The Quietest of Mentors

ON SEPTEMBER 19, CHARLES Edward Widmayer '30, editor of this magazine for three decades, died in Hanover. It is a poignant coincidence that his death should be announced in an issue devoted III mentors. For Charlie himself was the quietest of mentors, a man who influenced the work of many hopeful writers and who set a soaring example for the editors who followed him. Last summer, when the Alumni Magazine won the Robert Sibley Award for the best periodical in education, Charlie was the first to be called. He Was, after all, the last Dartmouth editor to have won it and the first in the nation to win it twice.

Charlie came to work for Dartmouth in 1932, at a time when people still spoke of "the alumni movement." He understood that the magazine was a key part of that movement a cause whose center was the preservation and advancement of a great college. His stint with the magazine lasted 40 consecutive years, 30 of them - from 1943 to 1973 as editor in chief. And when the College was between editors in 1982 and again in 1986, this greatest of pinch, hitters uncomplainingly came back from retirement. It was Charlie who wrote the definitive and delightful biography of Ernest Martin Hopkins '01, this magazine's first editor and the College's 11 th president. And it was Charlie who, already an octogenarian, took on the daunting task of chronicling the presidency of John Sloan Dickey '29.

Charlie was not one for idle chatter ("He has an eloquent way of keeping quiet," a friend once said). Editors would do well to copy his economical way of rejecting an inappropriate proposal: he would simply say nothing, and the idea would eventually get the picture and go away. Given this Creative taciturnity, Charlie would undoubtedly prefer that we hold our tongue as much as possible, so we will let a future obituary list his many achievements.

Unquestionably the greatest of them, however, were the 300 issues of the Alumni Magazine that he captained for Dartmouth.

Dero Saunders '35, an equally durable editor of Forbes magazine, wrote on Charlie's (first) retirement in 1973 that he should be honored for his "ability to keep the Magazine enduringly independent during all that time, feeling the pressures from all its constituent audiences while surrendering to none of them, reflecting the College and its changes faithfully without being its spokesman-slave."

In those 300 issues Charlie chronicled the work of three Dartmouth presidents. He covered the changes in faculty and curriculum, coeducation, Vietnam protests, the deepest issues in higher education, and, not least, the lives of thousands of alumni. He saw traditions created, he saw old ones fail, and through the decades he staunchly defended his' own, his magazine's, his college's integrity. "No one but another editor will ever know how hard that is," Saunders noted. Charlie's successors will know that while it is hard, it remains, thanks to his example, possible. Charlie Widmayer was a tradition that did not fail.

Charlie Widmayer '30