1921
In our spirited and uninhibited fashion of freshman year we used to refer to that tough disciplinarian Herbert Darling Foster, bearded professor of history, as Eric the Red. In the uninhibited and spirited spring of 1918 ArtFoley feared Eric the Red's final exam and doubted his chances of passing. Our brilliant classmate Rudi Blesh promised to help Art but kept putting it off until the night before. Art found him in his New Hamp room not in monk's garb, not burning midnight candles, not buried deep in ponderous tomes, not ascetically disciplined among reams of notebooks but alcoholically exhilarated and stark naked except for a derby hat and a leather belt around his waist. In a poetic mood he was playing his cello and drinking up a jug of Irish whiskey called Cruiskeen Lawn. Resigning himself to failure, Art helped Rudi drink up the Celtic Dew. As the morning sun rose over Balch Hill, Rudi pulling himself together and pulling a sheaf of notes from somewhere (possibly out of the derby hat) pontificated before Art and Art's face alight with the desire for past worlds to conquer. "Learn that," he said. "Better memorize line by line. Spout dates. Eric likes dates." Art did. And he passed the exam.
When Merrill Shoup sells his house and moves into smaller quarters, it is news, for his is not just any little old house. Estate is the word. Broadmoor in Colorado Springs is one of the finest in that exclusive area. Built in 1900 and occupied by the Shoup family since 1947, the 28-room mansion with seven baths and 13 bedrooms has as auxiliaries five garages, two stables with box stalls, two private wells for lawn irrigation, its own outdoor lighting system, and shrub-enclosed patio. The reported sale price was $300,000. It would have brought more if Merrill had decided to include his art treasures and historic furnishings. Instead, he gave his library to Colorado College, his art works to the Colorado Springs Fine Arts Center, and his collection of model trains, one of the largest in the West, to the Colorado Springs Boys Club, but he is keeping for his own amusement and edification his stamp collection. The Shoup estate was once the scene of gay, large, and elaborate social events in which Merrill used to entertain 250 and 300 guests at a time.
Such is Merrill's domestic news. And now business. Under construction in Hereford, Texas, is the Holly Sugar Corporation Plant to cost a pretty penny, $21,000,000. To 1921 men the most interesting fact is not that it will have a daily slicing capacity of 6,000 tons of beets nor that it has sugar bins with a capacity of 600,000 hundredweights nor that it is expected to produce no less than two million hundredweights of sugar a year. How much more that plant means to us because of its name: the Merrill E. Shoup Plant.
Life is simpler in the Orient. When BishopCharlie Gilson, Taipei, Taiwan, wanted the Hammond organ moved from his house to St. John's Cathedral, he did not have to worry about moving vans, trucks, hydraulic hoists, burlap wrappings, traffic jams, strikes, and labor unions. A pull-cart drawn by one man did the job.
Harry Chamberlaine continues to concern himself with more complicated matters: the research and marketing of the twelve Hearst magazines, the copy problems of Good Housekeeping, and the frustrations involved in the international editions of Popular Mechanics.
Pale, emaciated, and intense, Mac Johnson, who just barely escaped death in major surgery recently, lectured in Hanover this summer to bankers about the national debt as a sort of trial flight for the book he intends to write on money and finance. Mac has quit tobacco and alcohol, says that he is much sharper mentally, and is glad to save Ort Hicks hundreds of dollars a year.
It has been a Sahara summer. Hal andDoris Braman in Norwich had no water at all. Their spring went bone dry. What then? Baths once a week in a tablespoon of water. Too little. A cupful was needed. So Hal drove daily up a country road in a small car with two milk cans, and Doris could splash around twice a week and Hal could count on a potful of hot water for his afternoon tea.
Two good men who were best men at each other's weddings many years ago had a reunion in Columbus this summer. HerrickBrown and Ken Sater had seen each other only three or four times in 39 years, and Ken has seen only one other 1921 man in the last 25. Is not this something for DougStorer? Ken told Herrick about his son Johnny who has been pulled off his ice island, Arlis II, 1700 miles northwest of Alaska, and been plunked down on what he does not like, dry land and paper work in Barrow, in the Office of Naval Research, where he complains of a heat wave, 40 degrees.
Ben Tenney will continue to teach obstetrics and gynecology at Harvard another year, and after that he does not know what he may want to do. Write, perhaps. Now he is reading history in the same delighted fashion of Dan Ryder, Bob Loeb, and Bob Luce. Is it the scientist in Ben which leads him away from modern fiction and poetry? From time to time he thinks of joining the 1921 group in Hanover, for he remembers his heritage. His grandfather, Henry Elijah Parker, 1841, professor of Latin for 40 years at Dart- mouth, held the Daniel Webster Chair from 1882 to 1892; and his mother was born in Hanover. His father was Dartmouth '83, and they are all buried in Hanover.
Engagements and marriages? Why, certainly. Jack Whelden '49, son of MarshWhelden, has married Miss Freda Ozone of Cambridge, a Syrian girl, graduate of the British Lebanese College, Beirut, who speaks and writes Arabic, Aramaic, French, and English and can understand Italian. Just to make matters more interesting, she was born and brought up a Presbyterian. Jack, a components engineer, is with Raytheon; Marsh, with the Killington Manufacturing Co. In Marion, Mass., Marshall, son of OtisSeverance, married Joanna Crocker Makepeace, Duke '62. They honeymooned in Nova Scotia. Lawton Storrs Lamb, Princeton '55, son of Dana Lamb, will marry in the fall Helen Heathcote Mclllvaine, Briarcliffe '61.
Farmington and Vassar '57, the daughter of Dana Lamb is well named Faith. With faith and courage she is bringing up her three children on the Labrador Coast where life is more bleak, raw, and primitive than in "desolate and forbidding" Iceland visited by Walter Lundegren this summer. Faith is backing up her husband, the Rev. Robert A. Bryan, who is devoting his time and personal income to help poor fishermen earning on an average only $500 a year. .They live in 14 isolated villages along the coast and up at 4 a.m. hunt and fish in the icy waters of Quebec-Labrador. A skilful pilot, Bob flies a light plane to cover his parish. He assists the fishermen in making contracts for large catches of fish and fur, and he raises money for a mission boat to carry books, emergency supplies, and clergy. He finds scholarships for young men and women to study in civilization and then, returning, to live and work among their own families and friends. Dana Lamb, on the Board of Directors for the Quebec-Labrador Mission Foundation, Inc., is donating to the mission all the profits of his forthcoming book on fishing. Entitled "On Trout Streams and Salmon Rivers." Limited to 1,500 copies, costing $10, it consists mostly of Dana's articles printed during the last 30 years in the Angler's Club Bulletin and the Atlantic Salmon Journal. The subjects range from an alcoholic opening day to the virtues of piscatorial persistence, from the habits and character of salmon to red-letter days on the Ausable and the tributaries of the St. Lawrence.
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Treasurer, 2728 Henry Hudson Parkway New York 63, N. Y.
