RETIRING FACULTY

JAMES SYKES, A.M. '53, Professor of Music since 1953, has spent this final year before official retirement on a last leave of absence. Much of the time, he has been doing one of the many things he does so well, playing musical ambassador for the United States Information Agency.

On this fifth concert tour for the USIA, he presented in France, Great Britain, Luxembourg, and Rumania a piano program balanced about equally between the traditional and the works of American jazzmen and modern composers. Earlier tours have taken him to Europe in 1952; to Germany in 1954; to the Caribbean and Central and South America in 1960; and around the world, concentrating on the Far and Near East, in 1965.

Early tours he regarded in part as "missionary trips," to demonstrate to listeners in other lands that American music had come of age, that it had more than earned a respected place among the best. Of late, he has found the need for such evangelism diminished: "Europeans know more about American music than many Americans do."

A knowledgeable musical historian, Professor Sykes has specialized in Romantic music as well as modern American. He is an international authority on Robert Schumann, the 19th-century German composer, and, in 1962, he was the first western scholar since World War II to be permitted access to Schumann's writings and manuscripts in East Germany.

But James Sykes, teacher, probably takes precedence over James Sykes, concert artist, and James Sykes, musicologist, in what he calls his "split personality." The emphasis throughout his 40-year career has been on education.

A Princeton alumnus with an undergraduate major in cultural history, Professor Sykes studied at the Delacroze School of Eurhythmies and the Austro-American Conservatory after graduation and then went on to the Eastman School of Music at the University of Rochester for his master's degree.

Before coming to Dartmouth as Professor of Music and chairman of the department, he was dean of the Lamont School of Music at the University of Denver; chairman at Colorado College; a visiting professor at the University of Southern California summer school; and, from 1947 to 1953, department chairman at Colgate University. In 1954 he was Fulbright Guest Professor at the Hochschule fur Musik in West Berlin. He was awarded an honorary master of arts degree from the College the year he joined the faculty.

As the music member of the building committee for the Hopkins Center, Professor Sykes initiated the introduction of serious music into the concept of the Center. He had previously started the music festivals at the College in 1958. For almost 20 years he directed the Handel Society, oldest college musical organization in the country, conducting among scores of programs the first American performances of several Schumann choral works. A familiar figure to Hanover concert-goers in repertoires classical and modern, he appeared most recently, billed as "JellyRoll Jim," in a jazz concert in May sponsored by the Student Forum.

Hanover will continue to be headquarters for Professor and Mrs. Sykes in typically energetic retirement. He plans next year to work and travel and looks forward to recording more of Schumann's piano works.

GEORGEA. TAYLOR, A.M. '51, Professor of Engineering and Management at the Thayer School, who retires this month after 24 years at the College, goes the efficiency expert, a relatively status quo type, one better.

Creativity is the watchword of Professor Taylor's teaching, his research, his writing, and his counsel to engineering and industrial firms which he serves as a consultant. His professional creed can be summed up in Heraclitus' dictum: "There is nothing permanent - except change." He is fond of quoting Henry Ford's comment: "If I see a method that has been performed the same way in my shorp for six months, I question it; but if I see a method that has been performed the same way for one year, I know very well that some competitor has a better way.

Professor Taylor came to the College in 1949 as an assistant professor after 14 years with Ingersoll-Rand in New York and an earlier association with General Electric. He was promoted to full professor the following year and was awarded an honorary A.M. in 1951. A native of New York City, he earned his bachelor of science degree summa cum laude from NYU in 1929 and an M.S. from the same institution in 1940.

In 1951 he began teaching a course in Methods Improvement, the prime objective of which was to teach students to think creatively in developing cost-conscious techniques for business and industrial operations. A Methods Laboratory, established with the help of noted engineer Lillian Gilbreth, grew from the course, attracting wide attention and earning design awards for a number of Professor Taylor's students. Methods Improvement has since evolved into Innovative Design, and the subject matter of lab projects has broadened into wider social issues, such as the structure of educational systems, but the principle remains the same: stimulating students to tackle concrete problems creatively.

In addition to courses taught at Thayer - Advanced Managerial and Engineering Economy and Innovative Design Processes have been his offerings this year - Professor Taylor has served as adviser to a joint Tuck-Thayer program for students preparing for management responsibilities in engineering-oriented industries. For several years he has conducted methods workshops on "Executive Decision-Making" for manufacturers and other high-level executives.

An impressive bibliography has emerged from Professor Taylor's teaching and research. He is the author of four books and co-author of another, in addition to articles and chapters in other publications. His work has attracted to Thayer some 20 awards from design and management organizations.

In retirement, Professor Taylor plans to pursue what he terms "my two hobbies": teaching, which he hopes to continue both through his workshops and in academia; and sports - "golf, tennis, skiing, skating, swimming, just about everything except polo." The center of activities will remain in-Hanover, where the Taylors still have a daughter, the youngest of five, in high school.

THOMAS H. VANCE, A.M. '50, John D. Willard Professor of Oratory and English Literature, completes 33 years as a member of the Dartmouth faculty as he retires this month.

Poet and playwright, critic and teacher, Professor Vance has devoted - and continues to devote - his energies, in and out of the classroom, to the universality of poetry as expression: through his own work, through translations of modern European poets, through teaching and critical writing.

He is the author of Skeleton of Light, a highly acclaimed volume of poetry; Charade, a verse play first performed by the Dartmouth Players in 1963; poems which have appeared in Nation, Atlantic, The New Yorker, and other national and literary journals; and numerous critical essays and reviews. He and his wife, the former Vera Lindholm of Stockholm, Sweden, have long collaborated on translations of the work of contemporary Scandinavian poets. Last month they appeared together in Solos andDuets, a program of readings from Charade, some of Professor Vance's more recent verse plays, and the work of poets they have translated.

A Yale man from undergraduate study through the Ph.D., Professor Vance came to the College in 1940 as an assistant professor after holding instructorships at Princeton and the University of Virginia. His teaching career had begun at the Sorbonne when, his first year out of college, he was drafted to lecture on American literature while studying in Paris. When he became a full professor in 1950, Dartmouth awarded him an honorary master of arts degree.

Professor Vance's teaching years have been interspersed with several significant excursions from the Hanover Plain: all, with the exception of a four-year tour of duty in Navy intelligence during World War II, academically enlightening to European students of American letters. He served on the faculty of the Salzburg Seminar in American Studies during the summers of 1949 and 1950; as Visiting Professor at the Amerika Institut of the University of Munich in 1951-52; and as Fulbright Guest Professor at the University of Tubingen during the 1969-70 academic year.

Although he has specialized in British and American modern poetry, Professor Vance's teaching and scholarship have ranged far. He has taught Shakespeare frequently and this year conducted a seminar in "Hamlet and the Hamlet Tradition." He recently presented a paper before a regional Modern Language Association meeting on "Concrete Poetry and the Aesthetic of the Ideogram," an indirect product of his auditing a course in Chinese given by Professor Jonathan Mirsky.

Professor Vance says that, insofar as he regrets retiring at this time, he will be sorry not to be around to see more of the contribution of women students to the academic life of the College. In classes this year, he observes, "the girls are giving the boys a good run for their tradition of supremacy," with a firm grip on at least their proportionate share of space at the top of each class.

But retirement will mean more time for the engrossing activities which have occupied him outside his teaching schedule: travel, translations, and writing, both creative and critical.

DR. G. WINTHROP SANDS, Associate Director of the College Health Service and Clinical Instructor of Medicine at the Dartmouth Medical School, who retires this month, came to Hanover in 1953 from New York University.

A graduate of Harvard College, he attended the Harvard Business School and was associated with banking and financial houses in the New York City area before returning to college at New York University in 1938 to complete his pre-med requirements. He received his M.D. from NYU in 1943 and did his internship at Bellevue Hospital before going on a two-and-a-half-year tour of duty as a battalion and regimental surgeon with the Army Engineers.

Dr. Sands did his residency at the Goldwater Memorial Hospital on Welfare Island in New York, where he remained for an extra year as a Research Fellow. He was a member of the NYU medical faculty and an attending physician at the NYU Hospital before joining the staff of the Mary Hitchcock Memorial Hospital and the Dartmouth Medical School. He was appointed Associate Director of the College Health Service in 1969.

Dr. Sands is a member of the AMA, the New Hampshire Medical Society, the New York Academy of Medicine, the American College Health Association, and the Societe de Medecine de Paris, where he was born and spent his early childhood.

Parents of four children, Dr. and Mrs. Sands live near Danbury, N.H.

DR. O. SHERWIN STAPLES retires this month after 27 years as a member of the Dartmouth Medical School faculty and chairman of the Orthopaedic Surgery Section at the Mary Hitchcock Memorial Hospital and the Hitchcock Clinic.

A noted authority on injuries resulting from skiing accidents, Dr. Staples is a graduate of Harvard College and the Harvard Medical School. After an internship in general surgery at Boston City Hospital and residencies in orthopaedic surgery at the Massachusetts General and Children's Hospitals, he became an assistant in orthopaedic surgery at Mass General and at the New England Peabody Home for Crippled Children. He served concurrently as an assistant in orthopaedic surgery at the Harvard Medical School.

Dr. Staples was on active duty with the U.S. Array Medical Corps from May 1942 to December 1945, with a final rank of Lt. Colonel. For more than two years he served with convalescent and evacuation hospitals in North Africa, Italy, France, and Germany.

He came to Hanover in 1946 as an Instructor in Orthopaedic Surgery at the Medical School and section head at the hospital and the clinic. He became an Assistant Professor in 1948, an Associate Clinical Professor in 1961, and Clinical Professor in 1967.

A former president of the Grafton County Medical Society and the Boston Orthopedic Club, Dr. Staples has been an associate editor of the Journal of Bone and JointSurgery and an examiner for the American Board of Orthopedic Surgery. He also serves as a consultant to the Veterans Administration Hospital in White River Junction and the Springfield (Vt.) Hospital.

Residents of Hanover, Dr. and Mrs. Staples have a son and a daughter.