USA > Massachusetts > Middlesex County > Cambridge > Harvard College class of ninety-seven : fiftieth anniversary report, 1897 > Part 32
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Jaques married Bertha Frances Whittemore, October 10, 1898, at Ipswich, Massachusetts. Their children are: Helen Marcia, born November 30, 1900; Amy Frances, born March 2, 1902; and Alden Whittemore, born July 17, 1913. He married Ella F. Curtis, June 18, 1921, who, with his three children, survived him.
R. L. S.
MARK JEFFERSON
I SPENT my first twenty years in my father's house in Melrose, one of Boston's sleeping-town suburbs," reports Jefferson, "reading too many very good books, playing with too few mates, roving the nearby woods, and knowing intimately the common birds' nests and superficially the common trees and plants. I had picked up the hesitant use of Gray's Botany for identification.
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"For three years I was a member of the eleven-student class of 1884 in the Great City's little university. Again I was much too limited to books. I read about mathematics, knew six languages by eye, never once hearing them spoken, and, typically, astron- omy without telescope or stars.
"Into my astronomy class one day in November, 1883, came an astronomer from the National Observatory of the Argentine Re- public at Cordoba, seeking an assistant. I wanted to see the world I had read so much about, to hear languages actually spoken, and to be an astronomer. I got the job.
"The thirty-day voyage to Rio delighted me. Spanish was spoken every day, Portuguese occasionally, as we made five stops along the Brazilian coast, and after Rio five days on a German boat for the voyage to the River Plate and three of quarantine gave me a sample of German sounds.
"I went to Cordoba for one year and stayed three, as third and second astronomer in charge of the meridian circle. I liked as- tronomy. Is it not man's greatest mental achievement that we can buy in 1946 a nautical almanac telling the date, hour, and minute of every eclipse of 1948? Men say God knows. Surely the God of Things As They Are does know, but here are men who can read His thoughts after Him. What other science can match it?
"I liked the Creoles. My six years in South America revealed five things that came to me as new. First, the charm of Creole life; second, their preference of Europeans to us because we do not perceive their merits; third, the acute homesickness of the Pampa man for level horizons; fourth, the present and future sig- nificance of the reversal of the seasons south of the equator; and fifth, young Darwin. The Creoles buy in Europe, they travel in Europe, and they affect European manners and modes of life. Except Singer and Standard Oil, most United States firms disre- garded the taste, language, and business habits of Latin Ameri- cans completely.
"Winter in South America comes in July. Italian harvest hands made harvest in Italy and Germany in August and went to the Argentine for another in November. Ask in Italy what the people of those tiny villages, which you see peeping through the woods
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over Lake Como, do for a living and the answer comes, 'emigrano.' They emigrate.
"Fifty years before my day, Charles Darwin, a young man of twenty-two, highly trained in natural science, but quite unknown, visited the Pampa as a guest of Captain Fitz Roy on H.M.S. Beagle's exploring trip around the world. Thirty years later he became the chief discoverer of natural selection, revealing a 'God of Things As They Are' to an unwilling world, and becoming famous. His Researches are full of glimpses of God's truth. I had eagerly sought good books on the country and was always disap- pointed. After reading young Darwin, I looked again at the coun- try and its people and saw them. But I could not follow Darwin with satisfaction for lack of training in natural science. There was beginning to rise in me a consciousness of a great lack.
"Part of my work at the observatory was keeping the clock rate, finding how fast or how slow our clock was, and recording it. Every Thursday I sent a noon signal all over the Republic. About this time, too, I began to take photographs and made groups of my Creole friends at their country homes, not then so common a thing as now.
"It occurred to some of the directors of La Providencia that it might be opportune to add to the management a North American who could tell time by the stars and could make photographs. I was only twenty-three and didn't look that, but I suggested that we try it for the season then beginning. After that, if they were satisfied, they could make me sub-manager. They did, and I stayed by them three years.
"In 1889 I came home via Europe between harvests, and ar- ranged to take my degree in Boston with the Class of 1889. And so, after the sugar-making season of 1889, I came back to the United States to a new period of life, that of teaching, family, William Morris Davis, geography, and public affairs.
"Home in Massachusetts, I taught because teaching was the easiest thing for me to get into that would yield subsistence at once. Also I like to teach. I began in high schools at Hingham, Turners Falls, and Lexington, and at the Mitchell's Boys' School at Billerica. The Turners Falls program required me to teach
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physical geography of which I was ignorant. Two things came of that. I went to Harvard for the summer school of 1891 to learn what I lacked. Meanwhile I taught a class of plane geometry in French. A former resident of the town, then a member of the Lexington School Committee, happened into the class and was interested. In 1893 I moved to Lexington.
"The summer school at Harvard delighted me. I thought it the best teaching I had ever had and resolved to have more of it as soon as possible. Ours was a normal college; our job to train teachers. Geography classes should give students glimpses of God's truth, which could be found out-of-doors. Also it has been interesting to me to have five of my six assistants at Ypsilanti attain certain eminence in geography.
"In 1896 I went to Harvard for two years of training in ele- mentary natural science. The director of the Graduate School was shocked by such an array of elementary courses and tried to get me to take some advances from my previous work, but he found me deaf. Here I met Professor Davis.
"When Professor Davis began teaching at Harvard his subject was physical geography, the foundling orphan of the earth sci- ences, always assigned to the newest man on the faculty. Davis made the subject respected in America and even in England, where in 1889 his Peneplain had been derided. The English had a theory of their own about that, nor did they need an American to come over and tell them the history of their River Thames. Ten years later he was given an ovation in London, at Cambridge, and at Oxford. The man had an exasperating habit of being right when he differed from you. Presently Berlin and Paris called him to teach in their universities. He did so in German and French.
"I took all his work at Harvard, work in the Rockies in 1910, a parade across Europe in company with British, French, German, Norwegian, Czech, and Japanese geographers, guided on our way by local experts as we crossed Wales, England, France, and Switz- erland into Italy on our way to a geographical congress at Rome, which was put off by war between Italy and Turkey. That gave me acquaintance with some thirty European geographers, some on their own special grounds. In 1912 I was marshal of the
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Davis American Geographical Society Transcontinental Excur- sion across the United States and back in a special train carrying forty-three selected European geographers, with receptions and excursion by cities and universities along the way. By going to Davis to learn geography I was put in touch with the geograph- ers of the world. He gave me his books and papers. I was privi- leged to know his home in Cambridge and was in correspondence with him to the end of his life. What a teacher!
"In 1897 he assigned to an unwilling Jefferson a study of the geography of the tides. But I found that in reality it was fascin- ating. A long paper resulted. I picked the best piece of it and sent it to the National Geographic Magazine, not then a gorgeous picture book of geography, but a rather drab publication with eighteen hundred subscribers in Washington. I read my paper before the American Association for the Advancement of Sci- ence at Boston, and it was later printed. Requests came 'for the rest of the paper,' which was printed in following issues.
"Then came Caesar's Commentaries on his wars in France, used everywhere for early reading in Latin. Davis' analysis of the geo- graphy of France would have brought out the remarkable control the central plateau had exercised on Caesar's movements if he had read Caesar. I believe he had not. A ten days' confinement to my bed with a very slight touch of pneumonia gave me oppor- tunity to write the matter up. I had just heard Davis and had taught Caesar for years. Davis came to see me in that week, saw Allen and Greenough's Caesar on my bed, and was apparently impressed. Davis gave my paper to Professor Greenough, who in- vited me to his house, where I spent a pleasant half hour, heard kind words from a scholar, and received an autographed copy of his latest Caesar. For twenty years Allen and Greenough had meant a Latin grammar to me. Now it meant a pair of amiable gentlemen. I was learning that the great University in the little city has both students and faculty in residence, to its very great advantage. Has it not always been so? Can the University of London ever mean to England what Cambridge and Oxford have meant?
"If I had wanted to draw some comparison between Xenophon
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and Arrian in my great city university, how could the instructor help pulling out his watch? Did he not live thirty miles away with a train leaving in a few minutes? At Harvard I knew the din- ing rooms of several of my instructors.
"From Harvard in 1898 I went to the Brockton High School to teach too many subjects. I asked to add another - field work in the city. In the summer of 1900 thirteen hundred Cuban school- teachers were brought to Harvard for a summer of American teaching. President Eliot engaged me to give them eighteen lec- tures in Spanish and field excursions to accessible places in par- ties of two hundred each. At the end came a letter from the presi- dent saying that the honorarium offered had been insufficient. He doubled it. In 1901 the University placed me in the chair of geography of the State Normal College of Michigan at Ypsilanti, where I taught until my retirement in 1939.
"A family is a large part of life. Eight of us went to Ypsilanti. We had lots of fun. We built ourselves a spacious house on New England lines with grass enough under the backyard elms to let the children play croquet, or tennis, or basket ball, provided they did not all want to play at once and take their friends in too. Now they are scattered from the Atlantic to the Pacific. Now an- other mother and a daughter and granddaughter live here with father.
"Most summers we have gone away. Father has taught one summer out of three at various universities, at Harvard, Yale, University of Michigan, Chicago, University of California, and Columbia. In 1895 mother and I took our two-year-old for a win- ter month in the lovely Windward Islands. Then there was an ancestral place at Gilmanton, New Hampshire, dating back to 1814. During the summer of 1901 we camped on South Beach at Martha's Vineyard, parents, maid, and five children in three tents, eked out with a small wooden bunk house which could shelter all of us in bad weather. In the West I found a lovely place at Canadian Kincardine east across Lake Huron from the Thumb of Michigan. We camped two seasons in Farmer Francis' woods at the Canadian south end of Lake Huron, the Grand Trunk conductor obligingly putting us off at our tent. One sum-
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mer we tried a cottage on one of Michigan's smaller lakes in the Big Pines. Then the family geographer did his stunt, explored and found the ideal spot, east of Charlevoix on Pike Lake. By 1923 good roads were so near that people began to make me offers for the place. When they offered seven times what I paid I had to sell.
"Geography was indicated for my life's work by Davis, and confirmed by the American Geographical Society of New York. My work brought me into contact with the Society in 1909. I had read a paper at Baltimore on the inner structure of great cities. A week later C. C. Adams wrote from the American Geographical Society of New York, wishing to print my paper. Also he asked permission to print my name on the Society's list of contributing editors to the Bulletin, to send them whatever I found convenient. That more than provided the family with butter on its daily bread for the next thirty years. There were conversations about my going east to the great city to work for them. But I needed the long vacation and the A. G. S. needed a man always on the job.
"I was made a marshal of their Transcontinental Excursion of 1912. In 1918 I was sent to Chile, Argentina, and Brazil with an assistant to write a report on modern colonization in those coun- tries. I published a book and several brochures of results. They made me a corresponding member of the Society in 1922, chief cartographer of the United States Peace Commission in Paris in 1918-1919, and Cullom gold medalist in 1931. They have always been most generous in allowing me the use of their superb collec- tions and their technical staff in New York.
"In 1900 I published in the National Geographic Magazine a study of the best-mapped large rivers in the fine collection of maps in the Harvard College Library, pointing out that the belt in which these rivers meandered was on the average nearly eight- een times as wide as the rivers themselves. Forty-four years later came a letter from hydrologic engineer, Robert E. Horton, to say that from mathematical analysis he had made under physical laws rivers were obliged to do just that. It was pleasant to have Vujevíc confirm my studies from his observations of the Hun- garian Theiss, and the Swede De Geer from his studies on the
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Klarelv. It was pleasant to have the Stockholm Selskab for Geo- grafi och Antropologi make me a corresponding member in 1922, and the Geographic Society of the University of Belgrade in 1932, and to receive from the Geographic Society of Chicago the Helen Culver gold medal in 1931.
"The Kiwanis Club of Ypsilanti showed me a way to work with other citizens of state and community to get needed things done, things that were everyone's business but no one's obligation. From 1933 to 1935, I was appointed by three successive governors of the Michigan District chairman of a Committee on Legal Pro- cedure. They told me at the State University Law School that the time was opportune for laymen to help get the Bar of the state in- tegrated. The bill was passed in 1935. The Michigan State Bar was organized as a body which all practising attorneys must join and a code of ethics for attorneys was adopted. This was a very important gain in Michigan legal procedure which other states should share.
"In 1940 and two years following, I was made chairman of an- other state-wide committee of Kiwanis on Taxation. In these campaigns we found it possible to enlist the services of men who were well informed of the practical need of change. The consid- erable time and effort that it was necessary to put into it was very well repaid by the consciousness of serving the public cause. To me it was the most satisfactory work of my life.
"As I write I am eighty-three years old, well and happy. I find it pleasant to walk a mile every morning to my coffee. I find the cold of winter uncomfortable, but proper clothing and a closed car with a good heater help on that. I have more to do every day than I can get through. I'd like an afternoon nap, but am glad to say that I cannot always spare the time.
"All the great evils in the world seem to me to be the outcome of human unreason. Can't we get at work on that? I fear it is true that if we let labor as constituted today vote whether they should have another 10 per cent increase in pay, even if it involved a 15 per cent increase in all prices, they would immediately vote for it. They would be willing to pay for the pleasure of handling more money. If I am right, we can go to work to make the cost clear.
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The people who work may do foolish things just as capitalists do, but they are not fools. Intelligent men should be able to put over intelligent views. Propaganda is not limited to the use of the unwise."
Jefferson, the son of Daniel and Mary Elizabeth ( Mantz) Jeff- erson, was born March 1, 1863, at Melrose, Massachusetts. He prepared at the Melrose High School. In 1889 he received an A.B. at Boston University. He obtained an additional A.B. with our Class and an A.M. the following year. He married Theodora Augusta Bohnstedt, August 22, 1891, at Gilmanton, New Hamp- shire. She died November 6, 1913, at Ypsilanti, Michigan. He married Clara Frances Hopkins, June 17, 1915, at Holland, Michi- gan. His children are: Geoffrey, born July 4, 1893; Theodore, born August 24, 1895; Barbara, born January 17, 1897; Phoebe, born May 22, 1898; Hilary, born August 10, 1900; Sally, born March 29, 1916; Thomas, born August 2, 1920; and Mary Alice, born September 27, 1923. There are five grandchildren. Geof- frey, Theodore, and Hilary served in World War I.
Jefferson is the author of a number of books and articles on geography, and was the recipient in 1939 of the Distinguished Service Award from the National Council of Geography Teach- ers. He is a member of the Geological Society of America; Asso- ciation of American Geographers, of which he was president in 1916; and Michigan Academy of Science, of which he was presi- dent in 1908. His clubs include the Twenty Club and Ypsilanti Teachers' Credit Union.
EDWARD ELLIOTTE JENKINS
I
SPENT the first few years after leaving college in my father's office," writes Jenkins, "After his death in 1907, I was in part- nership with my brother until my retirement in 1920. My brother and I erected the Jenkins Arcade Building in Pittsburgh in 1917, and I became vice-president of that company. On the death of my brother, I became president.
"I spent the years from 1920 until 1929 in New York City, East Hampton, Long Island, and abroad. I changed my residence
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from New York to Palm Beach in 1929, and to Warrenton, Vir- ginia, in 1930. I acted as president of the Peoples' National Bank of Warrenton for five years and am now chairman of the Board of Directors. For some years I was interested in oil production in western Pennsylvania.
"I still retain my membership in the Harvard Club of Pennsyl- vania. I am one of its early members and have filled all the offices in the club.
"One of my interests in life now is noticing my grandsons grow up, and I feel that I have many blessings for which to be thankful."
Jenkins, the son of Thomas Christopher and Eleanor Katherine (Elliotte) Jenkins, was born January 6, 1874, at Pittsburgh. He prepared at the Belmont School in Belmont, Massachusetts. He was at Harvard for one year, which he spent at the Lawrence Scientific School.
He married Cornelia Willis Eddy, June 27, 1894, in Cambridge. She died April 13, 1901. His marriage to Evelyn C. Grimm took place June 2, 1903, at Franklin, Pennsylvania. They have four children: Richard Elliotte, born June 23, 1904; Edward, born November 18, 1906 (deceased); Edward Kenneth, born August 18, 1908; and Alan Nelson, born October 25, 1915. There are three grandchildren.
Jenkins' son, Alan, a member of the Harvard Class of '39, served as a lieutenant in the U. S. Naval Reserve during World War II. Edward was a lieutenant commander in the U. S. Naval Reserve. Jenkins' brother, the late Thomas Clifton Jenkins, was a member of the Harvard Class of 1892.
Jenkins is also a member of the Duquesne and Pittsburgh Clubs of Pittsburgh.
+ ROBERT DARRAH JENKS
R OBERT DARRAH JENKS was born March 1, 1875, at Enterprise, Florida. He came to Harvard from the Penn Charter School in Philadelphia and graduated cum laude with the Class. Long interested in railroads, he then worked for a year in the freight department of the Philadelphia and Reading Railway. He next
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entered the Law School of the University of Pennsylvania, taking an LL.B. in 1901. The remainder of his career was devoted chiefly to the practice of law and was characterized by zealous regard for the public welfare untainted by ulterior commercial considerations.
He remained greatly interested in railroads and presented many cases before the Interstate Commerce Commission. On railroad rates he was considered an authority. His high ideals carried him further into public service, and he was a trustee of the Penn School in South Carolina, a member of the Philadelphia Committee of Seventy, secretary of the Pennsylvania Civil Serv- ice Reform Association, and chairman of the Council of the Na- tional Civil Service Reform League. On June 20, 1914, he mar- ried Maud Lowrey, at Philadelphia.
Jenks' legal career naturally tended to transportation prob- lems. He had a practical knowledge of many intricate aspects of transportation. At the time of his death at Philadelphia on Janu- ary 22, 1917, he was at work on one of many cases which he had supported before the Interstate Commerce Commission. The at- titude in which he approached the cases entrusted to him was one of scrupulous fairness to both the railroads and the shippers. To him the fundamental points at issue were far more important than the commercial interests immediately involved. He had already won professional standing of a high order, with promise of wide public recognition of his abilities.
CHARLES JENNEY
Tave bro "THE second twenty-five years, like the first," reports Jenney, "have brought happiness in many forms, both in and outside the family circle. My three children have all happily married, and seven grandchildren have brought the satisfaction which, as President Eliot said, only a grandfather can know. The one great offset to all this came in the death of the one who was responsible for the happiness of my forty-three years of married life. But a man must count his blessings. I know of no one who has a larger credit balance in good fortune.
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"In 1920 I deserted the congenial paths of the pedagogue for the competition of business. After two years as special agent in the Aetna Life Insurance Company, I was made assistant mana- ger of the Boston agency of that company, and the following year became general agent. This position I held for five years. I re- signed to pursue the business of life insurance in the more lei- surely and less harried rôle of independent broker. As a result I am encumbered with a smaller burden of 'filthy lucre,' but have passed the three-score-and-ten milestone with a better than aver- age store of health and general contentment. After all, what are we aiming at?
"My contribution to the war effort was slight. I had supposed that my preferred vocation of teaching was for me far back in the past. But the topsy-turvy condition of the world conflict pulled me back. Teacher shortage, first at the Wentworth Institute where the Navy was trying to turn out machinist mates on the assembly line, and later at Boston University under the Army Specialized Training Program, and the current G. I. plan, forced administrators to rob the graveyard. There they dug me up, and I have had the time of my life working with a mighty worth-while lot of young men. At present writing (September, 1946), I am still happily at it.
"I am most grateful to '97 for giving me the chance to serve on the Class Committee and for the friendly contacts which have re- sulted from my job as Class Agent. As a member of the Harvard Fund Council, I have been glad to repay even a microscopic por- tion of my debt to Harvard College.
"Hobbies? Yes, I have three of them besides the aforemen- tioned children and grandchildren - books, wood-working (I have a bully shop with all sorts of electric gadgets ), and golf. The most enthusiastic golfer I ever knew never broke 100. That's the way with me, a bum golfer but, gee, how I love it!
"I never wrote a book, just a couple of articles for the Harvard Business School Review (about trusts) and the Alumni Bulletin (reveries of a class agent ). But I sure like to read them."
Jenney, the son of Noah Stoddard and Mary Hannah ( Howes) Jenney, was born September 14, 1874, at South Boston, Massa-
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chusetts. He came to Harvard from the Brookline High School in Brookline, Massachusetts. He was graduated from college with our Class in 1897. In 1896 he served as manager of the foot- ball team. He married Blanche Howe, August 9, 1900, at Lewis- ton, Maine. She died December 9, 1943, at Cambridge. Their children are: Elizabeth (Mrs. Taeusch), born September 2, 1901; Warren, '26, born June 26, 1904; and Charles, Jr., '26, born Sep- tember 3, 1905. There are seven grandchildren "the best in the world," according to Jenney.
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