Death at Quail Hill

"This is the proudest moment of my life!" cried Dr. Simon Strousse Baker when, in 1921, he returned to Washington. Pa., in the county where he was born, to become president of Washington & Jefferson, the college from which he had been graduated in 1892.

One day last week Dr. Baker, no longer a president, went back to Washington tired and alone. Passengers on a Pittsburgh-Washington bus saw him get aboard, a mild-faced, sandy-haired little man. Before the bus reached Washington, a 20-mi. trip, Dr. Baker alighted. Nearby was a funpark where W. &. J. students take their pleasure; some four or five miles away were the trees and towers of the college. Before Dr. Baker stood "Quail Hill," an old, boarded-up Georgian house whose owners used to entertain him and his wife. Dusk fell. Presently the weary, 66-year-old pedagog stumbled, fell by a stream near the highway. In the night a wind & rain storm beat down on "Quail Hill.". . .

A student strike which meant business and speedily accomplished it was the one at W. & J. during five days of March 1931. Calling Dr. Baker "autocratic" and "domineering," the students protested his strict rules for dress (such as forbidding corduroy trousers), his delay in building a new stadium, his dismissal of three professors, his regulations by which it seemed that athletes were made to work harder than plain students. A trustees' committee investigated the charges. Before it could report, Dr. Baker resigned his job (TIME, May 25, 1931). Ill health (a prostate operation in 1930) was partly responsible, and he had long ago been affected by the death of his only son, Lieut. Edward Baker, an aviator shot down in the War. Dr. Baker capitulated completely to his striking students. Said he: "I have tried to win their friendship but I have been unsuccessful. Sometimes I think the fault is mine. ... I hope my resignation will benefit the college."

Dr. Baker went back to Pittsburgh, where for some 25 years he had been associate superintendent of schools. He never recovered completely from the prostate operation. Friends noticed that Dr. Baker grew increasingly depressed Last week he seemed drawn back to Washington. Pittsburgh police hunted for a day in Highland Park, where Dr. Baker had said he was going to stroll. But it was at "Quail Hill," the morning after the storm, that a pipe-line walker named Steve Sento found the sodden body, twelve-hours dead, pistol in hand and a bullet in the head.

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