The history of Colby College, Part 70

Author: Colby College
Publication date: 1963
Publisher: Waterville, Colby College Press
Number of Pages: 716

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President Roberts summed up Colby's contribution to the war when, in his baccalaureate sermon on the occasion of the 1920 Centennial, he said: "Our best defense against the perils that assail our national life is the patriotism of our young men-a patriotism grown intense through service and sacrifice. To do one's best for the country is to do one's best for Colby."

SECOND WORLD WAR

Before the "Day of Infamy" at Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, Colby men had already seen action in World War II, and two of them had died. Lt. Jean-Pierre Masse, who had been an exchange student at Colby in 1935, was killed in battle on his native French soil on May 16, 1940, and in the following June, Corporal Paul R. Stubbs had died while on duty guarding the Panama Canal.

As the cold war of 1939 changed into the hot war of 1940, as Holland, Belgium and Norway were invaded, and as France fell before the German on- slaught, plans for the defense of the United States were activated. Measures were taken to strengthen the defenses of the Latin American countries, and in June, 1940, Congress voted defense taxes of nearly a billion dollars a year. A Per- manent Board of Defense was arranged with Canada. On September 16, 1940, Congress passed the Selective Training and Service Act, the first peacetime pro- gram of compulsory military service ever adopted by the nation. It provided for the registration of all men between 21 and 35, and for one-year training of 1,200,000 troops and 800,000 reserves. In August, 1941, service was extended to eighteen months.

When the Japanese bombers struck at Pearl Harbor, many Colby men were already in service, either as training officers from the reserve, or as draftees under the selective service program. So many of them were stationed at Camp Blanding,

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COLBY IN THREE WARS

Florida, that a Colby Alumni Association could well have been formed at the post. At that camp were Col. Spaulding Bisbee, 1913, commanding officer of the 103d Infantry, 43d Division; Col. John F. Choate, 1920, in command of the 152d Field Artillery; Lt. Col. Harold C. Marden, 1921, of the Headquarters Staff of the 43d Division; Lt. Col. George W. Putnam, 1916, 152d Field Ar- tillery; Major Byron H. Smith, 1916, of the same unit; Captain W. B. McAllister, 1926, of the 172d Field Artillery; and Captain Charles E. Towne, 1928, of the Medical Detachment, 103d Infantry. Other Colby men at the same camp in- cluded four lieutenants, three sergeants, six corporals, and five privates.

When the United States finally declared war, the Alumnus had this to say:

This College was conceived during the War of 1812; it was decimated and nearly succumbed in the Civil War; it was dislocated, battered, thrown off stride by the First World War; and now once again Colby must take its battle station. War is a setback to all normal construc- tive enterprises; it demands sacrifices, and Colby claims no exemption. If our normal program and cherished goal to move to Mayflower Hill must be set aside for the duration, so be it. Let no man think that Colby will go into eclipse. There will always be a Colby."

In January, 1942, only a few weeks after Pearl Harbor, the Alumnus reported 136 Colby men in service: 100 in the Army, 32 in the Navy, 3 in the Marines, and one in the Royal Canadian Air Force. Already promoted to lieutenant, junior grade, in Naval Aviation was Whitney Wright, 1937, who would make this service his professional career. Six months before the 1942 Commencement, fifteen members of that class were in service, five of them as commissioned of- ficers. The Class of 1943 already had eight men on active duty, and the Class of 1944 had seven.

One Colby man, Norris Potter, 1929, wrote an eye-witness account of the attack on Pearl Harbor:

When the attack came on December 7, I happened to be on the spot. A Marine officer and I were on our way into the Yard, where we ex- pected to board a boat for a reconnaissance of the coastline. Our first intimation of trouble was a machine-gun bullet which came through the roof and splintered a chair beside us, while we were drinking coffee in a shop. We didn't finish the coffee. When we got on to the road, we saw one Jap plane coming down in flames and we heard heavy detonations. After a race of 35 miles through fields of sugar cane, we reached the depot, where we found everybody on battle stations. Later in the morning our barracks were machine-gunned. We are methodically preparing for the next attack, when we hope to provide quite a different reception.5

Potter did not say a word about the terrific destruction of American ships. When he wrote his letter, the extent of that destruction was being carefully concealed from the American public.

During World War II a total of 1350 Colby men and women were in the armed services. They represented every branch of the service in every theatre of the war's wide activities. Nor were students and alumni the only ones who served. Nine members of the faculty, three of whom were alumni, left their campus duties to serve in the ranks: two of them were in the Air Force, three

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HISTORY OF COLBY COLLEGE

in the Navy, two in the Infantry, one in the Military Police, and one a Physical Instructor.

A large proportion of Colby personnel in the service were commissioned officers. Several, entering the enlisted ranks as privates, were mustered out as captains. A total of 123 men were awarded decorations. Eight received the Legion of Merit, 29 the Bronze Star, 16 the Distinguished Flying Cross, 24 the Air Medal, four the Silver Star, two the Certificate of Merit, two the Croix de Guerre, and one each the Navy Cross, the Navy Air Medal, the Navy and Marine Corps Medal, and the Soldiers Medal. For wounds received in action 34 Colby men were awarded the Purple Heart.

Colby students and alumni who died as members of service units in the Second World War totaled 61, and to those should be added two names of Colby persons who were just as truly war casualties as were any who served in arms. Those two were Francis Rose, 1909, and his wife Gertrude Coombs Rose, 1911, missionaries in the Philippines, who were executed by the Japanese on December 20, 1943. For the first time in any American war, women were included in the casualty lists. In addition to Mrs. Rose, two Colby women died in the service: Alice Manley, 1938, a WAC, and Ann Westing, 1944, a WAVE.

Following are the names of Colby's 63 casualties, including those of the three women and of Francis Rose.

Frank Bailey, 1942

Fred Blumenthal, 1940

Ralph Bradley, 1923

David Bruckheimer, 1947

John Casper, 1931

Harold Costley, 1942

Richard Crocker, 1946

Forrest Edson, 1942

Howard Goodman, 1939

Harrison Gorman, 1943

Donald Gray, 1943

Robert Gray, 1943 William Guptill, 1941

William Hancock, 1920 Arnold Holt, 1937

Harold Johnson, 1942

Francis Johnson, 1942

Frank Kastner, 1946 Gerald Katzman, 1946 John Kitchen, 1942 Robert LaFleur, 1943 Herbert Levenson, 1945

Walter Lupton, 1946

William Lyman, Jr., 1945 Edward McIntyre, 1939

Roderick MacDougal, 1931 John McCarley, 1944 Charles Maguire, 1940 Victor Malins, 1939 Alice Manley, 1938 Tiffany Manning, 1939 Myron Mantell, 1941 Jean-Pierre Masse, 1935

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COLBY IN THREE WARS

Leonard Murphy, 1941

Paul Murphy, 1943

Arnold Myshrall, 1941

George Neilson, 1941

George Nelson, 1940

Richard Noyes, 1941

John Pendleton, Jr., 1939

Phillips Pierce, 1945

Gilbert Potts, 1942

Frank Quincy, 1943

Francis Rose, 1909

Gertrude Rose, 1911

Howard Rowell, 1943

Harold Sachs, 1921

James Salisbury, 1939

Frederick Sawyer, 1937

Clarence Simmons, 1937

Richard Simpson, 1945

Roger Soper, 1937

John Stevens, 1942

Paul Stubbs, 1942

Norman Taylor, 1937

Lyman Thayer, Jr., 1946

Elmer Tower, Jr., 1942

Robert Turbyne, 1937

Robert Wescott, 1945

Ann Westing, 1944

Eugene Williams, 1938

Robert Wit, 1942

Raymond Zavaglia, 1946

Three Colby men lost their lives in the Korean War:

David Dobson, 1950 Charles Graham, 1940 John Thompson, 1951

Several Colby men suffered the miseries of prison camps in Germany or Japan. Among them were Howard Pratt, 1943; William Hancock, Jr., 1942; Sher- wood Jones, 1947; Raymond Zavaglia, 1946; Russell Farnsworth, Jr., 1946; Robert Gray, 1943; Harland Thompson, 1945; Robert Lucy, 1945; and Floyd Harding, 1946. One of these men, at least, escaped from a prison camp. He was Hancock, who, taken prisoner in Italy, got away, only to be picked up by Germans, from whose camp he also escaped and after thrilling adventures made his way back to his own unit.

Hairbreadth escapes were not confined to Colby men in uniform. When the Japanese invaded Burma, Gordon Gates, Colby 1919, was professor of biology at Judson College, Rangoon. Fleeing with other Americans and British, Gates made his way to India, making a long trek of 170 miles through jungle trails and over 9000-foot passes.

During the war this historian, who was then Dean of Men, carried on cor- respondence with many Colby boys in the service. One such exchange of let- ters stands out vividly in his memory, because it typifies the links which Colby had established all over the globe during the 140 years since the first graduate,

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HISTORY OF COLBY COLLEGE

George Dana Boardman, had gone to the very land from which Gordon Gates made his escape from the Japanese.

This particular correspondence was carried on with a Colby marine sta- tioned in Iceland. Not only was he desperately homesick; he had so many idle hours that he was completely bored. He asked for a shipment of books-good, sound books of English and American classics. He got them. But what troubled him most was the coldness of the Icelanders, colder than the climate. They weren't hostile to the Americans, but they wouldn't fraternize with them. Ice- landic homes couldn't be visited, Icelandic girls couldn't be dated, and there was no social life at all for those ice-bound marines.

Remembering that, in the Class of 1932, there had been a native Icelander, the Dean wrote to Martin Sorensen, who replied that Icelanders are really a cordial, friendly people, but that the war had impoverished the island. "It is unthinkable," said Sorensen, "for an Icelander to invite a stranger into his home without offering him food, and in Iceland today there just isn't enough food." But Sorensen enclosed a letter in Icelandic, addressed to his brother in Reykjavik, commending the young Colby marine to the brother's attention. The Dean sent that letter on to the Colby boy. In a few weeks there came a reply. Icelanders were no longer icebergs; instead they were wonderful people. Why? Because the Icelandic home of one Colby man of an earlier college generation had been opened to another Colby man in the armed services.

On February 13, 1945, the S. S. Colby Victory was launched at the Ter- minal Island Yards of the California Shipbuilding Corporation. Present were Dr. George G. Averill, who spoke for the Colby Trustees, Denis Bowman, 1893, Mrs. Dora Knight Andrews, 1892, and Wallace Bruce, 1886.

A Colby woman who lived through both the occupation and liberation of her native France was Jeanne Peyrot, 1936. Getting her degree at the Sorbonne in 1940, she was teaching at Beaune, Côte d'Or, when the Germans crushed the French armies and became masters of the country. She wrote in 1945:

Life was not pleasant during those long years of the German occupa- tion. But I managed to live and keep out of concentration camps and Gestapo prisons. And I managed to teach English and make my girls love it. Mother stayed with me at Beaune, so that she was not in Paris when the capital was liberated. I think she'll regret it all her life: not being there when the Germans were kicked out, when Le- clerc's soldiers came in, when General deGaulle at last arrived. Beaune was freed on September 9. It certainly was one of the happiest days of my life. To watch the Germans retreating and our soldiers from Africa advancing was a wonderful sight. How we managed not to be killed in our exodus from Paris in 1940, I don't know. It was sheer luck. All along our route the German bombing of stations and rail- ways and their machine-gunning of roads occurred just twelve hours after we had left. But I won't speak of that any more. It's past.6

Many Colby service men were in the Pacific theatre when the Japanese sur- rendered. Among them was Norman Palmer, 1930, who wrote from Iwo Jima:

We didn't celebrate much when the news came of the Japanese surrender, but we were mightily relieved nevertheless. I was at CINCPAC head- quarters on Guam when the atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima, and I was on Iwo when President Truman announced the Japs' ac-

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COLBY

COLLEGE

The Blue Beetle, reminder of many 'tween- campus trips.

FOR SALE OLO COLBY COLLEGE CAMPUS 38 COMMERCIAL LOTS 8 BUILDINGS SEE YOUR BROKER CUPT. OF BLOGS COLBY COLLEGE

From the Old to the New

Removing to the Hill one of the oldest relics, the College fence.

The old campus to be sold to benefit commercial Waterville.

SATC in World War I (top); and CTD in World War II.

"Pop" Newman and women of the SCA sending letters to Colby men in the service. World War II (top); and ROTC on parade.

Memorials

FRATRIB

ETIAM IN CINERIBU

QUORUM NOMINA INER 4

QUIQUE IN BELL

PRO REIPUBLICAE INTEGRI

HANC TABI

POSLERUNT

MDCCCLI

MDCCCIL

JOHANNES GO!

GEORGIUS KNOX 5 MDCCCLIV JOHANNES B. WILSON

GUILIELMUS V

MDCCCLS

AMASA BIGER

MDCCCLY

ARCH D. EBAY

ALMUS S. HEATH

Civil War: Lion of Lucerne

World War II: Flagpole

World War I: Woodman Stadium

Chamber music at the President's house

The Colby Community Symphony Orchestra in rehearsal

Exhibition of the Rockefeller Seal Harbor Collection in the art gallery

Industry and the railroad stifled the old campus, and the citi- zens of Waterville presented Colby with the Mayflower Hill land.

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Old-timers and President Johnson look over the new campus.

A student in the Lane Room in Mary Low Hall

The Chapel seen through

the west doorway of Miller Library.

.......

Colby is used year round; in summer the language schools and institutes people the campus and the Outing Club Lodge (top) and the Adult Recreation Center, both on Great Pond.

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COLBY IN THREE WARS

ceptance of surrender terms. On V-J Day I was over the once-great Jap Island Fortress of Truk. On V-J Day plus four I flew over the heart of Japan for three hours, from Nagoya to Tokyo. The devastation is utterly incredible. Almost all of downtown Tokyo, except for the grounds around the Imperial Palace, which were deliberately spared, is gone. My respect for the B-29s is boundless, but I hope that never again shall we be compelled to resort to mass destruction.

Norman Palmer's note is appropriate for the end of this chapter. In three great wars Colby men have met the call to duty with courage and sacrifice. May they never again be either victims or perpetrators of mass destruction!

CHAPTER XLVIII

The Alumni

ATERVILLE COLLEGE had graduated twenty-five classes before there was any formal organization of alumni. That an earlier informal organization existed is shown by the printed copy of an address delivered before "the Associated Alumni of Waterville College" by John Holmes on July 28, 1831. No records of that earlier organization survive, and we suspect it was temporary.

On the occasion of Commencement in 1847, a meeting of alumni was called for the purpose of forming an association. Selected to draft a constitution were Crosby Hinds, 1838, of Sebasticook and Stephen Coburn, 1839, of Bloomfield.1 A year later, at the Commencement of 1848, "the alumni of Waterville College met in the President's recitation room at 81/2 o'clock A.M." The constitution was adopted and officers were elected. The first president was Martin B. Ander- son, 1840, who was founder and for 37 years the first president of the University of Rochester. The secretary was James H. Hanson, 1842, the distinguished principal of Coburn. At its very first meeting was begun the annual custom of reading a necrology for the year-a custom that continued well into the twentieth century.

At first not all graduates were automatically members of the Alumni Asso- ciation of Waterville College, but only those who signed their names in the sec- retary's book. That original book is preserved. It contains 230 names, ranging in classes from 1823 to 1875. The first signer was Henry Paine, 1823, and the last name in the book is one greatly honored in Colby history-Leslie C. Cornish, 1875, Chief Justice of the Maine Supreme Court, and chairman of the College Trustees.

There are other memorable names in the old record book: the first of many Coburns, Stephen of the Class of 1839; the first of the long line of Merriams, Mylon, also 1839; Nathaniel Butler, 1842, father of a Colby president; Moses Lyford, 1843, Colby's first astronomer; Josiah, first of the Drummonds, 1846; the great jurist, William Penn Whitehouse, 1863; the first of the four John Fosters of successive generations, John B., 1843, Colby's beloved professor of Greek; Edward W. Hall, 1862, librarian and necrologist, and his classmate, Richard Cutts Shannon, builder of South American railroads and donor of Colby's Shannon Laboratories; George B., the first of many Illsleys, 1863; and William S. Heath, 1856, for whom Waterville's GAR Post was named.

From the earliest days of the College, the Commencement Dinner was an annual event. To it, in 1853 was added the Alumni Luncheon. Dues were then established, when it was voted "to assess on each member an annual tax of one dollar."

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HISTORY OF COLBY COLLEGE

The annual meetings were held in various public halls in Waterville. For instance, in 1862 the "repast" was served in the Hall of the Sons of Temperance. The record does not tell us whether the members were content with water or had something like the tepid ginger ale that graced the tables in the old gymnasium in the 1920's. No large hall was required for the gatherings. As late as 1872 it was recorded: "This meeting was larger than any ever held before, about fifty members being present." Not until the turn of the century did as many as a hundred alumni attend the annual meeting.

If they were few in number, the members of that early association were strong on deeds. They procured portraits of presidents, trustees, and benefactors; they furnished a special classroom for the president of the College; they gave generously to the struggling library. But their major effort came as a result of the Civil War. A conventional memorial, in the form of a statue, had been sug- gested. Determined to have something better, the Alumni Association voted to give energetic effort to raising funds for building a memorial hall. It was the first such action to be taken by any college alumni group in the country. The result was the erection of the beautiful, ivy-decked building on the old campus which so long housed chapel and library, and where was enshrined Milmore's graceful copy of Thorwaldsen's Lion of Lucerne. At their meeting in 1869 the Association voted "to commend the committee that supervised the erection of Memorial Hall and request them to furnish it with blinds."

The practice of honoring the 25 year class began in 1865 with the reunion of the Class of 1840. Not until seven years later could there be any fiftieth class reunion, and then there would be no members to assemble, because both Board- man and Tripp of the Class of 1822 had died. At the meeting in 1865, when the 25 year class was first honored, three Civil War generals who were Colby graduates were made members of the committee to consider an appropriate me- morial, and it was their later recommendation that resulted in Memorial Hall and the Lion of Lucerne. Those generals were Harris M. Plaisted, 1853, Charles H. Smith, 1856, and Russell B. Shepherd, 1857.

It was the Alumni Association that engaged Professor Hall to compile the first General Catalogue in 1878. Its title page was appropriately in Latin, and we refuse to insult any Colby graduate by translating it. "Catalogus Senatus Academici et eorum qui munerunt et officio generunt, quique alicuius gradus laurea donati sunt, in Universitate Colbiana, Watervillae in Republica Mainensi, MDCCCLXXVIII."

When that catalogue appeared, all members of the first three classes (1822, 1823, and 1824) had died. But still living were three members of the Class of 1825: Benjamin Hobart, a lumber dealer of Edmunds, Maine; John Hovey, postmaster of Danby, Michigan; and Harrison Avery Smith, a lawyer of Kala- mazoo, Michigan. In Elijah Lovejoy's class of 1826, the living members were Albert Getchell, a prominent Maine attorney, Albert Jewett, a U. S. diplomat, and Ebenezer Merrick, a Baptist minister. The total number of graduates in 1878 was 609, of whom 438 were living. Nearly a third of the total, 196, had entered the ministry.

As early as 1873 the Alumni Association clamored for representation on the Board of Trustees. A committee of the Board, after conference with a com- mittee of alumni, reported that it was the wish of the latter "to have some co- operating influence in the management of the affairs of the University." The Board refused to take affirmative action, but the Association was somewhat molli-

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THE ALUMNI

fied when it was pointed out that a large majority of the Board were graduates of the College.

The effort was renewed in 1886, when the alumni asked for direct repre- sentation on the Board by the Association's election of two trustees in each of the three classes of board membership.2 Again a trustee committee investigated, and in 1887 made the following recommendations which the Trustees then adopted:

The charter lodges in this Board the power of filling vacancies and of filling the places of trustees as their terms expire, and this power can- not be delegated in whole or in part, and the present members of the Board cannot bind their successors by any arrangement which can be made. Therefore any plan by which the alumni shall have any voice in the election of trustees must be based upon the voluntary action of the Board at each election. But we believe the Board will, at any time, be glad to meet the wishes of the alumni, and the latter are invited to present to this Board annually the names of those gentlemen whom they desire to have elected as members of the Board.

Responding to this invitation, the Alumni Association nominated three men in 1888. The Trustees accepted two of them, so that Larkin Dunton, 1855, and Leslie C. Cornish, 1875, became the first trustees nominated officially by the alumni. Although the Association again presented three names in 1889, the Board elected only one, Richard C. Shannon, 1862. When three names were again submitted in 1890, the Trustees chose only Edwin Lyford, 1877.

The situation dragged along until the turn of the century, when the alumni cause was supported vigorously by a trustee who himself was not a Colby graduate. Joseph Lincoln Colby, son of benefactor Gardner Colby, had been made a trustee in 1897. He had attended Harvard for two years, and then gone into mining and railway construction. After Gardner Colby's death in 1879, the family had been represented on the Waterville Board by Gardner Roberts Colby, 1879 to 1889, and Charles Lewis Colby, 1889 to 1896. When Joseph Colby succeeded Charles in 1897, he was already friendly with several prominent alumni of the College, including Col. Shannon.

In 1901 Colby wrote to Leslie Cornish, then secretary of the Trustees, that the alumni were spreading severe criticism of the Board. The graduates com- plained that they were not given proper representation, that they were refused information, and that the Board's actions were causing loss of public confidence and hence loss of financial support. Mr. Colby suggested that the alumni de- served direct representation and asked for opportunity to talk the matter over with Cornish.

The result of that conference was that, in June, 1902, on motion of Mr. Colby, the Trustees voted to ascertain what legislation was necessary to enable the Alumni Association legally to elect members of the Board of Trustees. In Jan- uary, 1903, when the Maine Legislature had convened, the Trustees voted ap- proval of the plan by which the college charter would be amended so that nine trustees would be elected by the Alumni Association, to be known as Alumni Trustees, and to be elected three each year for terms of three years. The charter was duly amended by the Legislature on March 11, 1903. (See Appendix P.) The first alumni trustees elected under the amended charter were Asher C. Hinds, 1883, Clarence E. Meleney, 1876, and Allen P. Soule, 1879. In 1917 the charter was again amended to provide for ten alumni trustees, in five classes, with five year terms. In 1931, when the alumnae were at last granted represen-

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HISTORY OF COLBY COLLEGE

tation, the charter was further amended to provide for the election of two alumni and one alumna each year for terms of three years.

There is much evidence, besides Mr. Colby's letter to Leslie Cornish, that the alumni were not enthusiastic about the College during the first decade of this century. President White was much concerned about it. He wrote to Dr. But- trick of the General Education Board: "There has been for many years a no- ticeable apathy on the part of the Colby alumni, largely explained, I believe, by the gradual increase in the number of women and the fear that it may become a woman's college." Col. Shannon, eager to arouse the alumni to greater interest in the College, suggested that Professor Hall prepare a new edition of the General Catalogue, and Shannon agreed to stand the full expense of its publication. That catalogue appeared in 1909, but two years earlier Hall had provided for White's annual report some interesting statistics.

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The history of Colby College, Part 70

Author: Colby College Publication date: 1963 Publisher: Waterville, Colby College Press Number of Pages: 716

Author: Colby College
Publication date: 1963
Publisher: Waterville, Colby College Press
Number of Pages: 716