USA > Massachusetts > Middlesex County > Cambridge > Harvard College class of ninety-seven : fiftieth anniversary report, 1897 > Part 50
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Shea was a man of few intimates. To the Class at large he was best known as a quiet, good-natured man who made a fine center in the Class football team. An an undergraduate he showed the romantic side of his nature in his great fondness for Italian litera- ture, developed largely under the influence of Professor Charles Eliot Norton. He could also be extremely practical, as he showed himself in his political associations. A student of politics, he had the highest ideals for the government of Boston, yet was devoid of the erratic methods of the spasmodic reformer, for which he himself had a profound distrust.
WILLIAM TRULL SHEPPARD
M Y early education was received in the public schools of Springfield, Missouri," reports Sheppard. "In 1892 I was graduated from a four years' course in the preparatory depart- ment of Drury College. One year at Dalzell's School in Worcester, Massachusetts, gave me final preparation for Harvard, which I entered with our Class in 1893. I was graduated four years later.
"Life during these fifty years has been a busy affair, but through it all I have had time to travel and play. I spent my first year after graduation in the West. Then I studied for three years in the Harvard Law School. I was admitted to the Massachusetts Bar in February, 1901, before receiving my LL.B., and began the practice of law in Lowell, Massachusetts, the following Septem- ber. I have specialized in probate, corporation, and real estate
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law, have acted as examiner for the Massachusetts Land Court and Home Owners' Loan Corporation, as attorney for the Central Savings Bank and Middlesex Safe Deposit and Trust Company, and have carried on a general practice. In 1917 I was employed by John D. Rockefeller, Sr., to purchase his winter home at Or- mond Beach, Florida, where I became a frequent guest and golf companion.
"I have travelled in Europe four times, once in Egypt and Pales- tine, and once after World War I on a mission of good will to all the capitals of northern Europe. I have also seen much of our own country. During the past thirty-two years, I have spent the month of March in Florida, playing golf as my main recreation.
"I have given much time to charity, serving as president of the Battles Home for Aged Men in Lowell, trustee and clerk of the Lowell General Hospital for forty-five years, trustee and member of the Finance Committee of the New England Baptist Hospital in Boston, trustee of the Baptist Home for the Aged in Boston, chairman of the Board of Trustees of Gordon College in Boston, trustee and director of the Lowell Y.M.C.A. for forty-four years, trustee of the Ministry-at-Large at Lowell, trustee and past presi- dent of the Boston Baptist Social Union, and member of the Board of Managers of the American Baptist Foreign Mission Society of New York for twenty years.
"I hold the following positions with business corporations: trustee and clerk of the Central Savings Bank, Lowell; treasurer and clerk of Stony Brook Railroad, a leased line of the Boston & Maine; treasurer and director of the A. G. Pollard Company, a department store in Lowell; president and treasurer of the Pro- prietors of the South Congregational Meeting House in Lowell, a real estate corporation; and trustee and clerk of the Monson Maine Slate Company. I was a former president of the Monson Maine Railroad and Monson Maine Electric Light Company."
Sheppard, the son of William Dare and Josephine Miranda (Trull) Sheppard, was born January 28, 1876, at Springfield, Missouri. He married Edith Frances Pollard, November 25, 1903, at Lowell. Their daughter, Edith Martha (White) Bartlett, was born April 11, 1905. There are two grandsons: William Pollard
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Bartlett, Harvard '44; and Sheppard Bartlett, Syracuse Univer- sity. During World War II, William Pollard Bartlett enlisted in the Naval Reserve and became a lieutenant (j.g.). He served on a minesweeper and preceded President Roosevelt to the Yalta Conference. He also served in the waters around Japan. He was the recipient of a '97 scholarship to Harvard, and was married August 24, 1946, to Florence Kennedy. Sheppard Bartlett served as a lieutenant (j.g) in the Naval Reserve and served in Japanese waters.
ANDREW EDWARD SHERBURNE
I PRACTISED medicine in Dorchester, Massachusetts, until 1923," writes Sherburne, "when I retired to Portsmouth, New Hamp- shire."
Sherburne, the son of Edward Payson and Sarah Georgianna (Stevens) Sherburne, was born October 18, 1873, at Haverhill, Massachusetts. He prepared for college at the Public Latin School in Boston. He was with our Class four years, and received his A.B. in '98 as of '97. He studied one year at the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, and in 1903 was granted an M.D. at the Medical School.
He married Clara Louise West, June 4, 1903, at Dorchester. Their sons are: Edward West, born March 13, 1904; and Andrew Badger, born July 16, 1907. There are five grandchildren.
+ GEORGE ERNEST SHERMAN
EORGE ERNEST SHERMAN died August 26, 1932, at Cambridge.
G T The son of George Augustus and Julia Elizabeth (Hart) Sherman, he was born June 12, 1875, at Milford, Massachusetts, and attended the Cambridge High and Latin School. He was with the Class only during 1893-94, going later to Tufts Medical School, where he took an M.D. in 1905. He practised in Cam- bridge and at the time of the 25th Report managed a garage "as a little side issue." He was active in local politics, serving for several years as a member of the Republican state committee and
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as chairman of the Republican city committee. He was also a candidate for mayor.
During the first World War, he was medical member of the draft board and in March, 1918, was commissioned a captain in the Medical Corps. Sherman had a fine voice and sang in many church choirs. He was a member of the Harvard Alumni Chorus at many Commencement exercises.
He married Jeanie Munro Campbell on November 11, 1896, at Cambridge. She survived him, as did a son, Ernest Augustus, born May 14, 1900, a daughter, Jeanie Kelso, born September 28, 1909, and a granddaughter, Mary Jean Sherman.
WALTER HERMAN SIDES
I WAS deputy collector of internal revenue in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, from 1898 to 1902," reports Sides. "From 1902 to 1926 I was in the wholesale hosiery business in New York City. During the next six years, I was export manager for a New York company, representing many hosiery mills. From 1935 to 1939 I was associated with the New York State Mortgage Commission. In 1940 I retired and returned to my native city, Portsmouth, where I now make my home."
Sides was born December 6, 1874, at Portsmouth, the son of William Odiorne Sides and Margaret Ann (Badger) Sides. He prepared at the Portsmouth High School. After four years with our Class, he received his A.B. in 1897. As an undergraduate, he was a member of the Pi Eta Society.
He married Florence Louise Hill, July 5, 1905, at Portsmouth. She died May 3, 1910, at Hackensack, New Jersey. He married Edith Florence Whittemore, June 6, 1914, at West Gloucester, Massachusetts. She died December 25, 1918, at West Roxbury, Massachusetts. He married Harriet Stoner Roberts, January 12, 1923, at Yonkers, New York. She died March 19, 1940, at Bronx- ville, New York. His children: Natalie, born May 23, 1908; Wal- ter Herman, Jr., born November 24, 1909 (died December 10, 1944); and Robert Whittemore, born February 14, 1916. There are two grandchildren.
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In 1941 Sides served for ten months as a member of the Ration- ing Board of the Office of Price Administration at Portsmouth. During the last four months of his term he was chairman of the Board. His son, Walter Herman Sides, Jr., served as a sergeant in a tank battalion, Army of the United States. He was wounded in action in Germany and died the same day.
While Sides was a resident of New York, he was a member of the Harvard Club of New York, New England Society of New York, and Dunwoodie Golf Club, Yonkers, New York.
+ ALBERT SILVERMAN
A LBERT SILVERMAN died June 1, 1938, at Chicago. The son of Charles and Labina (Hindelbach) Silverman, he was born November 3, 1875, at Chicago, and prepared for college at the Harvard School there. He left college at the end of our sopho- more year and attended the Law School. For some years he prac- tised law in Chicago. He then became vice-president of the Buckskin Fibre Box Company and later entered the real estate business in association with the E. B. Woolf Realty Company.
He was survived by his wife, the former Alice Gumbel of New Orleans.
+ RALPH SIMPKINS
R ALPH SIMPKINS died July 1, 1924, at St. Louis. At the time of his death he was vice-president of the Hydraulic Press Brick Company, a position which he had held since 1909. He began his business career with the Union Press Brick Company, which con- solidated with the Hydraulic Press Brick Company in 1905. At that time he became secretary-treasurer of the firm.
He was born November 11, 1874, at St. Louis. He attended Smith Academy there and was graduated with us in 1897 with an A.B. degree. His parents were George Winslow and Mary Louise (Michel) Simpkins. On June 10, 1908, at St. Louis, he married May Farrington Filley. Their children were George Winslow, born May 24, 1909, and Francis, born March 19, 1920.
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HARVARD CLASS OF 1897
+ LINCOLN FLEETFORD SISE
L INCOLN FLEETFORD SISE died on April 28, 1942, at Brookline, Massachusetts. He was a quiet, modest, reserved man, whose activities in college had not been of the kind to receive public notice and acclaim, and whose career as a physician had not been showy, but of consistent and peculiar value to the ill.
His great-grandfather was the ancestor who came to this coun- try from Ireland in 1784, settled in Dover, New Hampshire, and married a Dover girl. The next generation lived in Portsmouth, whence a son Albert Fleetford Sise came to Boston, became a merchant, and married Edith Ware, daughter of a famous Boston physician, Dr. John Ware, Hersey Professor of Theory and Prac- tice of Physic at the Harvard Medical School, and a physician on the staff of the Massachusetts General Hospital.
Lincoln Sise was born in Medford, Massachusetts, on July 1, 1874. He attended the Boston Latin School, and was graduated cum laude from Harvard with our Class. He then entered the Medical School, from which he was graduated in 1901, again cum laude. This education was achieved with quiet and conscientious effectiveness, without special distinction and equally without no- toriety of any sort. Sise was of slender build, not rugged, not one of those to attract notice by hurling huge weights incredible distances nor to cause the people to gather about him in the forum, but he was universally respected.
He obtained the coveted internship in medicine at the Boston City Hospital, and then settled in his native city as a general practitioner - a vocation which he appears to have found not to his liking, for he described himself as "a square peg in a round hole." It may be that he was not naturally skilled in those social amenities and devices which are so necessary to please exacting patients with minor illnesses. He was a very direct person who liked definite problems and tangible results.
No doubt during his early days of practice Sise had given anaesthesia for surgical colleagues, as most young men did in those days, and perhaps he liked the opportunity to be useful and to earn a fee without being bored with social chit-chat. Un-
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doubtedly, he saw that anaesthesia was as deserving of special study as any branch and noted that a few men in Boston were specializing in it with success. In 1914 he gradually gave up medi- cal practice and worked into the new specialty of anaesthesiology just in time to be of valuable service for a year and a half during the first World War as a lieutenant in the Medical Corps of the Navy, assigned for duty at the Chelsea Naval Hospital.
When relieved of active duty in October, 1919, he was able to accept the opportunities for professional service, which inevitably came to him, as visiting anaesthetist to various Boston hospitals and as a teacher of his subject at Harvard and Tufts. In 1923 he became associated with the Lahey Clinic and was largely respon- sible for the development and perfection of methods which con- tributed to the reputation of this clinic for its remarkable surgical success. He invented or perfected a number of devices to facili- tate the use of various agents, and perhaps did more to make spinal anaesthesia safe and dependable than anyone else in this vicinity.
He was inevitably a member of professional organizations, both local and national, and, in spite of his modesty, had to submit to election to the presidency of some of them. Also, in spite of his modesty, he recognized the obligations of a successful specialist and published more than fifty communications on various phases of anaesthesia, and addressed medical meetings in many states. He entered a scarcely recognized specialty in its early days; he worked faithfully and fruitfully to develop it; and when he ceased, its importance became a tribute to his memory.
Of Lincoln Sise's avocations I cannot speak from personal knowledge, but I suspect they were centered in his home and in aiding the development of two fine boys: Albert Fleetford, born April 23, 1907; and Herbert Stanwood, born June 30, 1912. With Albert he studied radio, constructed receiving sets when they could scarcely be purchased, erected a pole of ninety feet in his front yard and listened to the wide world talking. This boy must be a "natural." Harvard College and its books could only be toler- ated for a year and a half, nor did regular courses at Tech appeal, but, nevertheless, he is a radio engineer, working in a research
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laboratory and was widely in demand for important duties in con- nection with the war. The second boy, Herbert, must have watched with approval his father's career, for he followed his steps through Harvard College, A.B. '34, and Medical School, M.D. '38, and the Boston City Hospital and served as a lieutenant in the Medical Corps of the Naval Reserve. He saw duty with landing craft or Seabees or base hospitals in the Southern Pacific as chance dictated.
Most of us will remember Lincoln Sise at our reunions as a quiet, scholarly-appearing and rather delicate man, with a pleas- ant and sympathetic bearing and not much small talk. Some of us who were also of the Class of '01 at the Medical School recall him there and have missed him at recent annual dinners. I never heard him sing a song or tell a story or spontaneously make a speech, but I have seen him yield resignedly to the demands of an insistent toastmaster and tell deprecatingly of his doings. He grew increasingly deaf, which handicapped him in his work and dissuaded him from social pleasures. A heart attack, not severe but grim in its implications, forced him to give up work. A year later came one more severe, and in six months the end came pain- lessly. He was survived by his wife, Eleanor Gertrude (Stan- wood) Sise, whom he married at Medford, Massachusetts, on October 20, 1904, and his two sons.
Perhaps Lincoln Sise inherited many attributes from his grand- father, old Dr. John Ware, in whose memory Oliver Wendell Holmes read a poem at a meeting of the Massachusetts Medical Society. One verse might have been written of his grandson:
A whiter soul, a fairer mind, A life with purer course and aim, A gentler eye, a voice more kind, We may not look on earth to find. The love that lingers o'er his name Is more than fame. D. C.
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+ WILLIAM FREDERICK SKERRYE
W TILLIAM FREDERICK SKERRYE, who died April 17, 1937, at Belfast, Maine, was born October 31, 1867, at Liverpool, Nova Scotia, the son of Frederick Allen and Susan Elizabeth (Starratt ) Skerrye, and prepared at Phillips Academy, Andover. He was in College during 1893-94 and 1895-96, leaving to pre- pare for the ministry. In 1896 he was ordained in the Unitarian Church and until 1900 preached in Provincetown. After accept- ing a call to Saco, Maine, he remained there several years, taking an active part in community affairs. For some time ill health kept him from his profession, but by 1922 he was well enough to go to the First Church in Belfast. He wrote many short stories, chiefly for Youth's Companion and Leslie's and had also published a reli- gious book called How and Why.
On January 1, 1896, at Melrose, Massachusetts, he married Lillian Morse Starrett, who died in 1911. He married Carrie Louise Starrett on February 10, 1913. His autobiographies in the Class Reports indicate the deep satisfaction he derived from send- ing his two children - Wilbert Bancroft, born November 16, 1896, and Philip Baldwin, born October 2, 1898 - to college in spite of his small means. Wilbert attended Brown University and the Medical School and Graduate School at Harvard, taking an A.M. in 1927. Philip received an A.B. at Harvard in 1920.
The measure of the man, whom, unfortunately, few of his classmates knew well, is indicated by a few lines he wrote for the 25th Report: "The older I grow the more I find that is admirable in the men and women with whom I live; the more do I find life worth living, and work worth doing; the more do I find that the essential values of life are under our own hands and in our own keeping, and that the only sure sources of peace, power, and hap- piness are within."
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HARVARD CLASS OF 1897
+ ROY CHURCHILL SKINNER
R OY CHURCHILL SKINNER was born October 8, 1874, at Dedham, Massachusetts, the son of Joseph Crandall and Alice (Gil- bert) Skinner. He prepared at the Roxbury Latin School and took his A.B. with the Class. He then went into the mercantile busi- ness, but the keen competition of such a career was not compatible with his fine sensitiveness to the rights of others, and in 1906 he entered the Tufts College Dental School to follow his father's profession. After receiving his degree in 1909, he pursued his career with a high degree of success until his death on October 10, 1919, in Wellesley Hills, Massachusetts. He married Ethel Hersey Macomber at Boston on September 4, 1909. Their son, Joseph Churchill, was born November 15, 1913.
+ THOMAS BAILEY SLAYDEN
T HOMAS BAILEY SLAYDEN was born April 20, 1874, at St. Joseph, Missouri, the son of Stokely Westmoreland and Susan (Bailey) Slayden. He attended the Allen School in West New- ton, Massachusetts, and was in Harvard one year as a special stu- dent. He then went into business in New York with the H. B. Slayden Banking Company. He travelled considerably in Mexico, Texas, and Colorado. He died at Waco, Texas, on December 19, 1903. He was unmarried.
STEPHEN WESTCOTT SLEEPER
M Y life has been uneventful except for the many business trips that I have made throughout the United States and Can- ada," writes Sleeper. "I am still in the real estate business with John W. Dunlop of the glorious Class of '97, under the firm name of Sleeper & Dunlop, a partnership we began in 1911.
"In World War I, I was one of five retired National Guard offi- cers appointed by the governor to organize and equip a State Guard for home protection. After this had been accomplished, I served as a lieutenant colonel in the organization until it was dis- banded on the return of the National Guard from France. I took
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no part in World War II due to illness. My wife served with the American Red Cross in Boston."
Sleeper, the son of Jacob Henry and Maria (Westcott ) Sleeper, was born January 30, 1873, at Boston. He prepared at Noble's School in Boston. He was in college four years in the Lawrence Scientific School. He married Elisa H. Cushing, June 6, 1911, in Boston. She died September 19, 1946, in Gloucester, Massachu- setts. Their son, Jacob Henry, was born October 8, 1912. There is one grandchild.
In World War II, Jacob served with the 75th Infantry Division of the Army of the United States from March to August, 1943. He then joined the American Red Cross as a field director and served from October, 1943, to April, 1946, with the 32nd Infantry Divi- sion in Leyte, Luzon, and Japan.
Sleeper is a member of the Somerset Club, Harvard Club of Boston, and Eastern Yacht Club.
CLEMENT LAWRENCE SMITH
W THEN we enter college," writes Clement Smith, "our mature future lies ahead, undetermined. Some of us knew more or less the nature of our lives to come, some (we mourn them) were exempt from continuing in this world. I belonged to the large number who still had to find themselves after graduation. In my case this is how things took shape.
"After a few months as a clerk in a wholesale paint and dye- stuff house amid the coffee smells near India Wharf in Boston, where C. Minot Weld also took orders, I spent a few more months trying to sell pianos for Steinert Brothers. It was no go, and so I signed up at the New England Conservatory to see if I was or was not enough of a musician to follow the profession of music. Some tutoring of youngsters, simultaneously carried on, revealed myself to myself as a teacher. The calling was true, and music was rele- gated to the status of an avocation - witness the heap of stillborn compositions for piano buried away somewhere, and the enjoyable relations I have had with real musicians, both amateur and pro- fessional in my New York life.
-
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"For I became a New Yorker after a fourteen-year stretch of apprenticeship teaching in the Chicago Latin School; Milton Academy; St. Paul's School in Concord, where I was head of the History Department; Central Academic High School (public school), where I taught all the history and English to a class of one hundred and twenty boys and girls; Noble and Greenough School, where I had, mainly, the college-entrance classes in his- tory and elementary and advanced German; and one year as a secretary and grade teacher in the Browning School in New York City.
In the summer of 1914, as Kaiser Wilhelm, 2d, was starting his World War I, I put out my shingle - the Lawrence Smith School for Boys. (Incidentally, in March, 1888, when I was a boy, I had seen Wilhelm marching behind his father's bier along Unterden Linden.) The school grew from three boys to over a hundred. At first a college preparatory school, and later, like other private boys' schools east of Central Park, converted into a pre-prepara- tory school, it acquired a fine building, and in the twenty-five years of its existence sent many hundreds of boys to the big and small eastern boarding schools. Although situated in the seventies in Manhattan, we commanded a fine playing field and conducted a country day school program, which gave me membership in the Country Day School Headmasters Association.
"In 1939 the school went into the Browning School, and just recently, after a few years as associate head there, I retired and I am having a very happy time teaching, with assistance, several fine boys. They are not 'college material' as they say, but they are, nevertheless, headed to be fine and happy citizens.
"I married Katharine Perkins, July 30, 1912, at West Newton, Massachusetts. Our life has been most happy, and has been spent mostly in New York with a part of many summers in France, Italy, and England."
Smith, the son of Clement Lawrence Smith, '63, and Emma Gertrude Griscom, was born April 14, 1875, at Cambridge. He prepared at the Browne and Nichols School and Cambridge Latin School. He received an A.B. after four years with our Class, and following two years' study at the Graduate School of Arts and
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Sciences, obtained an A.M. in 1904. While an undergraduate, he was a member of the Samoset Club and Cercle Français. He wrote the incidental music for ballets in the club's performance of the "Bourgeois Gentilhomme" in 1897. He reports that he took a good many music courses in college. He has two Harvard brothers: George Lawrence Smith, '95; and Edgar Lawrence Smith, '04.
Smith is the author of A Boy to Educate; articles which ap- peared in an educational periodical, Independent Education; and an article on the importance of endowments to maintain pre- preparatory schools, which was printed in the Harvard Alumni Bulletin. His clubs are the MacDowell Club of New York, of which he served as secretary for several years, and the Harvard Club of New York.
EDWIN WALTER SMITH
I LEFT college at the end of freshman year to enter the wholesale shoe business with my father," reports Edwin Smith. "I con- tinued till the fall of 1931 when I liquidated the business.
"Since then I have worked as an independent salesman. For the past five years I have sold made-to-measure clothing. This keeps me in contact with my friends.
"The older I grow the more I realize that the most important values in life are family and friends, and I have been greatly blessed in both. I have been interested in church work, Boy Scouts, and military organizations. At present I am a trustee of the Chestnut Street Congregational Church and its financial sec- retary."
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