The Fifty-Year Address
PRESIDENT DICKEY, members of the Board of Trustees and other officers of the College, Faculty, the Class of 1905, members of the Graduating Class, ladies and gentlemen.
There are gathered here today some 42 men who are feeble in body and who have arrived at a stage of rather innocuous desuetude, but who are very young in spirit and who, to the last man, will declare that the Class of 1905 was, and still is, the greatest class that ever graduated from Dartmouth College. No doubt you of the present graduating class will make the same claim just one hundred years from the time we graduated. You should at least be a greater class than '05. You have had greater privileges and opportunities in these "halls of ivy" than we enjoyed. In one way, however, we can boast of being far ahead of you and at the moment you can do nothing about it; and that is, that 22 sons of '05 men and women have graduated from Dartmouth.
There is always a note of sadness connected with the fifty-year reunion, and we of '05 feel it keenly here today. For we realize that out of a total number of graduates of 150, the grim reaper has taken one half, and that we who are left are among those who have reached their three score years and ten.
The fifty-year speaker is under great temptation to run down the roster of his classmates and tell of the great achievements of each one. The present speaker is not going to do that. For who am I to presume to measure the greatness of my classmates, no matter how well acquainted I may be with their accomplishments and fame. We started some years ago a roster of "Who's Who in '05," and individual biographies are being published from time to time in the ALUMNI MAGAZINE and have now been compiled in book form. If anyone is interested (which I doubt) in how great we really are, he can consult these biographies.
Our class has its full quota of eminent men in the learned professions of ministry, law, pedagogy, science and engineering and in the business world, and perhaps most eminent of all, a president of a major university. On the other hand there are those in our class who have not become especially eminent but who, by their integrity, generosity and moral lives, have contributed lasting good to humanity and have set high examples to all with whom they have come in contact. These we especially honor. Also there are a few men in our class who deserve the thanks of all the rest of us because of the work they have done and the sacrifices they have made over the years. I refer to our class officers, both those in office now and their predecessors.
As for myself, as I sat on that platform back in June 1939, when Dartmouth College saw fit to confer on me the honorary degree of Doctor of Engineering, I thought, with a lump in my throat, "This belongs, not to me, but to Dartmouth College and the Thayer School of Engineering which gave me that treasured education without which I would not be here now, and to my good wife who gave me every encouragement and who endured with fortitude my many duties away from home"; and I thought, "The citation as well belongs to all those on my engineering staff and many other officers and workers in our Company." Is not something like this true of whatever any of us may have accomplished?
I trust at this point you will pardon a few reminiscences or may I call them "Remember Whens."
Remember, classmates, the private eating clubs where we paid $3.00 per week for meals, and some of us, waiting on tables, coming into the dining room of a morning and shouting, "Steak or bacon and eggs?" Good old days with steak for breakfast!
Remember the winter morning in 1904 when, at chapel time, with the temperature at 6 degrees and a foot of snow on the ground, old Dartmouth Hall burned to the ground? Remember poking among the ruins a day or so later for fused chunks of the old bell which we later had cast into miniature bells for watch charms? Remember, when, in October of that same year, the Sixth Earl of Dartmouth laid the cornerstone for the new Dartmouth Hall?
Remember the high leather boots, so wonderful for "wooding-up," and the turtle-necked sweaters which looked so bad that Dr. Tucker had to forbid us to wear them at Sunday Chapel? I wonder what he would say about the modern dungarees, especially as worn by women..
Remember Ed Gilbert setting up his barber chair in Thornton Hall (then a dormitory) and cutting our hair to earn his way through college? Remember the wonderful mustache he sported even then? Ed took a chemistry course and with that and his barbering experience, gained at our expense, has earned his living ever since by manufacturing soaps and hair oil.
Those were the days!
Last June, Dean Kimball permitted me to express to the Thayer School graduating class some thoughts on the difference between knowledge and wisdom. A few additional thoughts may be pertinent now.
Knowledge is, and has been through the ages, a more or less universal commodity, but very few persons have been vouchsafed any considerable amount of wisdom. Knowledge has made the world a more interesting and comfortable place in which to live but has not done too much to make men good. Wisdom has done a great deal to make men good. Alexander the Great and Napoleon had a vast knowledge of military tactics and strategy, Hitler an uncanny knowledge of the power of invective, but none of them wisdom. On the other hand, much of the glory of ancient Greece consisted not only in works of art, but also in the wisdom of its philosophers, much of which is applicable to our times. The wisdom of the teachings of Christ is sublime.
A great deal of knowledge comes to us willy-nilly. It has been said that a person acquires more knowledge in the first ten years of his life than he does throughout the rest of it; but no wisdom. Wisdom has been defined as the application of knowledge to the betterment of mankind and one's own soul. Wisdom, therefore, implies a considerable amount of maturity, the kind of maturity so excellently described by President Dickey in his address, "The Measure of Maturity," given at the opening of the 185th year of the College, in October 1953. In this address, he speaks of the difficulty of acquiring the taste for and the power of thinking, but adds that this taste and power are necessarily a part of maturity. It seems to me that wisdom can never be acquired without this taste and power. I wonder how many of you men of the Class of 1955 have acquired these two qualities? The same question may well be put to the Class of 1905, or to any alumnus.
Many of the fifty-year class speakers have spoken of Dr. Tucker's great wisdom and quoted from his teachings. I am going to do very little of that, but I do want to emphasize the tremendous impact his wisdom and teachings made on all of us of '05, and because we are the last class but one to come under this impact for four full years at the peak of Dr. Tucker's power. For early in 1907 he suffered a severe heart attack which prevented him from fulfilling most of the tasks of the presidency during the last two years of his incumbency.
I have often thought that the spiritual values as exemplified by the teachings and writings of William Jewett Tucker might well be used as subjects for a series of chapel talks. This would be a wonderful opportunity to study these precepts and teachings with respect to our own time. For his wisdom, like Lincoln's, is for the ages.
As I gaze on Dr. Tucker's portrait in the Administration Building, I seem to see an expression of great thankfulness for all the things that are coming to pass in his beloved College. He was continually fearful that a student, being faced with the violent readjustments incident upon his entrance to college life, would falter in continuing to live up to those precepts of morality with which he had been surrounded in the home. Dr. Tucker said, If the College itself does not step in to bridge this gap and continue to place emphasis on moral and spiritual values, who will?"
A few years ago at one of our class dinners in New York, we were discussing some serious lapses in moral discipline that had recently occurred among the students at Dartmouth. Our beloved classmate, Dr. Edmund Ezra Day, now gone from our midst, but who was then President of Cornell University, spoke very eloquently on the need of a revival of, and a continuous emphasis, year after year, on moral and spiritual values at Dartmouth.
Right here I would like to quote from Dr. Day's address given at his inauguration as fifth president of Cornell University, October 8, 1937. "It is part of the tasks of our institutions of higher learning to help students fortify and, if necessary, to rebuild the fundamental faith by which men live and work."
Now let me tell you that it is a source of great satisfaction to our class to return to the campus for our golden reunion, to find here a concrete plan, supported enthusiastically not only by the Trustees and the Faculty but by the student body as well, to revitalize spiritual and moral values at Dartmouth. This movement has the wholehearted approval and support of President Dickey. In fact he personally has sponsored the plan and has emphasized it in his talks to the alumni in various cities during his fall and winter travels, and in his excellent article on "Conscience and the Undergraduate" which appeared in the April 1955 issue of The Atlantic.
I refer to the new concept of the Tucker Fund. In June 1951 the Trustees established the William Jewett Tucker Foundation, "for the purpose of supporting and furthering the moral and spiritual influence in Dartmouth College." To implement this program, a fund of 1300,000 is currently being raised and a new office has been created in the College, that of Dean of the William Jewett Tucker Foundation.
Ladies and gentlemen, it seems to me that the fifty-year reunion is inevitably fraught with considerable sentiment and nostalgia. So, may I say in conclusion, that if you see second childhood's tears on our faces, may you know that we are not ashamed of them today, but ask your indulgence and that you do not turn away without some feeling of sympathy and understanding.
Perhaps I can best express our feelings by a few pentameters which became a part of my struggles to compose this address:
I shall come back to roam these halls again, And climb the tower's old and well-worn stairs.
Unseen by those who'll carry books and pen, I'll sense once more youth's joys and hopes and cares.
I'll tramp the well-remembered paths and roads, I'll read the thoughts of all I meet and then I'll learn if Tucker, Hopkins, Dickey codes Still guide the thoughts and deeds of college men.
I shall return with other Dartmouth men, Whose worn-out bodies have been laid away, But who, in spirit, will be homesick then, For Baker's chimes to ring the time of day.
If I come back in fifty years or so, And find great change, I shall be well assured By every one I meet, for they will know The spirit which is Dartmouth has endured.
Dr. Goodrich (right) and President Dickey at the Commencement Luncheon
