1933-58 MEN OF ACHIEVEMENT
Active then, active now is the way the Silver Anniversary men must be characterized as a group. As undergraduates they achieved good balance between studies and work, sport and campus leadership. Twenty of the 25 held part-time jobs or worked through summer vacations to help pay their way. Eight of them won academic scholarships (only four had athletic scholarships) and five wound up Phi Beta Kappa. Outside football season, almost all won letters in other sports; they played hockey, baseball and basketball, wrestled, ran, jumped, heaved the shot.
As career men today they put in an average "work week" of a solid 65 hours, including in some cases heavy contributions of time to community affairs. They have a good deal less time for outdoor sport than they had as undergraduates (and as one result average 14 pounds heavier than in football days). But they are golfers, swimmers, tennis players, fishermen and—in a world of expanding suburbias—home gardeners, leaf rakers, Mr. Fixits. All have married (at the average age of 26), and they are the fathers of 34 sons, 32 daughters.
As Depression era undergraduates their average tuition, board and room costs came to $775. Their sons and daughters will have to pay more than twice that, but Pop should be able to raise the money. The average income of the 20 award men who were willing to reveal their incomes is $37,000, and the figure would likely be even higher if all had replied. Here they are in vignette:
KEITH METS
California rancher
UNIVERSITY OF ARIZONA
It was no part of Keith Mets's plan that he would become a rancher; he wanted to be a doctor. But in his second year at Harvard Medical School his father died, and Mets headed back to the Imperial Valley to get the crops in. His farming operations grew so quickly that he never returned to Harvard. Instead, he pioneered the production of flax in the Imperial Valley, was soon setting world records for its production. He now farms 3,500 acres in a diversified crop program, breeds Charolaise and Charbray steers, is president of the Imperial Valley Farmers' Association. Not quite forgetting his medical school aims, he is also president of the Imperial Valley Tuberculosis Association, as well as an adviser to the government on irrigation and fair treatment of migratory Mexican labor. An old tackle, Mets says: "The training gained in football is of value, regardless of what fields of endeavor one may enter."
BERNARD M. LOOMER
Professor of theology, University of Chicago
BATES
Bernard Loomer was the quarterback and take-charge man for Bates 25 years ago. Now he is a University of Chicago theologian teaching courses in constructive theology, the theology of Barth, Tillich, Bultmann and Niebuhr, the philosophy of Plato, Hegel, Aristotle, Kant and Whitehead in relation to the Christian faith. He is working on two books, Integrity, Community and Education and The Structure of the Christian Faith. Theologian Loomer also has some thoughts about sport: too many people think of it as just a recess from more earnest business. "This is heresy. There are enough critics of the arts; we could use more well-trained critics of athletics. For in sport, life is just as significant as it is anywhere else, and the tensions are just as real as in any other phase. Sport itself is an aspect of the full human life." In a full life of his own, Loomer also lectures to undergrads at Knox College.
EDWARD C. MYERS
Vice-president, United States Steel Corporation
BUCKNELL
As a triple-threat halfback, senior class president and honor student, Speed Myers was a well-rounded man at Bucknell. He coached an amateur football team on the side in his first years at U.S. Steel, where he began as a trainee in the sprawling, historic Homestead plant. As the steel industry recovered from the Depression, Myers had less and less time for coaching. He moved up through the ranks at U.S. Steel, this year was elected vice-president in charge of personnel for the 220,000-employee corporation. Myers and U.S. Steel search for "the uncommon man—especially in research." But prevailingly they look for "generalists," people of diversified abilities. Today Myers keeps diversified by playing golf and squash, by serving as an officer of his church and of a mill town community house, as a member of industry-wide committees on safety and employment of the handicapped.
ROBERT P. SHARP
Chairman of geological sciences, Caltech
CALTECH
Bob Sharp is glad that he went out for football and wishes more young scientists would do the same. As a quarterback in an early version of the T formation, Sharp handled the ball on nearly all plays. Since the rules of the game were weighted in favor of brute force in 1933 (five-yard penalty for two incomplete passes in a series, loss of the ball if you passed incomplete into the end zone), the 165-pound Sharp spent a good part of each game flat on his back under the charge of incoming enemy tackles. Today, he is one of the ablest, most popular teachers at Caltech, a U.S. member of the panel on glaciology for the International Geophysical Year. He says: "I think most young scientists need what you get from football—the news that you have got to be as determined as hell and that there is a certain poise and aggressiveness that is desirable. I know no better way to get this."
GLEN S. PETERS
New York State lumber manufacturer
COLGATE
Glen Peters saw a lot of the world and a lot of combat (six battle stars) with the U.S. Navy in World War II. After that he faced a sharp decision: whether to go for advancement in the big national company that employed him before the war or to try business for himself in western New York where he was born. Scraping together the down payment, Peters purchased a lumber mill in the town of Arcade, enlarged his scope by the purchase or founding of four more companies in the next 10 years. A model of the small businessman who brings growth and leadership to his community, Glen Peters has also busied himself in attracting branch plants of major U.S. industry to Arcade. One civic challenge Peters has not yet accepted is to run for mayor; like many a businessman he thinks himself "too busy." But he still finds time to watch high school football, urge and assist boys to enter Colgate.
WILLIAM C. EMBRY
Manufacturer and civic leader, Louisville
DARTMOUTH
The teamwork and drive he learned as an end at Dartmouth have, in Bill Embry's own mind, been "part of the maturing process" and transferable assets in his life. His job now, as general manager of the Louisville division of the Alton Box Board Co., involves the characteristic decisions of the executive. In addition Embry devotes himself to the life of his city and state. He was a chairman of the Louisville Board of Education when the Supreme Court decision of 1954 ordered desegregation; Embry insisted that "thinking and planning must start right now," and Louisville's orderly execution of the Court's mandate has been outstanding. Today, a past president of the Louisville Chamber of Commerce and a leader in the Red Cross, he is a member of the Kentucky Board of Education, secretary of his Dartmouth class, president of the General Association of all Dartmouth alumni.
HENRY W. HARDING
Electronics manufacturer, Boston
HAMILTON
Halfback Harding belongs to one of the fine football teams in Hamilton history; the Continentals had a 6-1 season in 1933. But Harding will be remembered even longer at Hamilton as a man who has made his way in the world and has never ceased to interest himself, through alumni councils, in the welfare of his old college. Upon graduation he took a job at $27.50 a week as an executive trainee at General Electric, soon discovered the capacities that have led him to success as the reorganizer and developer of industrial firms. Today he is president of the Laboratory for Electronics, Inc. of Boston, which this year received a $23 million Air Force contract for navigation equipment, one of the largest since the war. Golfer Harding (handicap 15) mumbles that he should have spent more time playing the game in college, but proudly observes that a son has the makings of a halfback.
C. DEAN McNEAL
Executive vice-president, Pillsbury Mills
KANSAS STATE COLLEGE
As an undergraduate Dean McNeal specialized in line play and in mastering the intricacies of agricultural economics. He stayed on at Kansas State for a while to teach but soon went to work on commodity forecasts for industry. Today, after wartime service with OPA, McNeal is an executive vice-president of Pillsbury Mills. On weekdays, he concerns himself with such things as the buying of wheat, the processing of feeds and the probabilities of the commodity market; on weekends he tramps over the Minnesota countryside in pursuit of ducks, pheasant and bass, depending on season—except on Sunday mornings, when he turns up in his Minneapolis church to lead the junior high school division of its Sunday school. Executive McNeal admits that he leans toward hiring young men with athletic backgrounds "because I believe they will think and act more decisively."
JOHN M. LEWIS
Ceramics manufacturer, Abingdon, Ill.
KNOX
John Lewis earned nine letters in football, basketball and track at Knox College, a record matched at Knox about once in 25 years. Then he settled down to make his career in his home community of Abingdon, Ill. (pop. 3,300), home of the Abingdon Potteries, which employs 300 of the town's men and women. Lewis is today executive vice-president and general manager of Abingdon Potteries and a leader in the town's civic concerns—as a member of the School Board, of the County Association for Crippled Children, and, among other things, of the fund-raising group that has just gathered $830,000 to enlarge two district hospitals. "I have never seen a person who has succeeded in athletics," he says, "or at least worked hard to compete in athletics, fail to make a success in something else." So far as hiring policy goes under John Lewis, "We're looking for competitive attitude."
PETER J. KOPCSAK
Colonel, United States Army
U.S. MILITARY ACADEMY
Some of the same qualities that made Pete Kopcsak a formidable end for West Point have made him a man to reckon with in a military career which won him the Silver Star, Bronze Star and a Purple Heart as a tank commander with Patton during World War II and a postwar assignment to military intelligence. From his western Pennsylvania boyhood in a coalmining family, Kopcsak had developed a mastery of Hungarian, and he was sent to Budapest as assistant military attaché. On four separate occasions he found himself in Soviet jails accused of espionage. Twice he talked his way out. Once, in Vienna, being transported between prisons, he was rescued by an international patrol. The fourth time he made a break for it, escaped in a jeep. Says husky Colonel Kopcsak: "Two Russian policemen came along for a while, but they both fell out." Kopcsak is now on duty in Japan.
GEORGE F. PARKE
Surgeon, Centralia, Wash.
MONTANA STATE COLLEGE
After his quarterbacking days George Parke worked his way through medical school in Chicago, turned west again to settle in little (pop. 8,500) Centralia, Wash. Today his gifts and graces have made him virtually the most useful and respected man in town. To a large general practice he adds the specialty of surgery, has served as chief of staff of the Centralia Hospital and is the local ideal of what a doctor should be: "Never too busy to give requested advice, never too rushed to savor the joys of everyday living, never too important to notice trivial things that concern small children"—as one admiring colleague puts it. Dr. Parke works an 80-hour week. "I'm firmly of the opinion," he says, "that coronary attacks are not caused by reasonably hard work. Dissatisfaction with what you are doing and general boredom can cause more trouble of that kind than work ever will."
GORDON P. CHUNG-HOON
Captain, United States Navy
U.S. NAVAL ACADEMY
Home for Gordon Chung-Hoon is Honolulu, where he was born into a Hawaiian-English-Chinese family and from which he was later appointed to Annapolis. Honolulu has other memories for Captain Chung-Hoon: a few years after his graduation from Annapolis, where he was an authentic Navy football hero, he was a gunnery officer on the battleship Arizona in Pearl Harbor when the Japanese bombs came down. His turn to strike back came later as commander of the destroyer Sigsbee in the final stages of the war and brought Chung-Hoon the Navy Cross for "extraordinary heroism in action" off Okinawa as well as the Silver Star for "conspicuous gallantry and intrepidity" off the home islands of Japan. Today, a responsible four-striper in the office of the Chief of Naval Operations, his job is helping to evaluate the characteristics required in the support vessels of a changing Navy.
ARTHUR M. JENS JR.
Insurance executive and attorney, Chicago
NORTHWESTERN
Arthur Jens went to Northwestern as a tall lanky track star, the champion high hurdler among Illinois schoolboys. Then, says Jens, "I fell in with rough companions and became a football player." A good one, too; against Indiana, skinny Right End Jens charged in and blocked three punts in one game. After night law school, and at the prodigy age of 31, he was named a member of the top command of Trans-World Airlines by TWA's mercurial boss, Howard Hughes. After he was fired ("Howard fired everyone, and everyone was eventually grateful to Howard for forcing them to move into more successful pursuits"), Jens found his own real career as a partner in the big Chicago insurance firm of Fred. S. James & Co., specializing in large industrial accounts. Long active in Northwestern University affairs, he served last year as president of its general alumni association.
EDWARD W. KRAUSE
Coach and athletic administrator, South Bend, Ind.
NOTRE DAME
Notre Dame had one of its rare seasons of depression when Moose Krause was a senior; there were four games in a row in which the Irish scored not a point. But the season was redeemed by a 13-12 victory over Army, and Tackle Krause, who incredibly blocked or helped block eight punts, was one of the heroes of the day. Moose Krause prefers winning seasons but can see some handy values in the losing kind: "You learn to accept adversity and master it." As a coach and athletic director Krause has been prevailingly blessed with winning seasons. His one time-out was a World War II tour of duty as a Marine Corps lieutenant assigned to air-combat intelligence flights in the Pacific. For the last 10 years he has been director of athletics at his alma mater. He has also found time to lead South Bend's United Fund drives, serve as a director of the National Conference of Christians and Jews.
MICHAEL N. VUCHNICH
Businessman and civic leader, Toronto
OHIO STATE
Mike Vuchnich grew up in the coal mining hills of western Pennsylvania and quit school at 14 to keep his family by mining coal himself. Only after three years and the insistent arguments of an old teacher was it possible for Vuchnich to enter high school. But high school led to football, to a prep school year at Kiski and then to Ohio State, where Mike is remembered as one of the finest centers in Columbus history. The education that football led to then led Mike into business, eventually to the presidency of the Lincoln Electric Company of Canada (gross last year: $6,000,000), to a distinguished civic career in Toronto and to Canadian citizenship. A leader in the enlightened management of Canadian business, Vuchnich has been a pioneer in industrial profit-sharing, an active fund raiser in behalf of retarded children, of the YMCA, YWCA and of the United Church of Canada.
ARTHUR S. LANE
Lawyer and jurist, Trenton, N.J.
PRINCETON
Captain of the unbeaten football team, president of his class for four years, chairman of the Undergraduate Council, winner on graduation day of Princeton's hallowed Pyne Honor Prize as the outstanding man of his year—that was Lane's undergraduate record. Instead of gravitating to a business career, he took his law degree (Harvard) and was just settling into practice when World War II began in Europe. Lane volunteered for active Navy duty before Pearl Harbor, rose to the command of a destroyer escort on antisubmarine service, today holds the uncommon high rank of captain, USNR. Back home in New Jersey after the war, Lane took up again the profitable practice of the law but, true to the public-service tradition of Pyne Prizemen, accepted duties as assistant county prosecutor at the same time. Two years ago, in a career that continues, he became a judge of the Mercer County (N.J.) Court.
JOSEPH M. HARRER
Atomic scientist, Argonne National Laboratory
RENSSELAER POLYTECHNIC INSTITUTE
Atomic science as a career had not been thought of when Joe Harrer was playing in the line for RPI and getting his chief kicks helping to beat Union, CCNY and Worcester. As a science graduate in those still-Depression days, Harrer went to work for $15 a week. Even today, given the fact that the public service of the United States pays niggardly wages for the same talents that are highly rewarded in business, he is still underpaid by Silver Anniversary income standards. Harrer's compensations lie in other directions. When the wartime call went out for imaginative engineers who could function with top-secret effectiveness in the atomic bomb program, Harrer qualified and went to work. Today he applies himself to an assignment equally challenging, if not more so: as a boss engineer in the reactor division of the Argonne National Laboratory he is harnessing atomic power for peaceful purposes.
AARON ROSENBERG
Motion picture director and producer
SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
When the All-America votes were counted in 1933, Southern California's great guard Aaron Rosenberg was a virtually unanimous choice. Rosenberg, a varsity player for three years while the Trojans were winning 30 games, losing two under Coach Howard Jones, was one of the reasons for Southern California's then dominance of the college game. (Ironically and characteristically, Rosy rejected UCLA and chose Southern California after a UCLA coach told him in a recruiting tête-à-tête, "You'll never make it at USC with all that competition.") On graduation, Rosenberg headed into the Hollywood jungle to learn the movie-making business. There, when he was treated deferentially as a football hero (and given little to do), he cursed out his bosses and told them, "Get tough with me and show me how things are done." Today, at 46, Rosy is one of the top dozen movie producers in America.
DAVID PACKARD
Electronics manufacturer, San Francisco
STANFORD
The other All-America guard in Aaron Rosenberg's senior year (see above) was Bill Corbus of Stanford—and Corbus' Stanford was one of the rare teams that beat Rosenberg's USC. Not unnaturally, Stanford's nominating citation in this year's Silver Anniversary All-America awarded praise to Bill Corbus, now chairman of Stanford's own Athletic Board. But on career achievement the man Stanford nominated was End David Packard, campus leader and Phi Bete, who is today chairman of Stanford's Board of Trustees. An engineer by training, Dave Packard served an apprenticeship at GE (like Hamilton's Henry Harding—see page 90), later launched into the electronics business. The Hewlett-Packard Co. of California, founded by Dave and a Stanford classmate, employs 1,700 people, did a $30 million business in "measuring tools" for the electronics industry last year, is still growing.
JAMES F. KELLY
Author and advertising executive, New York City
SWARTHMORE
Jim Kelly played football at a college that values thought, and Halfback Kelly has remained a thoughtful man. Most of his week he is vice-president and creative supervisor for the New York advertising agency of Ellington & Co.; on weekends he is an author who this fall examined a cast of Madison Avenue characters, and incidentally the theology and morality of Madison Avenue, in an uncommonly good novel on the subject called The Insider. Kelly objects to the stereotype of the ad man "as a helpless Madman as portrayed in books." Advertising "is not a hungry predator on the prowl nor a fey branch of show business; it is an integral part of human society and should be judged as such." Kelly thinks that college football has value on Madison Avenue too. "One of the main things you learn in football," he says, "is footwork, how to fall loose, how to keep on plugging."
CHARLES T. KINGSTON JR.
Insurance executive, Hartford, Conn.
TRINITY
The chapel at Trinity College, built since Chuck Kingston's time, reflects in the skilled carvings of its pew ends some of the events of Trinity history. One carving—of a forward pass—reflects the cherished moment when Guard Chuck Kingston intercepted an Amherst pass that led to Trinity's first victory over Amherst in 18 years. Kingston still has the ball, and football remains among the enduring enthusiasms of a man who was president of his class and student-body president and who, as Hartford general agent for Union Mutual Life, has been selling a million dollars' worth of insurance every year since 1952. Some of his activities on the side: chairman of the Hartford Community Chest drive, president of the Hartford Hospital Association, president of the Trinity Alumni Association. In World War II he was a major in military intelligence, won four decorations during service in the Pacific.
AMOS ALONZO BOLEN
Attorney, Huntington, W. Va.
WASHINGTON AND LEE
Amos Alonzo Bolen (who is not sure whether his father meant to name him for Amos Alonzo Stagg or not) grew up in the "deep, feuding and un-prosperous" mountains of Kentucky. His first job, at 13, was shoveling sawdust for a lumber outfit on a stream with the symbolic name of Troublesome Creek. Bolen made Washington and Lee on character and football promise, waited on tables, worked summers in the steel mills at Ashland, Ky., became captain of the football team, also Phi Beta Kappa, valedictorian, president of the student body. After law school he turned down opportunities in larger cities, settled in hill-and-river country. "My exact reason for doing so escapes me. Perhaps seven years at Washington and Lee never took the country out of the boy." Today he is a partner in one of the most active law firms in the Ohio Valley, counsel for the Chesapeake and Ohio R.R.
CHARLES H. BROWN
Internist and professor of medicine, Cleveland
WESLEYAN
Charlie Brown was Wesleyan's football captain (and a Phi Bete) in a good year for the Cardinals; though preseason underdogs they won the championship of the Little Three. Early in his career Brown decided that the same qualities that make for success in football—for which he uses with fondness such well-tried words as drive, desire, persistence, teamwork—lead to accomplishment in medical research. Today, a distinguished internist and professor of medicine at the famed Cleveland Clinic, Dr. Brown is sure of it. For 20 years he has been making steady contributions to advancing medical science; alone or teamed with colleagues he has published 90 original medical treatises—and this in a regular work schedule that includes lectures, seminars and a daylong succession of patients. For just one period he published nothing: from Pearl Harbor until 1946 he was too busy as an Air Force flight surgeon.
CHARLES M. BARRETT
Cancer researcher and professor of medicine, Cincinnati
XAVIER
Charlie Barrett's Xavier team never met Charlie Brown's Wesleyans, but Barrett followed the same path—into frontier work in medicine—and chooses some of the same words that Brown does for what football taught: "discipline and persistence." After med school at the University of Cincinnati, Barrett found his life's specialty in cancer research and practice. Like Brown, he gets his chief reward in "treating people." "I have to see patients or it would kill me," he says. "Often it looks as if there is no progress, but if I can add three or four years to just one man's life and alleviate the pain of those years I have done something." Last year Dr. Barrett planned and built for Cincinnati a radioactive cobalt unit for cancer therapy, one of only two in Ohio. Churchman, devoted teacher, he is described by a professional observer as "a constant example of the best in American medical tradition."
LAURENCE R. GOODYEAR
Attorney, Buffalo
YALE
The character and energy that made Laurence Goodyear a successful undergraduate athlete, a Phi Bete and an honors man in law school (Harvard) are now devoted to the practice of the law in a classical pattern. Goodyear is a partner in the Buffalo firm that bears his name, one of the largest in its area, and with foundations that go back through predecessor firms to Millard Fillmore and Grover Cleveland. But within this setting Goodyear has for 20 years devoted himself to a new and challenging specialty: labor law. His skill has earned him an outstanding reputation in the field. Goodyear interrupted this career in World War II. Turning down a desk job commission, he enlisted as a private; later commissioned in Army military intelligence, he was attached to a Marine outfit and served in the Okinawa campaign. His current pride: two sons who have captained their prep school football teams.
FIFTY PHOTOS