USA > Massachusetts > Middlesex County > Cambridge > Harvard College class of ninety-seven : forty-fifth anniversary report, 1897 > Part 4
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All his family, after the California custom, became extensive land- owners. About 1912 the doctor decided to give up practice and de- vote his whole time to his ranches. In his thorough way he had made an intensive study of soils, irrigation, and fruit culture. Labor troubles during the war and finally the big depression made it inadvisable to continue his large Marysville ranch. In 1931, there- fore, he returned to Stockton as a psychiatrist at the Hospital. Care of these poor unfortunates was really an old love, and he entered upon his work with a great zest. The entertainment and recreation of the patients was his special duty. Not content to stop there, he gave freely of his own time as counselor of the parents and guardians. These people very greatly appreciated this unselfish service. Ill health, in his later years, never for a moment prevented him from carrying out to the full his every responsibility.
From the outset he was active in many worthwhile causes and organizations. The Medical Societies of the Valley claimed a great deal of his time. He gave freely of his money and of himself to the Episcopal Church. St. John's Parish in Stockton, several small Mis-
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sions near his various ranches and the Diocese of San Joaquin all received his enthusiastic support. Upon several occasions he was a delegate to the General Convention of his Church.
Up and down the great valley, wherever he lived, people in all walks of life loved and valued him. He spent his whole manhood in genuine service for his fellow men.
H. B. W.
OLIVER (GRANVILLE) LENTZ died at Reading, Pennsyl- vania, April 28, 1940, after an illness of many months. After gradua- tion he secured his LL.B. from Dickinson College in 1900. Long active in the practice of law in Reading, he became prominent in Democratic politics in Pennsylvania. He served as assistant city solicitor and as controller's solicitor in Berks County, and later was a candidate for election to the State Senate. He was also prominent in fraternal organizations in Reading. During the War he was com- missioned a captain of infantry and was stationed at Camp Jackson, South Carolina, and Camp Lee, Virginia.
Born at Fleetwood, Pennsylvania, August 28, 1872, the son of Levi R. and Sarah M. (Koch) Lentz, he attended Palatinate College, Myerstown, Pa., before entering Harvard. Surviving are his wife, Susanna (Burkholder) Lentz, two daughters, and his mother.
R. L. S.
FREDERICK TAYLOR LORD was born in Bangor, Maine, June 16, 1875 and died in Boston on November 4, 1941. His wife, who was Mabel Delano Clapp, died three months before him. He is survived by one married daughter and two grand-daughters.
Lord came to college from the Lexington, Massachusetts, High School, and will be remembered by his classmates as a friendly, quiet man, of somewhat less than average stature, of solid build and rubi- cund, cheerful countenance, who devoted himself rather closely to work in order to obtain his degree in three years - which undoubt- edly explains his failure to win the scholastic honors which his intellectual ability would have assured him in a more leisurely course. He had magnificent muscular development, both natural and cul-
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tivated, and ranked by the Sargent tests as the strongest man in college. He worked at gymnastics and tumbling rather than in or- ganized athletics, but played for three years on the Class baseball nine. The writer remembers vividly the speed and flat trajectory with which he propelled the ball from third to .Warren's waiting mitt at first. He was a rather shy member of a social club, but en- gaged in few extra-curricular activities. He graduated from the Har- vard Medical School cum laude in 1900, aided in a material sense by scholarships which he won, and served a medical interneship at the Massachusetts General Hospital. Entering private practice in Boston, he began almost at once a life-time of service as a member of the medical staff of the same Hospital and of the teaching fac- ulty of the Medical School, where he mounted the academic ladder to the post of Clinical Professor of Medicine. On retirement by age limitation he was made Emeritus.
Fred Lord gave a life-time of quiet, sustained devotion to his family, to his profession, and to his friends. He was a perfect ex- ample of the intellectual and the humanitarian in medicine. He developed a large practice, chiefly consultative, in his office and at large in New England, but his scientific interest never failed to find time for him to work on clinical problems in the laboratory with the aid of colleagues engaged in pure research. He early de- veloped a special interest in diseases of the lungs, bronchi and pleura, of which the most important were necessarily tuberculosis and pneu- monia. His public spirit enlisted him in the organized fight against the former as advisor to the State Department of Public Health, and as a member - and usually president - of many anti-tuberculosis organizations. He made himself perhaps the outstanding local au- thority in pneumonia. He studied the biology of the pneumococcus, became a clinical authority on the use of anti-pneumococcus serum of which he made a special study under a grant from the Common- wealth Fund, and played an active part with the State authorities in making it available to practising physicians. The recent intro- duction of the sulphonamid drugs in the treatment of infectious dis- eases, including pneumonia, found him no less keen in evaluating
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them as an adjuvant of or substitute for the serum whose use he had advocated so strongly.
Most characteristic was the pleasure and obligation he felt to share his knowledge. For thirty years he was a highly valued teacher at the Harvard Medical School. He wrote or was co-author of four volumes on various aspects of diseases of the lungs, bronchi, and pleura. He contributed more than two hundred articles to current medical literature. He was always ready to help spread the gospel of medicine before medical societies. His memberships in them need not be enumerated here; they included all those of note in the fields in which he was interested.
In the World War, in 1917, he was a member of the American Red Cross Commission to Serbia and was decorated by the Crown Prince with the Serbian Red Cross at Corfu, and with the Second Order of St. Sava at Salonica. His greatest contribution, like many another man, was continuous, fatiguing duty in hospital, school, office and sick-room, that the people might suffer as little as possible from universal warfare.
A colleague speaks of Lord as having the "humanity, humility and humor" which are postulated by Lord Tweedsmuir as necessary for the citizens of a successful democracy. His life was full of good works proffered in a gentle, kindly, generous, self-effacing way. He performed important duties so unostentatiously that there is sor- rowful amazement at the void which is left by his passing. He was blessed by rugged health; he was seriously ill but twice, -once, strangely enough, by a pneumonia of a type not benefited by the serum which he had worked so hard to introduce. His last illness was but of three days, - an unusual malady whose symptoms in- terested him greatly, probably without causing him alarm. His life was fruitful, happy, and without much sorrow save the long illness of his beloved companion.
D. C.
ALFRED PENRHYN MEADE, JR. died at Washington, D. C., on November 28, 1937, after a lingering and hopeless siege of ill-
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ness. He was born in New York City, on August 9, 1873, the son of Alfred Penrhyn and Hortense (Hildegard) Meade, and was pre- pared for college at St. Paul's School, Concord, New Hampshire. Although his athletic activities, as an undergraduate, had been limited to cricket - in which, game he had participated as a mem- ber of our Varsity Cricket Eleven - a naturally robust physique prompted his choice of a career calling for great outdoor activity in the field of topographical and geological engineering, with the result that in 1901, five years after his having left Harvard at the end of our Junior year, he became a member of the United States Geological Survey. For our Twenty-Fifth Class Report, he wrote: "I have constantly been mapping the United States, swamps, moun- tains, drainage surveys, all taken as they were allotted to me, and am still able to go into the toughest kind of country and make a detailed map of same." This experience was to prove of the greatest value to him when, on August 17, 1917, having enlisted in the army and been assigned to the Engineers, 603rd and 29th, Washington Barracks, he was appointed a Captain of Engineers in the Intelli- gence Section of the 2nd Army Staff in France - for it became his duty to furnish information concerning the German maneuvers to the American and French armies by means of aerial restitution, the aërial photograph being made and reproduced on French base maps. This information related in detail the numerical strength of the different divisions, their general condition and their morale, and was obtained both from prisoners and from aërial surveys - information of essential importance to the General Staffs of both armies.
Receiving his honorable discharge on July 26, 1919 - with two citations to his credit, won at St. Mihiel and the Argonne, with the 2nd Army - he decided to apply this technical lithographic knowl- edge and experience to civilian needs and, together with his sergeant, started the Pearson-Meade Lithographic Corporation, in New York. "The business is still running," he wrote in 1922, "and I hope with settled times will develop into what we both dreamt it would, while waiting in France for the chance to get home and start same." And he added: "I am with the U. S. Geological Survey also, and expect
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to enjoy next summer mapping some part of the United States." But, as in so many like cases, the rigors and severities of war service had drawn too heavily and had imposed too great a burden upon his physical and mental reserves, and a general breakdown was soon to follow. In 1933 he suffered a paralytic stroke, from which he never recovered - lingering on, at the Mt. Alto Hospital in Wash- ington, hopelessly afflicted, until his death four years later. Married at Washington, D. C., on April 15th, 1907, his widow, Alice Davies Meade, survives him.
His sad death will bring sorrow to many of his classmates, who would far rather recall the joyful, light-hearted and stimulating companion of their undergraduate days. But they will take pride in his self-sacrificing patriotism and in the memory of his unflinching bravery and patient courage. He "fought the good fight." He "kept the faith."
H. T. N.
DANIEL FENTON MURPHY, the son of John and Eliza Fenton Murphy, was born at Thompsonville, Connecticut, on September 27, 1872. He died at New York City on May 14, 1937. From the Hart- ford High School he entered Harvard College with the Class of 1897. Graduating with the degree of Bachelor of Arts, he studied for the two following years in the Harvard Law School. He then joined the staff of Daly, Hoyt and Mason, counselors-at-law of New York, and shortly was admitted to the bar. In 1906 William Travers Jerome, district attorney of New York County, appointed him assistant district attorney. Thereafter he devoted his life to the criminal law. One of his important cases was prosecuted before Mayor Gaynor sitting as a City Magistrate. The Mayor was so im- pressed that he promptly appointed Murphy to be a City Magistrate. In 1917 he was promoted to the Court of Special Sessions and served as a member of that Court until his retirement on September 1, 1936. After his death the members of his Court adopted a minute out- lining his career and concluding with this well-merited tribute:
"In all these positions of trust and confidence he discharged his
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duties in such manner as to command in the highest measure the approval and esteem of his associates and the public at large. He was endowed with a keen and penetrating mind, combined with a wealth of experience, a passion for justice, the ability to distinguish the true from the false, and the never-failing quality of mercy so essential to the redemption of the erring without sacrifice of the interests of the State."
On June 14, 1916, Murphy married Mary Seney Sheldon Fuller, daughter of the late George R. Sheldon and Mary Seney his wife. No children were born of their marriage.
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R. L. S.
JAMES HORACE PATTEN died at Washington, in the District of Columbia, April 25, 1940. He was associated with the Class in 1896-97, having received an A.B. degree from Kansas State Uni- versity in 1896. He received an A.M. degree from Harvard in '99 and an LL.B. degree in 1905.
Patten served for many years as secretary of the Immigration Re- striction League, but later moved to Washington, where he was secretary of the Farmers' National Congress and counsel for the Farmers' Educational and Cooperative Union of America, the American Vigilance Association and the Elberton & Eastern Rail- road.
Born at Spring Hill, Kansas, December 23, 1877, the son of Henry H. and Gertrude (Pratt) Patten, he prepared at the Paola and Olathe High School and at Wentworth Military Institute. In 1909 he married Olive Y. Latimer of Belton, N. C.
R. L. S.
MICHAEL FRANCIS PHELAN, A.B. '97; LL.B. 'oo, died Octo- ber 12, 1941, in his sixty-sixth year, after a life of distinguished public service to both State and Nation.
"Mike" Phelan, as he was affectionately called by his many friends, was a native of Lynn. He was elected to the Massachusetts legislature in 1905, and in 1913 to the Congress of the United States, where he served for four successive terms. He was in Washington during the
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First World War, and voted for the entry of the United States into the war. But his Congressional career was most memorable for the outstanding service he rendered as a member of the Committee on Banking and Currency, which framed the Federal Reserve and Federal Farm Loan Acts.
After retiring from Congress, Phelan resumed his practice of the law with offices in Lynn, Boston, and Washington. But he was again called into public life, when the Governor in 1937 appointed him upon the Merrimac Sewerage Commission, and later on the State Labor Relations Board, of which he became chairman.
Mike Phelan was a lifelong Democrat. It was a principle with him that in a democracy every citizen should contribute such serv- ice to the body politic as he was capable of giving, and his life well illustrates his fidelity to the principle he so strongly advocated. He is survived by his widow, Marie Van Depoele Phelan, two daugh- ters, Mrs. Micela C. Hickey and Mrs. Prudence M. O'Brien, a son, Louis V. Phelan, and six grandchildren.
W. D. C.
"THE older I grow, the more I become absorbed in my children. Their development, interests and activities seem more and more to be the things most worth while." So wrote Sam Pillsbury in the Class Report, published in 1922, and so he patterned his life until the end came on May 19, 1938. A successful trial lawyer, an occupa- tion demanding the utmost of a man's strength and time, he yet devoted his life to his wife and children and found his greatest happiness in his home in Milton, where he became well known and greatly respected.
Pillsbury's association with the Class was brief. After graduating from Phillips Exeter, he spent the year 1893-94 in College, entering the Law School the following year and graduating in 1897 to take up the practice of the law in Boston. He was a member of the firms of Tower, Talbot, Hiler and Pillsbury, Pillsbury, Dana and Young, and Burnham, Bingham, Pillsbury, Dana and Gould, successively.
He was born at Foxcroft, Maine, December 29, 1873, the son of
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Samuel and Joan (Spaulding) Pillsbury. In 1912 he married Helen F. Watters of Swampscott, who survives, with two sons and a daughter.
Notwithstanding his short association with the Class he became well known and his ready wit found him a place on the Lampoon. Those who have returned for reunions were likely to have a pleasant chat with this modest, unassuming classmate whose talents were rated high at the Bar, who gave freely of his time on the Draft Board during the War and served his community in many capacities.
His last year has been one of suffering and great fatigue. Those of his family and friends who knew and sympathized with his troubles must realize that the end has come to him as a great release. R. L. S.
IT is rare to find the combination of qualities that adorned the per- sonality of our classmate, Samuel Lendall Pitts, who died in Boston on March 9, 1938. His gentle wisdom, strength moral and physical, his clear, cautious thinking, and firm convictions gave him great human understanding as well as a love for life. A strong apprecia- tion of humor threaded through and wove the pattern into a rich and unusual individuality. He looked at life through a philoso- pher's eye, devoted himself entirely to painting and was a great connoisseur.
With both English and French inheritance, Pitts possessed the Nordic physique and mental equilibrium, the keen perception of the Latin, and the good qualities of both types. His education started at St. Paul's School and following family tradition, continued at Harvard, where his Lampoon drawings brought him prominence and his tastes grouped him with the more thoughtful and mature. After graduation, his artistic leanings led him to the Paris studios, and, absorbing him completely, at length won him international recognition.
Thrown on his own resources in the first years of this century, he branched into etching. To this, the painting sense induced him to apply color, a less known and intricate art, in which he became an expert. During this period of struggle he worked indefatigably,
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saw almost no one, nor alluded to his trials. When this strenuous time was over, a great happiness came to him through the compan- ionship of his sympathetic wife, Elizabeth Stevens McCord, also a well known artist. His own words in summing up his hardships were, "As a painter and etcher, I have produced a great many portraits."
Although his work held him much in France which he loved, it never showed much local influence except where it touched the mys- terious. On the contrary the frank dash of the Dutch Hals and the strange romanticism of the Swiss Böcklein were his strongest influ- ences. In his landscapes, he liked better the heights than the plains, and his eyes, like his clear mind, looked towards the mountain tops and serenity. His artistic maturity came in a transition period, with the world disturbed by preparation, war and reconstruction; when æsthetic interests were at low ebb. That generation of painters never reached complete fulfillment. None of his associates ever more than faintly scratched the surface of world renown. Nevertheless the world has lost an original and distinguished artist, while we have lost, to our living regret, a strong spirit and a most lovable friend. J. A. S.
WILLIAM READ died at Wayland, Massachusetts, on March 27, 1942. He was born at Cambridge on November 14, 1872, the son of John Read (Harvard 1862) and Elise (Welch) Read, and was prepared for Harvard at the Browne and Nichols School. His first five years following graduation in 1897 he spent in Boston, asso- ciated with R. L. Day & Company and the New England Telephone and Telegraph Company, respectively. In 1902 he joined the Roller Bearing Company of Boston and represented that company in Chi- cago from 1904 until 1906, when he returned to their then home office at South Framingham, Massachusetts, to assume the duties of purchasing agent and assistant treasurer. Following the dissolu- tion of the company in 1908, he opened an insurance office at 141 Milk Street in Boston, which he maintained until 1940, when be- cause of ill health he retired from active business and associated
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himself with Meade & Gale, insurance agents at 50 Congress Street, Boston.
Read was married, at St. Louis, Missouri, on November 7, 1906, to Adelaide Sumner Wood, who survives him, together with a son, William, Jr., a daughter, Elise Welch (Read) Huggins, and two grandchildren, Kenneth Read DeWolf and Marion Brooks Huggins. H. T. N.
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OSCAR RICHARDSON'S name will be familiar to few members of the Class except those who are physicians. Born in East Boston in 1860, he married Anna Louise Gove in 1882 and for some years was engaged in business. Mrs. Richardson studied medi- cine and, as Dr. Anna G. Richardson, became one of the best known women physicians of Boston, and was chief-of-staff of the Vincent Memorial Hospital. Her husband became interested in her work and, at the age of 33, entered Harvard College with members of the Class of '97 in anticipation of studying medicine. Realizing the length of the road ahead of him, so tardily embarked upon, he remained only one year in College, and entered the Harvard Medical School where he received his degree in 1900. Becoming interested in pathology, he never engaged in clinical practice but joined the Staff of the Pathological Laboratory of the Massachusetts General Hospital where he worked with the late Dr. Homer Wright for many years, serving also as associate medical examiner for Suffolk County. He was a competent pathologist without the higher scien- tific training which might have enabled him to be a contributor to research. He was a dependable, useful man who made good use of the undoubted talents with which he was endowed. He died in Boston on August 28, 1940. He is survived by his wife but by no children.
D. C.
GEORGE NEWMAN ROBERTS was born in Cambridge, Decem- ber 12, 1874, the son of George B. Roberts, of the Roberts Iron Works, and Lucy Cogswell Roberts. In 1906 he married Mary Laura Lewis
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of Leesburg, Virginia, who died in 1934. He is survived by two sons, William and George, Jr.
Roberts prepared for college at the Cambridge Latin School. Even as a boy he had a flair for writing. When only twelve years old he published a small weekly paper in which he lampooned with humor- ous insight the characteristics of neighborhood celebrities. In col- lege he was correspondent for the Boston Record and Advertiser, New York Sun, and Associated Press. His interest in newspapers was maintained throughout his life, but his literary efforts also led him to write several short plays, which were produced under his direction at the Neighborhood Club in his home town of Waban. One of these, The Weasel, has been played throughout the United States and over the radio.
In his business career he was eminently successful. Joining the Bemis Bro. Bag Company in St. Louis in 1899, he became their manager first in Kansas City and later in Omaha, and in 1910 came to Boston as assistant treasurer. In 1934 he became president of the company and, in February 1940, chairman. He was also a director of Boott Mills in Lowell and of the Boston Transcript, Inc.
One of his close personal and business friends said of him: "His successful career was built upon his staunch independence of thought, his capacity for clear expression and his soundness of judgment, accompanied by a delightful sense of humor. George Roberts well typified the best and finest in the great era of American individ- ualism."
C. J.
ARTHUR WILLIAM RYDER died suddenly in Berkeley, Califor- nia, on March 21, 1938, while teaching his class at the University of California. Born. in Oberlin, Ohio, he was graduated from Phillips Academy at Andover and, in 1897, from Harvard College. After studying at the Universities of Leipzig and Berlin, he returned to teach Indic philology and German at Harvard. In 1906, after four years at Harvard, he founded a department of oriental languages at the University of California.
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Few men in the Class knew Ryder well. He was distinctly the scholar, reticent, seemingly unemotional, but not at all the pedant. He had a very quiet but charming personality, full of a dry humor, and perhaps in his own way enjoyed life more than most of us. He was chiefly remarkable as a chess player, and as such rather a close friend of Elmer Southard. They used to sit evenings when they would take on all comers, alternating their own moves and some- times in this way playing a dozen games at once; and it was a rare thing for any opponent to beat them. Ryder was one of the most brilliant scholars of the Class, but not for any purpose except that he just liked to know things, particularly those that were off the beaten paths. As a Sanskrit scholar he achieved great distinction and was for years professor of Sanskrit at the University of Cali- fornia.
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