1909

Away we go on another merry-go-round. The summer has waned as this is being writ and we're heading into fall. According to advice from headquarters, class notes, this year, will take on a new look. I hope it won't turn out to be the sack look that the dames are wearing. Items of general interest are solicited. Class newsletters will carry the chit-chat and exhortations for the class to do this or that - things more suitable to individual class readership. If I do say so, this is something I suggested a year or so ago in a letter to the editor of the ALUMNI MAG.

From Hollis Bartlett, '09's retired parson, come these reminiscences about Craven Laycock's class in Forensic Oratory:

"A student stands reciting with his hands clasped in front of him, just below the bottom of his vest. Professor Laycock is slouched in his chair, deeply bored. In a pained drawl he remarks, 'Aw, cut the fig leaf.'

"From the same class: A student says something to the effect that a plan under discussion is not adopted to our needs. Craven, even more bored than usual, asks: 'Are you from Boston?' The student says 'No,' and Craven remarks: 'Then the word is adapted'."

Good stuff, Hollis. You've started a literary trend that may catch fire and sweep the entire campus.

Doc Trickey, whose hole-out is in Asheville, N. C., is a guy who writes something like Horace Greeley was supposed to write (hen tracks on a sheet of paper), or his modern contemporaries, Gordon Weinz and WallieRoss. By intense concentration, induction, and deduction, I was able to glean these interesting bits from a letter of his.

I was sorry to hear of the passing of Bill Clough '05. (Bill was a stalwart on the '03 football team that defeated Harvard for the first time, a loyal Beta, and a grad of the Dartmouth Medical School). He used to like to swing me on one arm at right angles from his shoulder, and I weighed 145 or more. He was naturally very gentle, but said nobody had ever licked him since the time his father was boasting about the Civil War and Bill said, "I bet you were the first man in Washington after Bull Run."

Another strong man of our day was Jess Gage '06. I saw him walk up two flights of stairs of the Sparhawk Hotel, Ogunquit, Me., with a steamer trunk under each arm. Jess, another one who has departed this earth, entered the educational field after graduation. For years he taught at Blairstown Academy, Blairstown, N. J.

Another one to be sorely missed is Paul Revere Felt '06 who was an M.D., but should have been the Fred Allen of his time. Do you, as a freshman, remember him leading the band and making the most extraordinary noises on his favorite in-strument, the trombone? He played them all, including the violin and piano. I remember Husky Rich laughing so hard at Paul's antics that his tears were dropping on the floor as he sat on a bench in the Commons.

Doc Felt was, indeed, a great entertainer. A small guy with a highdomed forehead, he looked something like a serious gnome. It may be that in his chosen profession, patients of his "died laughing." As a freshman I remember the occasional Sunday concerts he and his classmate, Shorty Neal, gave in Crosby Hall on the violin and piano. They were something to hear - all the singable, popular songs of the day. He was a Phi Gam, in the same delegation with Genial Nat Leverone, chairman of the board of the Automatic Canteen Co., and Bugs Gardiner, at whose home in Chicago a bunch of us '09 freshmen were given a Dartmouth shot in the arm a couple of weeks before we left for Hanover. That was the first time I met Nut Root. Emmie Naylor and I, the only ones that year to enter Dartmouth from Evanston High School, had to take the long trip from Evanston to the South Side of Chicago on the elevated train. In those days, what was a two-hour ride to eager-beaver youths who had the starlight of Dartmouth in their eyes?

Those were the happy days, eh Doc? Charlie Trickey was in the same class with Paul Felt, Dennie Black, Tom Field, Harry Storrs, the last three all in '07. Others known to us 'ogers were Tom Uniac and Pat Manning, both in the liberal arts class of '04, who graduated from Medical School in '07 and '09 respectively. Pat and his energetic little woman, Ann, have met up with '09 at informal reunions the last couple of years. Bill Clough was in the class of '11, along with Tute Worthen and Morris Smith 07 Wink Fiske, Bub Shaw, and Ben Sanborn 'OB, and Izzie Kilburn.

Classes in the Medical School have never numbered very many since the turn of the century. Earlier classes had two or three times as many. Dartmouth medics, by and large, were a care-free bunch, always ready for a joke, sometimes on the ghoulish side, such as tossing a piece of cadaver at a visitor.

My friend, Charlie Truman, who then held the post of Official Steamfitter of Dartmouth College, was always apprehensive when he had work to do around the Medical School. Such things as cadavers did not appeal to one of his natural superstitions. Ghosts were associated in his mind with dead bodies. So he was loath to come in contact with anything associated with human remains. Tom Uniac and other medics had the habit of taking advantage of Charlie's weakness. It completely spoiled a whole meal for Charlie one time when Tom Uniac slipped a dead man's thumb into his soup.

On this happy note I leave you until next month.

Class Notes Editor, 141 Pioneer Trail, Aurora, Ohio

Secretary and Treasurer, Sandwich, Mass.

Bequest Chairman,