USA > Massachusetts > Middlesex County > Cambridge > Harvard College class of ninety-seven : fiftieth anniversary report, 1897 > Part 37
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Lydenberg, the son of Wesley Braxton and Marianna (Miller ) Lydenberg, was born November 18, 1874, at Dayton, Ohio. He prepared for college at the Dayton High School.
Union College conferred an L.H.D. upon him in 1935, Tufts College an Litt.D. in 1935, Columbia University an Litt.D. in 1940, the University of Rochester a Litt.D. in 1942, and Yale an L.H.D. in 1946.
Lydenberg married Madeliene Rogers Day, January 23, 1912, at Nutley, New Jersey. Their children are: John, born March 22, 1913; and Mary, born August 28, 1915. There are three grand- children. Lydenberg's son, John, A.B., Oberlin College, '34, re- ceived his Ph.D. at Harvard in 1946.
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+ GEORGE RICHARD LYMAN
G T EORGE RICHARD LYMAN died June 7, 1926, at Baltimore. His career as a botanist began in 1901, when he was appointed head of the Botany Department at Dartmouth College, a post he held until 1915. In that year he went to the Federal Horticultural Board, Washington, D.C., as pathologist, remaining until 1917. Six years later he became dean of the West Virginia College of Agriculture. He wrote articles and reports on mycology and plant diseases and was a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and a member of the National Research Council, the Botanical Society of America, the American Society of Naturalists, and the Washington Academy of Sciences.
Lyman was born on December 1, 1871, at Lee Center, Illinois, the son of George Alexander and Mary Eliza (Jones ) Lyman. He attended Beloit College Academy and received an A.B. from Beloit College in 1894 before coming to Harvard in 1896. For the next five years he was registered in the Graduate School, taking an A.B. in 1897, an A.M. in 1899, and a Ph.D. in 1906. On June 23, 1903, at Amboy, Illinois, he married Frances Ella Badger, who, with a daughter, Mavis Katherine, born October 15, 1907, sur- vived him.
THEODORE LYMAN
I
WAS born in Boston, November 23, 1875," writes Theodore Lyman, "the son of Theodore Lyman, '55, and Elizabeth Russell. After attending several private schools, I finally entered college from the Noble and Greenough School in Boston. During the last three years of my course I specialized more or less in physics, chemistry, and mathematics. That I finally devoted my- self to physics was due entirely to the encouragement of the late Professor Sabine.
"In the fall of '97, I began to climb the academic ladder rung by rung as an assistant in physics. I reached the position of Hollis Professor of Natural Philosophy in 1921. My time in Cambridge
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during this period of twenty-four years was divided among teach- ing, research, and administrative work.
"The year 1901-1902 I spent in study in England and Germany. In the fall of 1917 I cut loose from the University and sailed for Europe as a captain in the Signal Corps. I returned as a major of Engineers in the spring of 1919. I have remained in the Depart- ment of Physics in one capacity or another to the present day. In 1910 I became director of the Jefferson Laboratory, a position which I still hold.
"I have been handicapped by very uncertain health all my life. On looking back, I marvel at the considerable amount of work I have been able to get through notwithstanding. During my aca- demic career I have been obliged to sacrifice nearly all social activities, and I have found it necessary to spend long vacations in the open air.
"Matters came to a climax in the spring of 1930 when I suffered a ruptured appendix. I have never recovered from the effects of this illness. In fact, my very active life, both of work and play, terminated some fifteen years ago.
"The 'durable satisfactions' of my life have been: first, experi- mental research; second, my military service in France; and third, my hunting trips in Alaska, Africa, and the Altai Mountains."
In addition to his A.B., Lyman holds an A.M., received in 1899, and a Ph.D., received in 1900. His brother, the late Henry Lyman, was a member of the Harvard Class of 1901.
Lyman is a past president of the American Academy and Amer- ican Physical Society. He has written a number of papers on optics and on the spectroscopy of the extreme ultra violet. He holds the Rumford Medal of the American Academy, the Cresson Medal of the American Philosophical Society, and the Ives Medal of the Optical Society of America.
He is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, a member of the National Academy of Science, Royal Institution, and a fellow of the Royal Geographical Society. His clubs are the Harvard Clubs of New York and Boston and the Somerset Club of Boston. He never married.
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MILO FREDERICK McALPIN
I WAS born October 20, 1873, in Lee in the Berkshire Hills of Massachusetts," writes McAlpin, "the sixth child and fifth son of Robert McAlpin and Harriet Graves. My father came from a long line of Scot's ancestors and became known as 'the father of wood-pulp paper.' My mother was the daughter of a hundred different families, each of which was among the first settlers of the Colonies of Massachusetts and Connecticut.
"Philosophy was my chief interest in Harvard College. Greek, Latin, German, and French, fortunately, were prescribed for me because of my lack of preparation before entering the college. The classical languages, it is believed by most of my friends and myself, should be a necessity for every educated man.
"During my college years it was convenient, as I lived in either Matthews or Thayer Hall, to attend morning chapel. I have never regretted doing so because I saw both President Eliot and Pro- fessor William James begin their day every morning with worship and praise. In the Yard the throb of college life of the thousands of Harvard students was continually felt, and by it the minds, bodies, and souls of these fortunate young men were gloriously and permanently enriched.
"While under these influences and under the meditation of the problems of metaphysics, I enjoyed an experience which seldom, if ever, comes to mortal man. My soul was absolutely separated from the physical body. Both Professor Royce and Professor James told me it was an experience of the greatest importance as it was proof of the conception that there is a life all about us without the body. It is the next phase of life when we finish here.
"After leaving Harvard College, I was for twenty years in the front line of very practical business affairs. Beginning with the National Bank of Commerce in New York (now the Guaranty Trust Company), I became well acquainted with the financial world centered in Wall Street. Then for almost two decades I was associated with the New York Edison Company and was part of the magical growth of the electrical industry which began with the invention of the electric incandescent lamp by Thomas A.
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Edison. As the industry grew, there was an opportunity to influ- ence public-utility corporations with emphasis on service - service first and the public-be-pleased policy. Individual enterprise and private management will survive as long as large corporations are directed and guided by broad-minded directors who have the spirit of serving the public. In the long, long future, when the government becomes non-political and efficient to a high degree, all monopoly public services will be under government control. All light, heat, and power will, of course, be distributed from a central plant to every home and every building.
"In 1917 I was commissioned a captain of Coast Artillery and served through the first World War acting as regimental com- mander and as fort commander. At the close of the war, I ac- cepted an invitation to act as financial executive for the Near East Relief in Palestine, Egypt, Turkey, and Syria. The American peo- ple have played a very creditable part in these Mediterranean countries. America is looked to in admiration for leadership. American colleges, hospitals, and missions have educated and en- lightened these innumerable races so that today they follow a compass which points always to the flag of freedom and liberty. Communism from Russia will never penetrate these lands to de- stroy their independence, taught them by representatives from the United States. Our service to human liberty is our title to glory among the nations.
"At West Point in 1936, I was elected secretary general of the General Society of the War of 1812 and I am now serving that society as president general. I am also secretary general of the Order of the Founders and Patriots of America, and a member of the Ancient and Honorable Artillery Company of Massachusetts, Hereditary Order of the Descendants of Colonial Governors, Or- der of the Crown of Charlemagne, Society of Colonial Wars, Sons of the Revolution, Sons of the American Revolution, Military Or- der of the Loyal Legion, Huguenot Society of America and Edison Pioneers. I was also one of the founders of the American Legion. My clubs are the Harvard of Boston and New York, Army and Navy of Washington, and the Military-Naval of New York.
"Looking ahead, the problems will not be so different from
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those of our day and of the colonial days. In our time man has learned to fly. The world has become OUR world whether or not we know it or like it. The responsibility for global organization is America's. The men who founded this country solved the prob- lem of many races living together in peace. People in general, under the guidance of the United States, will solve it equally well, and should do better. The separation of Russia from the western world is not a division caused by natural barriers. We inherit differences of law, religion, and understandings of democracy. These separations will disappear when debated on the anvil of world public discussion. We should have every sympathy for help to the United Nations. It offers us the greatest chance we have ever had to avert wars. The United States, of course, must pre- serve its strength and broaden its knowledge.
The first sign of a civilized man was when he gave concern for his fellow-man and the culmination of all advance in a developing universe is character."
McAlpin prepared for college at the Marinette High School in Marinette, Wisconsin. He is unmarried.
+ FREDERICK JAMES MCCARTHY
F REDERICK JAMES MCCARTHY was born September 9, 1872, at Malden, Massachusetts, the son of James and Margaret (Ronan) McCarthy. He attended the Malden High School and attended Harvard for two years as a special student before enter- ing the Medical School, where he took an M.D. degree in 1899. He began practice in Malden in June of that year. On January 21, 1901, he died in Boston. He was unmarried.
* THOMAS JOSEPH HENRY McCORMICK
M CCORMICK was born at Boston on February 8, 1875, and died at Roxbury on October 10, 1917, of heart disease which, if known to himself, was quite unsuspected by his intimates. He was survived by his wife, the former Mary Elizabeth Donnelly, whom he married in Boston on November 15, 1911. There were no children.
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McCormick was the son of Andrew and Annie (McDonald ) McCormick, and came to Harvard from the Boston Latin School. After having completed his college course in three years, he en- tered the Harvard Medical School, where his M.D. degree, won cum laude, gave evidence of his ability and of the wisdom of his choice of medicine as his profession. After a year of postgraduate study in Vienna, he established himself in practice in Roxbury. The same qualities which he had shown in school and college - cheerfulness, good fellowship, generosity, and devotion to duty, as well as ability, won him a host of patients among whom he counted with equal pride the needy poor and the well-to-do. His untimely end terminated a career which makes his classmates proud and keeps his memory green.
D. C.
SAMUEL JAMES McDONALD
A' FTER graduating from college," writes McDonald, "I spent four years in the Harvard Medical School, from which I was grad- uated in 1901. For the next year and a half I was a house officer at the Massachusetts Charitable Eye and Ear Infirmary in Boston. In September, 1903, I started practising in Boston as an oculist and surgeon. I continued as such until my retirement in March, 1946.
"After serving in various positions at the Infirmary, I was ap- pointed visiting surgeon in May, 1921, a position I held until my retirement from the hospital in March, 1931. At that time my associates in ophthalmology presented me with a beautifully en- graved watch which I treasure highly. Shortly after March, 1931, I was appointed consulting surgeon in ophthalmology, and still hold that position.
"During the summer of 1900 I had a most enjoyable trip through the principal countries of Europe.
"On May 18, 1914, my only child, Samuel James, Jr., was born. In his first school year he took first prize in the school athletic meet in the junior high jump, clearing 'the string' at six inches. I had hoped he would do six feet at Harvard some day, but instead he won his 'B' at Brown.
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"I have been living and practising medicine in Boston since graduation from medical school and have spent the summers in Marblehead on the north shore. I have been a member of the Harvard Club since its inception and belong to the Clover Club. With my family, with summering on the north shore, my trip to Europe, and other trips throughout various parts of this country, I have managed to keep busy and happy. I am a member of the Massachusetts Medical Society, the New England Ophthalmo- logical Society and the American Medical Association.'
McDonald, the son of John and Catherine (Gormly) Mc- Donald, was born May 10, 1874, at Waltham, Massachusetts. He prepared at the Public Latin School in Boston. He married Agnes Rosalie Wood, November 16, 1910, at Boston.
In World War I he served as a volunteer physician for Local Exemption Board No. 7, of which our classmate, Dr. W. R. Mans- field, was chairman. On August 15, 1918, he received an appoint- ment from the governor to membership of Advisory Board No. 41-A of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. During World War II, he served as examining physician for the Army Induction Center in Boston.
CLARENCE ALAN McGREW
WAS born March 20, 1875, at Camden, New Jersey, the son of Gifford Horace Greeley McGrew, '74, and LaDelia Chapman," writes McGrew. "I was the class baby of my father's class.
"While I was still young, my parents moved to Wareham, Mas- sachusetts, at the head of Cape Cod, my father having been made principal of the Wareham High School. I gained my early educa- tion at home and in that school. In 1889 the family moved to Cambridge, and I entered the Cambridge Latin School, from which I went to Harvard in 1893.
"Soon after my graduation I went on the staff of the New York Sun as a reporter, and was fortunate enough to get a few glimpses of its famous editor, Charles A. Dana, who died late in 1897. I resigned in 1905 to go on the editorial staff of the New York Times and remained there until the fall of 1906, when I went to Berke- ley, California. I did newspaper work there, in Sacramento and
I
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in San Francisco until 1908, when I came to San Diego to become editor of the San Diego Sun.
"In 1915 I resigned from that position to become city editor of the San Diego Union, and in 1933 was made editor of that news- paper. I still hold that post, though my office duties have been made much less arduous.
"One of my greatest sources of satisfaction is that I have always had the respect and love of my wife and children. I have been privileged to take a part in the community life of a busy, growing city, and I have had enough time to read extensively, especially in American history. I have also had the time to keep sharp my interest in wholesome sports and to keep up with my hobby of stamp collecting. Being busy at what one likes to do makes for a good life."
McGrew was graduated cum laude with our Class. He married Helen Ried, September 30, 1897, at Cambridge. Their children are: Dorothy, the Class Baby, (Mrs. Damon C. Handley), born July 28, 1898; Alan Bracken, born October 6, 1904; Robert Ried, born May 18, 1909; and John Chapman, born June 11, 1913. There are six grandchildren, of whom their grandfather says, "They are all wonderful."
In World War II, McGrew was a member of the San Diego War Housing Commission. His grandson, Damon Carl Handley, Jr., served in the Army of the United States.
"Since I was a resident of Cambridge while an undergraduate," writes McGrew, "and lived with my parents, I did not fully get into college social life as did many of my college friends, but I made many of those friends. I regret to say that when I moved across the country some years ago, I became separated from many of them. For a year or two in college I was on the staff of the Harvard Daily News (early and late lamented), and thus began a training for the work I have been in ever since. As I remember those days, Luther Mott, '96, was the guiding spirit of that college enterprise.
"Since 1942 I have been a member of the San Diego City War Housing Commission. For several years I have been a member and secretary of the board of directors of the San Diego County
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Goodwill Industries. In 1922 I wrote a history of San Diego City and County, a book of more than four hundred rather large pages. In 1945 I was elected a director of the San Diego Historical So- ciety. I have been a member of the San Diego Rotary Club for twenty-four years. I am a member of the San Diego Club and the San Diego University Club, and am president of the San Diego Stamp Club, to which I have belonged for many years."
PERCY MACKAYE
TN June, 1898, at Shirley Center, Massachusetts," writes Mac- Kaye, "in a sequestered, woodland shrine named 'Arvia,' built by myself and dedicated to Marion Morse, I began A Garland to Sylvia, A Dramatic Reverie, a verse-play, which is the key to almost all of my after works. Completed at the Villa Aldobrandini, Frascasti-Rome, Italy, in the spring of 1899, it later led to my first professional play commission.
"The title and theme of my Harvard Commencement Part, 'The Need of Imagination in the Drama of Today,' delivered in Sanders Theatre, Memorial Hall, in June, 1897, might seem to imply the launching then of my chosen life work and a Harvard interest in teaching modern drama then. But such was not so. Not until ten years later did Professor George Pierce Baker initiate his 47 Work- shop, and ten years earlier, in 1887, I was enacting at New York a boy sans culotte amid the French Revolutionary mob in the drama Paul Kauvar, or Anarchy, written and produced by my actor-dramatist father. Thanks to him, I was born and reared in and of the theatre and its art, and collaborated with him in por- tions of his last, great work, The World Finder, shortly before his death in my freshman year at Harvard.
"No: it was at the western end of Memorial Hall, in the ever- green-enclosed Delta, by glow of Chinese lanterns, on the night of our Class Day, in an interval of waltz and polka dancing, beside John Harvard's ivy-crowned statue, that the real story of my life - not chosen, but destined - was first hinted to a few friends and classmates in the announcement there then of my betrothal to Marion Morse, of Cambridge, my third cousin. On October 8,
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1898, we were married at Shirley Center, and we went abroad for two years. Her sudden, unintimated death occurred in France, June 1, 1939, and left me a lopped-off Siamese twin. Rarely en- dowed as poet and musician (a pupil of MacDowell), utterly selfless in her devotion to me and our children, she was spiritual collaborator in all my creative works during those forty-one years. She is none the less so - even more so - still. No other associa- tions and experiences of my life are in the least comparable to those shared with her. Relatively, all the rest is trivial. I con- tributed an introduction for her published play, Emma Jane Austen's Novel Dramatized (Macmillan, 1941), and in 1945 edited some portions (1921) of her lifelong Journal. The story of my life with her, of course, can never be told, but I am now engaged in writing for a volume of autobiography some parts of the story which can be told.
"Of 'what accomplishments' am I 'most proud?' I don't think I'm proud of any. I am thankful for some; thankful that I was per- sonally the means, in 1908, of saving six hundred and forty acres of redwood forest in northern California, to become a state-pro- tected grove (the Armstrong Grove); and of saving, in 1914, the largest mound of the Indian mound builders (Cahokia), near St. Louis, to become a state park; also, that I have been privileged to express, in poems, significances of about a hundred national and international public events and occasions; thankful, especially, that in minding my business - poetry - ( wherein I am a corpo- rate-union of one), I have always been my own boss-workman, constantly on strike for a forty-eight-hour day.
"My 'philosophical opinions, or convictions?' They are epito- mized in a slender volume (published in Alsace, France, in 1940, in four languages ), entitled Poesia Religio (The Faith of Poetry ), of which only a few copies have escaped the war. Its gist is that poetry is the essence of reality, which causes the survival of the fittest spiritually fit to survive. Its motto is: Liberty, Diversity, Fraternity. Three excerpts from it are the following: (1) 'Today explorers of the ether are invading the stratosphere to discover the creative principle of our universe in cosmic rays; explorers beyond the microscope are shattering atoms for nuclei of a ma-
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terial world ever more elusive; explorers of biology are deducing the ultimate, procreative gene of the germ-cell of life. In accord- ance with such precedents, as one explorer of the psychic world of poetry, I would deduce from the insights of Shelley and of other poet-explorers, this corollary: that the essential principle which reveals the similitude of things - the very gene of the spirit germ- cell that burgeons a Shakespeare, an Aeschylus, an Isaiah - is the principle of metaphor. (2) Imagination creates art; logic incites argument. Under the domination of logic alone, each racial group, each separate faith discerns and glorifies its differences from all other groups and religions. Within the communion of Imagination, all groups discern and glorify their similitudes. .. . Since the law of imagination is a natural law, it is only by preserv- ing the integrity of each faith that the harmony of all can be realized. For it is only when faith would coerce faith and thereby shatter the elements of its own integrity, that chaos descends on the contestants. So the wars of all crusaders, of whatever faith, are abortive. And so across the portal of our world fellowship of faiths should be blazoned this axiom: Delight in Diversity is the Beginning of Fellowship. (3) This, then, is the triad of the Faith of Poetry: Imagination ..- nature's revelation of her similitudes; Ecstasy - direct communion with nature's diverse oneness; Prem- onition - the sense of nature's self-expanding immortality.'
"And 'what ( for me) are life's durable satisfactions?' First of all, the inward revelations of great sorrow and loneliness and 'failure.' In comparison with such, the outward satisfactions of 'success' and social pleasures are fleeting, evanescent, and often stale, flat and unprofitable.' Secondly (akin to the first), the ex- perience of immortality: the awareness, through personal knowl- edge, that death is an organic form of life and selfhood indestruc- tible. Thirdly, the serene joys of imagination, especially in the presence of wild nature. Next and always ( as I've tried to suggest in the stanzas for this our reunion), the satisfactions - almost inexpressible in words - of friendship.
"Of such, I have found beautifully enduring the intimate phases of friendship shared with the variedly gifted individuals of my own family for five generations: with my grandfather, with
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my father and mother and a dear aunt, with my five brothers and my sister, with my wife (uniquely), with our children, and our grandchildren. After these, the friendships shared with a such a wealth of wonderful human beings - poets, artists, business men, scholars, peasants, workers, dreamers, 'rich man, poor man, beggar man, thief, doctor, lawyer, merchant, chief,' young and old, famed and obscure, righteous and reprobate, in many parts of the world, all so different and resourcefully endowed - are such that I hold my breath in retrospect of my blessed good fortune. Indeed, aside from opportunity for friendship, I have never yet met anybody who, on near acquaintance, hasn't turned out to be interesting, mysterious, and extraordinary. To rhyme it in four lines:
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