valley Authority.

One little political trick might be interesting. The dam at Holyoke has stopped the salmon going up the river since 1800. Two fish ladders have been built at this dam and neither one of them successful. Now plans are made for a third one. Cost about .$150,000 to build and $5,000 a year to operate. The money has been appropriated for this construction and the plans made, but the Government authorities have not approved the plans because the delaying of the approval will help to promote the drive for the Connecticut River Valley Authority - a political move. Once this fish ladder is built and is successful all the other dams above will be required to open up the river for the salmon and shad and other migratory fish. The new dam at Wilder has a foundation for a fish ladder. Ward and his group can't help much on this part of it, but their efforts will be needed, once the salmon pass Holyoke, to "unpollute" the small streams from Holyoke north to the mountains.

Hiram Tuttle years ago had a hand in the building of Harvard Stadium, and the work was done under the supervision of Prof. "Shortie" French, who taught us engineering in college. The result of this spectacular reinforced concrete structure had a good deal to do with the rapid change of the whole type of factory construction from the long-time, thoroughly accepted mill-type building, built with yellow pine timbers with brick walls, to re-inforced concrete structures. The speed of change of building type was very largely due to the spectacular results at Harvard.

Billie Balch, retired major of the U. S. Army, is our only classmate who has been in not only four wars of our own national participation but fourteen other wars or revolutions in Spanish America. He received a letter from William Jennings Bryan, then Secretary of State, commending him for bravery in action in one of the South American revolutions. Billie is very modest about his own activities but I have been able to dig this up.

Mike Kelly wrote me in a very casual way that in recalling his earlier activities he forgot to list that he was president of a bank for awhile.

Charles Bolser gave me one of the most interesting discussions about the inside activities of a professor in college from his recollections of a professor's life through four administrations - Dr. Tucker, Dr. Nichols, "Hoppy" and Dickey. It was a recalling of the faculty viewpoints and activities of various kinds for a period of almost fifty years. I wish Bolser would write it. He has taken up swimming lately for exercise.

I met an old friend of mine from Florida die other day at the Rotary Club. He said, "I'm going back soon and I'll remember you to Gibson." I asked, "You know him and his place in Florida?" He said, "Yes, quite well. It's a beautiful place." Gibby learned to have leisure in his early maturity. He is now busy with interesting contacts at the University Club of Orlando, Fla., been very helpful in the building program of a hospital, and helping to run it after it was built.

Both Sibley and Temple are still judges. Sibley is different from any other writer who advises me. His letters are long, vitriolic and original. He is a firm advocate of the virtues of the past and compares the present unfavorably with our days at college. I think at heart Sib is a radical and Temple, who was radical, has become conservative.

In the March edition of the MAGAZINE there is an ad by the General Electric Co. I wish all of our classmates would read this carefully, and send me the impression it leaves on them. My first conclusion is that we are moving from the plural of millions to the plural of billions, and with this movement I feel quite confident that we ought to tear out all the pages of our mathematics books until we come to the decimals, and we ought to leave out all the digits except the multiples of five, and have about three years saved out of a boy's life, learning the multiplication table.

Doing away with our use for coal and turning sea water into fresh water tend to make Ward's effort to purify rivers seem useless. When one explosion destroys several hundred billion tons of mother earth, more or less, I think we have got to enlarge our viewpoints and leave out details like 9 x 7 is 63 and other minor elements. The boy of today would rather study about space ships than row boats, and probably if this advertisement was read to him, he would say he knew that all the time.

I want Sibley's view on this, and perhaps Sport Morse could give us some sidelights. He has handled lots of bonds for a company selling at billions of value.

Secretary, 114 State St., Bridgeport 3, Conn.

Class Agent, 862 Park Square Bldg., Boston 16, Mass.