1925
Having just returned from the Alumni Officers Weekend, your secretary finds it easy to be enthusiastic at the propect of the coming reunion. A spring weekend in Hanover is just enough to whet the appetite for more. The hour will be late when this reaches you, and perhaps the deadline for room reservations, announced elsewhere in these pages, will have passed. Don't worry about that. If you haven't sent in your card but find at the last minute that you can make it after all, send an airmail post-card to Frank Wallis, 21 Estabrook Road, Phillips Beach, Swampscott, Mass. If there isn't even time for that, just appear. The 1925 office will be 107 Russell Sage Hall. Our dormitories, in addition to Sage, will be Butterfield, Cutter, and North. Considering the satisfaction to be had from such a gathering and the fact that it comes only once in five years (or maybe four), it should be well worth your while to make every effort to be there. Every one else will be glad to see you and your family.
Departing from the prevailing habit of accumulating grandchildren, Barbara and LinWhite announce the birth of a daughter, Carol Llewellyn, on April 16. Parker Merrow, possibly feeling his age a little after his recent maple syrup orgy (DARTMOUTH ALUMNI MAGAZINE, May 1954, page 18), wondered whether this might be 1925's last baby; your secretary tried to allay this gloomy foreboding, but with what degree of prescience remains to be seen. ... Bob Misch, meanwhile, continues to follow his gastronomic avocation. His latest article, in the May Esquire, entitled "From Basil to Basilisk" is, he says, "a complete kit on how to be a gourmet." ... Marty Huberth, in Williamsburg for a spring holiday, had with him a couple of back issues of this distinguished journal, having read which, he could think of nothing, he writes, but getting back to Hanover in June.... Lane Goss' son Woody '55 has been elected President of the Varsity Glee Club. ... Two Twenty-fivers are on the current sick list. Pete Blodgett was operated upon on May 7, and will be in the Phillips House of the Massachusetts General Hospital, Boston, until late in June. MacShepard had to interrupt his medical practice last June and is still convalescent, with the prospect of being out of circulation for another six months or more. His address is 66 Main Street, Putnam, Conn.
Turning back to the grandfather theme, Phil O'Connell acquired a granddaughter on April 17, but doubts that she will be permitted to come with him to the re-union.. . . Lorraine and Jack Per-Lee will be there, en route to a vacation on the Maine coast with their daughter Roxanne, and their son John '51, now attending Cornell Medical School.
...Allie and Milt Emerson, ending their long residence in New Jersey, have moved to Charleston, S. C., where the United Piece Dye Works, with which Milt has been associated for years, is opening a new plant of which he will be vice-president in charge. Their exact address is not yet available, but here are a few other new ones: Harold A. McHenry, 77 Marsden St., Springfield, Mass.; Edward W. Roessler, Old Mill Road, Chester, N. J.; Ralph E.Shineman, 90 Bryant Avenue, White Plains, N. Y.; Laurence A. Welch, 2117 Massachusetts Ave., Lexington, Mass.; James G. Rogers 11, 1290 Palmer Ave., P.O. Drawer 236, Winter Park, Fla.; Brig. Gen. Stuart P. Wright, Air Development Center, Griffis A.F.8., Rome, N. Y.
The Class was represented at the alumni officers' meetings on April go and May 1 by Jack Davis, chairman of the executive committee, Ford Whelclen, treasurer, and secretary of the Dartmouth Treasurers Association, BobMcKennan and Francis Brown, members of the Alumni Council, and your secretary. Brownie, in his dual capacity as Chairman of the Alumni Council Committee on Public Relations and Alumnus Adviser to the ALUMNI MAGAZINE, presided at a panel discussion on the "Class Secretary as a Public Relations Officer" at the meeting of the Dartmouth Secretaries Association. His term in the latter office having expired, the Association elected ParkerMerrow to succeed him. Having thus demonstrated that it was capable of discernment, it proceeded to fall fiat on its face by choosing your secretary as vice-president. His first official act was to exhort the new president, Reg Pierce '46 to remain alive and in good health. A pleasanter surprise was the appearance on the Inn porch one evening of Bob Warren, taking a brief respite from his pediatric practice in Wilmington, Del. to drive up with Florence to visit their son Stuart '56. Your secretary, to his shame, didn't recognize Bob at first. The trouble came of trying to place him in the wrong generation, for he looks indecently young for a guy who's been out 29 years. Other recent Hanover visitors were Jock Brace, who was up for a Trustees meeting, Win Brown, Mr. and Mrs. Gordie Marvel, and Dr. and Mrs. Harry Crawford and family.
Every enterprise dealing with the lives of people must have its roots in those lives. That is the principle of democratic government. Its failures have stemmed not, as many once feared would be the case, from lack of intelligence or education in the electorate, but from apathy and disinterest, from the refusal of the intelligent and informed - who are a sufficient majority - to exercise the prerogatives so hardly won for them in the past. Similarly, in the affairs of such an enterprise as Dartmouth, there must be participation by all those whose lives it touches. And when all has been said of the inadequacy of measuring that participation in material terms alone, the fact remains that without the material support of those who can give it, every other form of participation must eventually find its application limited or even totally impeded by lack of means. Beyond that, the very act of giving material aid to the College has in itself a value which is quite distinct from the practical usefulness of the gift, and in no sense to be assessed by its magnitude.
Entirely apart from the result of the Alumni Fund campaign in terms of dollars, the number of men who give those dollars is vastly important to Dartmouth. In its essence, the College is made up of men; and those who do its work from day to day, the Trustees, the Administrative Officers, the Faculty, all gain in strength and confidence from the sense of support arising from this evidence of interest and loyalty. That is why ten gifts of ten dollars each would be better than one of a hundred if a choice had to be made. The amount is the same but there are ten times as many-human beings behind it, and their value as such is beyond measure.
This is a frank appeal to those who have not yet contributed this year, whatever the reason, however small their gifts may have to be. Even a few dollars, given year after year and multiplied many times by others, can add up .to a considerable sum. Transcending that is the strength that comes to an institution which works on the premise that while not all of its sons can give equally, they all give what they can. In that sense, there is no such thing as a small gift. Every one is as big as the spirit of the man behind it.
TAKING ON ALL COMERS: Plans for the '26 Reunion in August are shaping up to champion proportions under the direction of Harry Fisher, reunion chairman and twice winner of the '26 golf trophy at class summer outings.
Secretary, 104 Pond St., Natick, Mass.
Class Agent, 80 Eastlawn Drive, Teaneck, N. J.
