The Fifty-Year Address
CLASS PRESIDENT
I TRUST you all realize in connection with the President's last remark that it's a commonplace that the great artists are never great teachers. There's a distinction there that I am afraid the President may have forgotten.
In talking to you today, I am necessarily expressing only my own thoughts. I believe, and I trust, that some of the things that I shall say will represent the thinking of the 50-Year Class. But we are different in some ways, and I have been thinking of the tremendous difference which was ours when we came to this campus fifty years ago. Perhaps the most marked contrast in the way we came to Dartmouth, and the things we brought as related to Dartmouth, is a contrast between my situation and that of the seven members of our class who are Hanover boys. Now you can easily imagine what a boyhood and a youth in Hanover meant to the men who had entered Dartmouth College 54 years ago this fall. As a matter of fact, I first heard of Dartmouth College in an accidental situation which resulted in my coming to Dartmouth College, which has changed everything in my life.
I came here because a train was late one day. On a Sunday afternoon in July of 1902 a train on the Northern Central Railroad from Philadelphia to Canandaigua, New York, was about an hour late. I was then two years out of high school and was trying to accumulate a little money with which I could start a course in Cornell Law School. Part of my duties at that time (I was a clerk in a railroad office on the Northern Central) was to come to the station about the time a train came in each Sunday and pick up the mail and take it to the office. That Sunday afternoon I got there before the train did. The train was about an hour late and I was waiting on the platform when I thought I recognized a man who got off the train. I approached him and said, "Aren't you Dr. Wicker?" He said, "Yes," and I told him who I was. He was my first high school principal, and when he was a high school principal and I was a freshman in high school we had quite a bit to do with each other. I became very fond of him and he became one of the best friends I ever had in my life. The school entered a high school speaking contest and George Ray Wicker selected me to represent the school, selected the thing I was to say, coached me in saying it, and I got first prize.
On that day when I met Wicker at the railroad station, having recognized him after not having seen him for six or eight years, because I left that first school and entered another before I finished, he said, "What are you planning to do?" I said, "I am going to Cornell Law School when I have a chance." He said, "Oh, you mustn't go to law school until you have a college education." I said, "Well where am I going to get a college education?" He said, "You come out to East Bloomfield next Sunday afternoon and I'll tell you." Those were the horse and buggy days; so I got a horse and buggy the next Sunday afternoon and went out to East Bloomfield, and George Ray Wicker convinced me that I could go to Dartmouth College without money - which almost proved to be true. And I became accustomed to the situation and haven't gotten very far away from it since. But I've had a good time, both at Dartmouth and since I graduated.
When I arrived at Hanover 54 years ago there were just two people in Hanover whom I had ever seen - Mr. Wicker and his wife. I had spent a few hours in Boston once and that was the only time I had ever been in New England. You could scarcely find a more completely untutored freshman than I was when I arrived here. Compare that with the attitude toward the College, and the knowledge of what college life meant and might mean, of the seven members of our class who were Hanover boys. And then between me and them were all sorts of gradations; but in spite of that, I think that the Dartmouth process of those days, and I hope it is as good now and will be as good in the future, was such that we all came out with pretty much the same tremendous fruits of that great experience. And it was a great experience.
I am going to tell you one little thing about George Ray Wicker which some of you may know and some of you may not, but I think it illustrates vividly the difference between the ideas of 1907 and 1957- Wicker, when I was here both as a student and a few years later as a member of the faculty, was the college radical. George Ray Wicker in that day believed in woman suffrage and parcel post, the income tax, postal savings banks and public ownership of public utilities. Now that was the radical program on the Hanover Plain fifty years ago. I think that represents almost as great a contrast as a little note I found on the front page of TheNew York Times today. In a discussion of Eisenhower's budget the story said the Senate Committee had cut the budget close to 300 millions, and the next sentence said, "that slight reduction wasn't taken very seriously." Now when you compare Wicker's radicalism of fifty years ago with the radicalism of today, and consider the fact that a reduction of nearly 300 million dollars is today a "slight reduction," you realize that the men of Dartmouth 1957 are living in a different world from that of 1907.
Our four years getting around the great bend between high school days and mature, responsible life was a thrilling experience. We of 1907 enjoyed that together. We were present when Dartmouth first beat Harvard in football, when Dartmouth initiated the Harvard Stadium. And we had a bonfire on the campus and a mass meeting in the old chapel of the original Dartmouth Hall. We were present on a winter morning shortly after that when in the midst of the chapel service Dean Emerson walked up the center aisle and said in a loud voice which not only President Tucker but everyone else could hear, "Dartmouth Hall is on fire!" And we witnessed the burning of old Dartmouth. We were thrilled, as the whole Dartmouth community was thrilled, by the news that came into Hanover while the Hall was still burning, that Mel Adams, an alumnus of some years' standing, had called a meeting to start raising funds for the rebuilding of Dartmouth Hall. The closing of Mel Adams' message was a phrase which was very often repeated in those days: "This is not an invitation; it is a summons!"
We were present when Lord Dartmouth came to Hanover to lay the cornerstone of the second Dartmouth Hall, and that was a great occasion. But perhaps the most memorable of all was a little event which took place at one of our "smoke talks" in Dartmouth Hall when Congressman Foster of Vermont started off by telling us of the good old days at Dartmouth in the 1870s. And when he got through the president introduced a man he referred to as Judge Cross. Judge Cross came forward and said, "It amuses me to hear Congressman Foster talk about the good old days in the 1870s." "Now," he said, "when I entered Dartmouth College in 1837," and he didn't get any further. The Hall broke into an uproar. We had standing before us in 1907 a man who had entered college in 1837. He was twenty years out of college when the Civil War broke out. As a matter of fact, when the Civil War started he was a man 44 years old and was a member of the New Hampshire legislature. After Commencement in 1907 I went up into the White Mountains with a couple of my sisters to see what the mountains looked like close at hand. Up there we met Judge Cross on a fishing trip. He was then ninety; he died in his ninety-eighth year.
We have one member of our class whom we are greatly honored to have with us today, who didn't share these experiences with us. She had a brother, a brother beloved both by her and by us, who died shortly after commencement. And we have as an honorary member of our class, Dick Hazen's sister, Miss Annah P. Hazen. Miss Hazen celebrated her sixtieth anniversary at Smith College two years ago. Tomorrow she is celebrating her fiftieth anniversary with the Class of 1907, along with the other members of the 50-Year Class. And she told us yesterday that she hoped soon to celebrate her twenty-fifth anniversary somewhere. I don't know how she is going to arrange it, but after meeting her about 24 hours ago, I am convinced that if it can be done Annah P. Hazen can do it. Miss Hazen [Miss Hazen stood briefly and was loudly applauded]. .
It is impossible, of course, to sum up the wisdom of these years as president Dickey suggested I might do. It would take generations to report even the wisdom that our one class has accumulated. But I should like to say something about what seems to me (and I think to other members of the class) more than anything else that we took with us from Dartmouth fifty years ago. And, of course, the first, the greatest, and the abiding thing is perhaps just loyalty to Dartmouth, something that it would be hard to define in specific detail. Devotion to the Dartmouth spirit which was a very common phrase in our days. It may have meant somewhat different things to different members of the class, but I think that it meant a great common devotion to all of us. In the second place I should say, there is in our class (and I hope in all other classes) a deep appreciation of the enrichment of our lives by our four years' experience on this campus. We had achieved in a large measure what I believe is the real objective of a college. And that is to have a man understand his place in history and also his place in the current human family of which he is a member. If a man can better appreciate those two things, the meaning of history to him and to his kind, and his significance and possibilities to the human family of which he is a member, I think he has gotten the most that a college can give him. In the gaining of that we had in my time, as I hope you have still, gracious, friendly, human teachers who were very much more (as I think a good teacher always is) than mere classroom teachers of specialties.
I am referring to such men as Craven Laycock. Craven Laycock, next to George Ray Wicker, was the closest friend I had here. I came back to teach under him after I had been two years out of college, and when he became Dean of the College, I succeeded to his responsibilities in the Faculty as a teacher. He was always a close friend of mine of whom I was very fond and for whom I had great respect. I think of John K. Lord who was as a matter of fact never a teacher of mine, with whom I became very well acquainted when I happened to be a very young colleague of his in the Faculty, and I have cherished all my life with tremendous appreciation a letter which John K. Lord wrote to me on the occasion of my promotion to an Assistant Professorship in Dartmouth, one of the kindliest and most helpful things I ever received. I can't recite the whole list now but I must refer with great affection and admiration to Clothespins Richardson who seemed always to be a teacher of literature who was very much more interested in encouraging men to want to read books than in trying to catch them short on literary information. That was the kind of teacher that Clothespins Richardson was; may his tribe increase.
There is just one other thing, something that President Tucker used to mention occasionally in chapel services, particularly on Sunday night. That is the love of places. "The love a man has for the land of his birth and the hills that stand in his pathway," in the words of Henry W. Grady; or the longing for "my own white valley in the snow; my country, and the hills of home" in the lament of an anonymous poet. So the men of 1907 have felt through the years a deep and genuine attachment to the place that is Hanover: Balch Hill, the river, the Vale of Tempe, the park and the tower of the old Pine, and above all, the changing seasons and the sunshine and shadow of the campus so magnificently expressed by McDuffee in his great song.
Youth and the "long, long thoughts of youth" come briefly to an end. But the old College and its hallowed surroundings remain to serve and delight oncoming generations of Dartmouth men.
What word can a representative of the Class of 1907 say to the graduates of 1957? So many orators and poets have tried varying expressions, on innumerable occasions, of the words of wisdom appropriate for age to hand down to youth on days like this one, that I shall not attempt a new version. Rather I shall call on our old friend Robert Browning. He covered it all: inevitable fact, observable truth, sound philosophy, and good advice:
Grow old along with me! The best is yet to be, The last of life, for which the first was made:
Our times are in His hand Who saith, "A whole I planned, Youth shows but half: trust God: see all, nor be afraid!"
James M. O'Neill '07, of Lakeville, Conn.,who gave the 50-Year Address for his class.
