1899

We had graduated, but little more, when Long Jim Richardson called us together for the first Saturday night of March, 1900. It was the beginning of a lifetime of Boston Round-Ups. And he master-minded those celebrations until Dartmouth made him a professor in 1918. Then Jim Barney and Charlie Donahue took over until the occasion became a tradition. For more than sixty years it flourished. The whole story, and much more, is in our 404-page 36th Class Report mailed in 1953 to every living classmate, every widow, and every son and daughter of a 99er. Find your copy. If you begin reading you won't stop.

One Round-Up night a blizzard blanketed Boston, but we forgot it while Tom Cogswell talked about his life on the stage. Then at midnight as all were donning scarfs, and coats, in walked Warren Kendall, six hours late from Washington. The gang stayed until two. Another blizzard found FrankStaley arriving for his only Boston Round-Up. Hale Dearborn got a special train one time from Florida and arrived just in time. He never missed one. Conservative BillHutchinson came by plane from Pennsylvania one night. Another night Benny Benezet precipitated a hot debate on his favorite mystery: Was "Shakespeare" Shakespeare? or just the 16th Earl of Oxford?

Donnie had a witty, whimsical way of enticing silent Round-Uppers into speech. Thus Pitt Drew, the reticent, fascinated us one evening by explaining his strategy as baseball captain, and revealing incidentally why in one key game he benched his close friend, popular Bobby Rowe, because Bobby's batting average was off. Pitt was inscrutable, outwardly inflexible, but loyal, just, and inwardly one of the warmest-hearted of us all. But he played to win whether on the diamond or in the market.

Stocky Hoppy Hopkins, in early days, a formidable wrestler, later a top-flight country doctor, answered questions about his recent autobiography, "Pep, Pills, and Politics." Nelson Brown also, when pressed, told how he practiced breathing. He would lie on his back, a lighted candle on his chest, meanwhile inhaling and exhaling rhythmically. Nelson indeed was a real orator, as also was Owen Hoban who eulogized him at a later Round-Up. And there was one March night in the early twenties when some of us came straight from Hanover, Mass., to report the funeral of our beloved Elmer Barstow.

Anybody, just anybody, might find himself landing unexpectedly and embarrassedly in the toastmaster's chair; but he always played the game out. That was the '99 spirit. Nobody welched. In 1909 Win Adams quickened our pulses by singing his own immortal melody "Arcady," to which GeorgeClark had written unforgettable words. In "Copley Square Dungeon" in 1912 Clothespins Richardson became our bona fide classmate; there too somebody borrowed the upstairs orchestra leader's violin for SullyO'Sullivan to play "The Angels' Serenade" while the astonished owner listened spellbound on the stairs.

Presently, prompted both by convenience and by courtesy, we made our yearly celebration a movable feast. It became a noonday affair to which we then gallantly, if rather tardily, invited our ladies. And it was in Joe Gannon's decade as secretary that he dreamed up our June visits to the New Ocean House in Swampscott. Later, in the 1960's we met several times in the Highway Hotel in Concord. But it was sheer genius that had earlier led Tim Lynch to organize "Tim's Tours." We cavorted successively in Weary Wardle's Grand Mere, Canada; in northern Maine with Bert Boston; again with the Kennebunk Beach crowd, and once in Connecticut at the Norwich Inn with the Al Greenwoods and the TomWhittiers. New Jersey, however, which was to have climaxed the series with a clambake at Freem Sewall's seaside cottage, was lost to the cause when a hurricane demolished Freem's cottage.

Postscript: I'm leaving Miami about April 1. If you want me between then and May 20, please write a card to Bill Beal (Wm. B.), 83 Wildwood Street, Winchester, Mass. Or telephone him at 1-617-729-0589.

Secretary, KENNETH BEAL 3615 Poinciana Ave. Coconut Grove, Fla. 33133

Treasurer, Box 87, West Cornwall, Conn.

Bequest Chairman,