Dickinson Alumnus
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·- --- - ·---- . ,_ - - . -· .--- -· - --···-·· The . DICKINSON ALUMNUS ~ A PHOENIX IN MY YOUTH THE DICKINSON ALUMNUS Vol. 46, No. 3, r969 HONORARY EDITOR IN MEMORIAM Dean Hoffman, '02 EDITOR Vincent J. Schafmeister, Jr., '49 ALUMNI PUBLICATIONS COMMITTEE Walter E. Beach, '56, Chairman Robert G. Crist, '47 David McGahey, '60 Whitfield J .. Bell, Jr., '35 Barbara A. Buechner, '63 M. Charles Seller, '55 William A. Jordan, II, '5 I The Dickinson Alumnus published by Dickinson College, Carlisle, Pa. 17or3 each September, December, Febru• ary and May. Second class postage paid at Carlisle, Pa. I 7013. Cover: Phoenix - - - an ancient Egyptian bird. It was consumed in fire by its own act but rose in youthful fresh• ness from the ashes. In This Issue: A Phoenix in My Youth Page 1 Splendor in the Sky Page 8 College Enriched by Potamkin Art Collection Page 10 Around the Campus Page 12 Personal Mention Page 13 Dickinson Annual Giving Report Page 19 Obituaries Page 52 Unique Vietnam Roles for Two Dickinsonians Page 54 Where There's A Will, There's A Way Page 55 Home Coming Back Cover "We Got Whupped!" education as the preparation for their the other hand, among the very last to esoteric, not to say occult, minorities. lay aside the old requirements. Was it Faulkner who, when asked Calculus and Greek: these were the two why there are so many more great intellectual initiation ceremonies that Late in the forties, though, the in• novelists in the South than in the North, the aspiring minister or doctor had to evitable happened, the Latin require• answered with no hesitation," 'Cause we pass through in order to gain access to ment was dropped. This must have got whupped !"? If I had to give one his profession. Something had to serve seemed to many alumni and some pro• reason for the rise of interest in classical as a weedout course, and these rigors fessors, not all of them classicists, a languages and literature at Dickinson or served as well as any. shameful break with a century and a any other college, I should say the same half of tradition. I am afraid that it was thing. Today, just as in the Renaissance, actually a long overdue change and one wherever the classics are alive and vigor• not at all to be regretted, least of all by ous, it is probably because they got IT is NOT too much to say that the today's classics professor. After a gen• whupped and neglected and rediscovered single greatest boon to classical studies eration of defensive warfare, classicists, by someone still able to be excited about is their relief from duty, in the years if not the classics, were tired. Probably them. after World War I, as the flunk-out both deserved a rest; in any case, both course for the professions. I suspect the got it. same might be said for the calculus. Today only medicine is a competitive WHEN, on the other hand, Latin enough profession to need a weedout course on the undergraduate level. This and Greek studies ruled as monarchs of JUST as they had done for a millen• the humanities, their scholarship became distasteful but necessary job has been, nium in the monasteries of Europe, the more and more haughty, ever and ever on most campuses, dropped into two Greek and Latin classics sat on the more picayune, and deader by the unwilling laps: Elementary Biology and shelves of college libraries, waiting to be decade. Pick up any school Latin text Analytical or Organic Chemistry. Let rediscovered. The experience was not a from the old days, and what do you find? both fields be forewarned, by the field new one for them. Yet, despite it all, Scrawled inside the cover is always that that did the dirty work for so long, that Ovid was still the same Ovid who had inevitable scrap of doggerel about they have taken on the most stultifying inspired the Canterbury Tales, and Plautus Latin, the dead tongue, that killed the and thankless job in higher education. was none other than the idol of the young Romans "and now it's killing me." playwright who started a career with These verses were not, however, written As we all know, Dickinson at her The Comedy of Errors. Freud was still in• in the fifties or even, in general, the foundation partook of some of the revo• comprehensible without Plato, and Berg• forties; they came rather from the text• lutionary and frontier spirit. Still, like son without the butchered but haunting books of the Class of 1910. For by the her godfather, John Dickinson, she did fragments of Heraclitus. 1930's on most campuses the classics, not rock the boat just for any pleasant dizzying sensation that rocking might with a little help from Dewey-eyed edu• Inspiration: that was the mysterious give. Anyway, her foundation as a col• cationists, had succeeded in killing not power that the classics had always lege came between the American revo• only the students but themselves. In possessed, the ability to breathe into a lution, with its chiefly political effects on many ways it was a consummation de• man talents that had never been there. the world, and the French one, where voutly to be wished. before. They had not long been dropped the real intellectual changes begin. The from the curriculum when there were two outstanding professors in the original In their day, of course, the classics murmurings that inspiration was gone, staff of five were Charles Nisbet, the were the symbol of the esotericism of the too, from literature in particular but theologian, and James Ross, the classical liberal arts. The idea of liberal arts grew from education in general. Those philologist; both were classicists of the up, let us never forget, in the late Roman rumblings are not all passed today. famous Scottish school. The classics Empire when the liberi, the free, were a When the late Col. William Ganoe, '02, were the core of the original Dickinso.n minority. The revolutions of the Eight• left his estate for the propagation of in• College curriculum, and no one was to eenth Century threatened the minority spiring teaching at Dickinson College, question seriously their place for a cen• nature of the free-you remember the he must have been thinking of the tury to come. little colonial girl with her cow, "Free• teachers of his own youth, men like 'n'-Equal"-but they never threatened Mervin Filler, who had recently left the the minority quality of the educated. For Dickinson seems from the first to Preparatory School to begin his long As the American frontier progressed and have been. unabashedly forward-looking career with the College. At the same finally closed, all Americans were able in developing the sciences, liberal in her time, consciously or not, Col. Ganoe was to enjoy free land, then paychecks, then theology, and bold in espousing the thinking of the seche and somber field a home of one's own, the rather circular social sciences. Yet in the humanities• that Dr. Filler professed. The oldtimers marks of freedom. But a college educa• which she always regarded as central to thought, I am sure, that anyone who tion was neither desired by all nor education - conservatism reigned could make Latin and Greek live must legislated for all. Even after the land• throughout the Nineteenth Century. have the powers of a warlock. That is grant bills threatened to send every Defying Alexander Pope two ways, just where they were wrong. The magic Free-'n'-Equal cow to college, it was Dickinson was both among the first by is all in the texts and the inspiration the professions that held out for a liberal whom new subjects were tried and, on comes from the words. Then, as now, 2 The Grammar The Grandeur That Was Rome That Was Rome A SIIORT, PLAIN, COMPREIIENSIVE, PRACTICAL LATIN GRAMMAR, COMPRISING ALL THE RULES AND OBSERVATIONS NEC~SSAHY TO AN ACCURATE KNOWLEDGE OF THE LATIN CLASSICS, llAVING THE SIGNS OF QUANTITY AFFIXED TO CERTAIN SYLLABLES, TO SHOW THEIR RIGHT PRONUNCIATION. WITH AN ALPHABETICAL VOCABULARY. THE NINTH EDITION, REVISED AND IMPROVED. BY JAMES ROSS, LL.D. PROFESSOR OF THE LATIN AND GREEK LANGUAGES, NORTH FOUl\TH STREET, PHILADELPHIA. Jqilalle lpqia: THOMAS DESILVEH, JuN. No. 247, MARKET-STREET. 1829. James Ross, first professor of Latin at Dickinson, won national stature by writing a usable school grammar. Today students study some of their grammar within walking distance of the famous lupa in the Capitoline Museum, with the grandeur that was Rome surrounding them. Many Dickin• son freshmen come in as veterans of high school Latin trips to Rome. if the teacher will only keep his mouth nothing yet produced in the rest of the ology is Greek mythology, as French shut and defer to Vergil and Euripides, world can replace the European intel• poets keep reminding us; European lit• he has it made. This allows for the in• lectual tradition, be it African strong erature (and this includes American spiration that the classics have shown in man, Asian guru or East Slavic enter• literature) is classical literature, by the more generations than English and Rus• priser. Not every member of the college testimony of Ezra Pound, Robert Frost, sian and French literature, all piled to• faculty holds with this rather Victorian Eliot and Housman, Robert Lowell and gether, have existed. To me it is the point of view, but we believe that even W. H. Auden, to take only the leaders of outstanding mystery of humane educa• our own century's unhappy history our own vernacular.