Editor’s Note - Board Chairman Guille Cox takes us down
memory lane in this column as part or our 125th anniversary. He asked a few Board of
Trustees officers/committee chairs to share some of their memories from their earlier days
at Rose-Hulman. Their remarks appear in edited form.
John Titsworth, Emeritus Chairman of the Board and Chairman of the
Board Affairs Committee, Class of 1949
My brother Tom, who was a student at Rose at the time, and me and two
other veteran students living in town, paid $100 for a 1934 Packard limousine. We called
it the Dumas special because the only way we could keep it running was to get parts from
the Dumas junk yard. It was a magnificent machine. Three of us would ride in the back seat
behind the glass partition, and one would drive. We arrived at Rose each in a
chauffeur-driven limo! But, alas, we blew a tire and couldn’t afford a new one, so
Dumas junk yard ended up with the car. A sad, sad, day!
Of course, following tradition, the upperclassmen — all non
veterans — tried to force us veterans to wear beanies as freshmen. We threw them in
the lake — the upperclassmen, not the beanies.
Clyde Willian, Vice Chairman, Class of 1952
I can think of many events that occurred while I was a student at Rose
that bring chuckles to alumni of that vintage. Many of those events involved a prank which
at the time seemed perfectly innocent. Theodore (Ted) P. Palmer was a professor who
generally taught the advanced mathematics classes. Despite a rather formal and somewhat
eccentric demeanor, he was regarded as an excellent teacher and was very well liked by the
students.
While lecturing, Ted generally wrote continuously on the blackboard often with both hands
simultaneously. By the end of a typical class period, the blackboard would be filled with
his writings. When the next class started he would commence by erasing a portion of the
blackboard so he could repeat the same talking and writing process.
One day some students placed some match heads between the layers of the
eraser. When the eraser was wiped across the board, the matches immediately ignited. Ted,
reacting instantaneously, threw the fiery eraser into the wastebasket. The paper in the
wastebasket caught fire, so Ted threw open the window and dumped the basket and its
flaming contents out the second story of what is now called Moench Hall The very dry ivy
clinging to the brick wall caught fire and had to be extinguished by maintenance.
Sam Hart, Chairman of the Honorary Doctorate Committee, Class of 1955
When I think of Rose, Professor McIane always comes to mind. I would go
to his mechanics class with fear in my heart. During class, he always sent someone to the
chalkboard to do a problem and make an example of them. I would sit there fearing those
words: “Mr. Hart, to the board.”
Howard Freers, Chairman of the Academic Affairs Committee, Class of
1948
Around 1977, I arranged for the Vice president of academic affairs
— Jim Matthews — to take a sabbatical assignment at Powertrain Engineering at
Ford Motor Company. I assigned him to Advanced Powertrain Engineering where we were doing
our most advanced research work on gasoline engine combustion to enable us to meet federal
emission and fuel economy standards and where we had a large number of recent college
graduate engineers. I met with Jim after he had been in the assignment a few weeks and was
impressed by his utter amazement at the technical level of performance expected from the
recent graduates. I like to think that this was the beginning of a program to introduce
real-world problems into the curriculum as opposed to textbook problems — an area
that I believe Rose-Hulman is in the forefront of today.
Hal Brown, Treasurer, Class of 1957
The comradeship of my classmates is the best of all experiences. These
friendships, forged during the hell called calculus, thermodynamics, unit operations,
etc., cannot be described, they must be experienced. Of course the faculties were our role
models and, despite the passage of time, this respect for my professors continues unabated
to this day.
For me, the chance to play basketball at Rose was wonderful. My
teammates and especially my coach, Jim Carr, were experiences that I will treasure
forever.
Guille Cox, Chairman
While not an alumnus, I have a vivid memory of Rose in contrast to
my alma mater, while I was an undergraduate physics major at Cambridge, Mass., during the
height of the Vietnam War and the era of the so-called “flower children.” Scene
1 — Cambridge: Noisy mob protests, shouting down opposing views; intolerance of any
authority; police batons and paddy wagons; high pressure water hoses dispersing crowds;
public buildings stormed and occupied; SDS bombings; brains, bodies and lives permanently
ruined by Timothy Leary inducements; spaced out flower children, “the end justifies
the means’, nihilism and negativism without assuming responsibility for one’s
actions. Scene II — Rose Poly : Respect for tradition and the rights of others;
serious dialogue regarding issues while allowing a fair questioning of, but respect for,
authority; work ethic; dedication to improving society not destroying it. Final Scene
— The hippie culture has long since died of irrationality. In the end, Rose’s
traditional Midwestern core values survived the turmoil of the ’60s, survive today
and will survive tomorrow. |
