Commencement Speaker

ROBERT FROST '96, four times Pulitzer Prize winner for poetry, will give the address at the 186th Commencement of the College on Sunday, June 12. The combined Commencement and Baccalaureate exercises will again be held on the lawn of Baker Library, where some 570 graduating seniors will receive their degrees.

Other Commencement speakers will be President Dickey who gives the Valedictory for the College, and Jere R. Daniell II '55, Rufus Choate Scholar, member of the Undergraduate Council and varsity basketball manager, who will present the farewell words of the Class of 1955.

At the commissioning ceremony for ROTC graduates, another Commencement weekend speaker will be the Honorable Joseph W. Martin, United States Representative from Massachusetts and House Republican leader,, who will make the address in the Bema on Saturday morning, June 11. Seniors who will receive their commissions number 55 in the Army ROTC unit, 68 in the Navy, and 75 in the Air Force,: making a total of over one-third of the graduating class.

All prognostications point to the probability that Robert Frost in his Commencement talk will not unduly depress the graduating seniors about the poor state of the world. A regular speaker before the Great Issues classes since the beginning of the course, Mr. Frost gave a poetry reading as a lecturer last month. He told the seniors that as he grew older (he was 81 last March 26), "hopefulness becomes more and more a philosophy" of his life. With the customary unreconstructed twinkle in his eye, he added, "If someone invents a big bomb and blows up the whole world, we'll just brush ourselves off and say, 'Wasn't that something?' "

At Tuck School graduation exercises on June 5, the speaker will be Percy W. Bidwell, of the Council on Foreign Relations, New York, who will talk on "A Businessman's Loyalties." Amos N. Blandin Jr. '18, Associate Justice of the New Hampshire Supreme Court, will give the address at the Thayer School exercises, also on June 5.