They Also Went Forth
RETIREMENTS
John F. Meck '33
Over the better part of three decades, very little at Dartmouth escaped the tight-fisted reign of John Meek. As President Dickey's second-in-command (first-in-command in the President's absence), Meck carried the official title of vice president and treasurer.
The official title obscured the fact that Meek for many years served simultaneously as Dartmouth's principal legal officer, overseer of business management (including housing and buildings and grounds), chief personnel officer, money manager, and fundraiser without portfolio. On the side he built the Dartmouth Skiway and supervised the College's timberlands and generally outpaced men half his age - either at the Skiway or in the boardroom.
Meck came to work at Dartmouth as treasurer in 1949 after careers as a professor and dean at Yale Law School and then as a practicing attorney in Washington, D.C. In 1949, the College endowment stood at $26 million; today, as Meek closes out his career as chairman of the Trustees' Investment Committee, it has reached $157 million.
In the wake of his one-man rule there have come whole departments of managers to supervise Meck's former domain. As a College observer recently noted, it takes scores of regular mortals to replace one John Meck.
Ruth M. Adams
When Ruth Adams was appointed Dartmouth's first woman vice president, charged in large part with guiding the transition to coeducation, the Boston Globe did a feature story on the retiring president of Wellesley. "She slows to a frantic pace," the headline read; her photograph was captioned "prepared for anything." The Wellesley News carried a centerfold of Adams decked out in a sweatshirt embellished with a picture of Queen Victoria.
The sweatshirt, incongruous though it was, symbolized the continuing thread of Adams' years in academia. A Radcliffe Ph.D. with a whole flock ,of honorary degrees, she is a Victorian specialist who taught full-time before she took up deaning at Rutgers. She will continue as a part-time English professor here when her term as vice president expires this month.
If she was "prepared for anything," what has she found? First of all, "a noticeable difference between the Dartmouth of five years ago and the Dartmouth of today." Recalling the hard time some hard-liners gave the original cadre of female students, she says "it wasn't easy to be a woman at Dartmouth then. . . . We've come a good distance, but we have a long way to go."
John W. Finch
Playwright, poet, critic, teacher, Finch has since 1939 been guiding Dartmouth students toward "that willing suspension of disbelief" that constitutes poetic or dramatic imagination.
Although as an English professor he had taught drama from a belletristic approach, he was convinced that "the way to learn about a play is to do it, whether in informal readings in class or as a full production on stage." The 1962 inauguration of the Hopkins Center followed by the establishment in 1967 of a separate department of drama, for which he had fought valiantly, brought his vision to full fruition.
In his playwriting course, the aim is "for each student to write the best one-act play he or she is capable of writing." Finch tells his students, "Playwright is spelled the way it is because plays are wrought - not written." And the William R. Kenan Professor of Drama has himself wrought several - among them TheWanhope Building, which was produced on Broadway, and TheWinner, one of the first presented at the Hopkins Center.
Van H. English
His official biography lists his special interest as Latin America, but English's maps have charted his course far beyond in time and space. He has navigated the Amazon and traversed the Andes, but he has also traced the ancient by-roads of Vermont and the battlefields of Europe.
Fresh Ph.D. in hand, English was assigned to the Office of Strategic Services and served as a special cartographer to World War II Chief of Staff George Marshall. He was with the Allied Commission on Reparations in Moscow and at the Potsdam Conference in 1945. He joined Dartmouth's geography department the following year.
As co-author of the Atlas of the Bayley-HazenMilitary Road, 1776-1779, ordered built by George Washington to transport military supplies, he has mapped the disused highway from Wells River to Hazen Notch, Vermont.
Edward S. Brown '34
About as green as a Brown can be, he earned both undergraduate and engineering degrees at Dartmouth and then returned after only two years with the Massachusetts Department of Public Health to join the Thayer faculty.
Town and gown alike have been the beneficiaries of his service. A water specialist, he had been an engineering consultant to state and local departments. He has served as Hanover's health officer, chairman of its selectmen, and a member of several other boards. His interest in water has led him even into the emotion-laden area of "Water Witching"; in an entertaining article in a 1968 Baker Library Bulletin, he risked the wrath of the true believer by suggesting that arguments for dowsing "could with equal validity be applied to the cases for astrology, palmistry, and tea leaf reading."
And, custodian of class funds since 1963, Brown has kept the green flowing into 1934's coffers in a stream sufficiently abundant to warrant the designation "Class Treasurer of the Year" in 1972.
Miles V. Hayes
His research and his teaching at Thayer and his work with industry embrace a variety of esoteric fields. A mathematics major at Yale, Hayes took a degree in electrical engineering at M.I.T. in 1934, then spent several years in petroleum marketing. He went to Harvard after the war for a master's in physics and for what is thought to be the second Ph.D. granted anywhere in the area of computer science.
Returning to industry in 1952, Hayes was in helicopter design and research, first with Hughes Tool Company, then with United Aircraft. He came to Vermont as an engineer and joined the Thayer faculty in 1960. Teaching both graduates and undergraduates, he has since specialized increasingly in computer technology and programming.
Now, as he retires, Hayes says that "After 65 years of prep school, I am ready to become a student." He plans to write, very probably on subject matter he covers in his freshman seminar "Technology and Policy" - the two conflicting worlds of science and the humanities.
Ulysses (Tony) Lupien
The first time Tony Lupien saw Dartmouth was in 1935 as a member of Harvard's freshman football team. For four years he made periodic ventures north to play basketball and baseball, but it wasn't until 1956 that the Lupien-Dartmouth association took a turn that has endured for 21 years.
As baseball coach and for 12 years as freshman basketball coach, Lupien has taught Dartmouth men to play in the professional fashion he learned as a major-league first baseman and minor league manager. They responded by providing Dartmouth with 313 wins and two ties in the 616 baseball games they've played under him, won the Eastern League championship four times, and advanced farther in the 1970 College World Series than all but a few Eastern colleges before or since.
He remains a competitor bred in an era that has all but vanished, and his approach to coaching has been built from those roots. He's not been much for backing down nor particularly flexible. What Lupien has done is attempt to teach his players to do what is right and do it to their best ability.
