Oglethorpe Purse

Dr. Thornwell Jacobs, 57, president of Atlanta's Oglethorpe University, tipped the scales at 150 Ib. Dr. Witherspoon Dodge, 47, pastor of Atlanta's "Radio Church," weighed in at 135 Ib. The purse was $200, which Preacher Dodge said President Jacobs owed him for part-time teaching at Oglethorpe. The ring was President Jacobs' office. There were no spectators.

A fight destroyed Old Oglethorpe 73 years ago. Founded by Presbyterians at Milledgeville, Ga. in 1835, it was the first sectarian college south of Virginia. In 1861 Poet Sidney Lanier and all its other 100-odd students marched off to war. Its endowment vanished in Confederate bonds, its buildings were burned in Sherman's March to the Sea. Friends tried in vain to revive it when peace came.

In 1913 Thornwell Jacobs, an ambitious young Princeton Theological Seminary graduate who had been a Presbyterian minister for a while, went to Atlanta, determined to resurrect Oglethorpe there. He gave some of his own money to start, talked a quarter million dollars out of civic-proud Atlantans, made 101 trips through the South to raise another quarter million. On the cornerstone of New Oglethorpe's first building, laid in 1915, was engraved the pious motto Manu Dei Resurrexit (By the Hand of God She Has Risen from the Dead).

In September, 1916 Oglethorpe, with Dr. Jacobs as first president, opened the doors of its one building to 56 students. Last year 500 students occupied its five blue granite buildings and football stadium. A prime factor in the new growth has been Publisher William Randolph Hearst. He was Atlanta's largest personal subscriber in Dr. Jacobs' first drive, boomed the campaign loudly in his Atlanta Georgian and Sunday American. In 1927 he gave Oglethorpe $25,000 and his third son, John, as a student. Grateful Oglethorpe promptly gave Mr. Hearst an LL. D., the only university degree he has ever received. Two years later the grateful publisher gave Oglethorpe a 400-acre wooded tract, valued at $125,000, adjoining its campus. Oglethorpe made him vice president of its Board of Directors. He put himself down for $100,000 on a million dollar pledge list not yet called in. President Jacobs ascribes Publisher Hearst's interest in Oglethorpe to his Southern ancestry, his Atlanta newspapers and the fact that he considers himself a citizen of the South.*

Last month Preacher Dodge got out of a hospital bed after an appendectomy, went to President Jacobs to complain about the nonpayment of his salary, demanded $200. President Jacobs reminded him that since June 1, 1932 the University had dropped set salaries, paid its faculty only what it could afford from time to time. Nevertheless Preacher Dodge, who was pastor of Atlanta's Central Congregational Church until parishioners tired of his advanced religious views, needed the money and thought he should have it. One morning last week wiry little Preacher Dodge marched into wiry little President Jacobs' office for a showdown.

Each participant later released a written account of what followed. President Jacobs, who emerged from the battle unscathed: "[Dr. Dodge] told me that unless I paid him $200 at once he was going to do three things: 1) To give the college and myself all the unpleasant publicity possible, staging it around a lawsuit. . . . ;

2) To write to all the patrons of the college advising them that I was wrecking the institution by my policies;

3) To beat me up right then and there in my office.

"My reply was that I never wrote checks under threat of blackmail, and that he could proceed with his purposes. He then attacked me and it became my duty to protect myself, which I did to the best of my ability without attacking him. After this was over he left the office."

Preacher Dodge, who left with a scratch on his nose: "When [Dr. Jacobs] refused to pay me, I said, 'There is but one thing for me to do. I am going to beat you here, and then I am going to beat you again next fall out on the campus before your entire student body.'

''I then told him to remove his glasses and I would give him his first beating. He started for the door. I told him to come back. He defended himself by scratching my face with his finger nails and pulling my hair and trying to hit me. I knocked him against the door with a left hook to the jaw, spun him into the glass sectional bookcases with a right and tumbled him into the table over my shoulder. After a few blows his secretary. Miss Margaret Stovall, and my daughter Sallie came into the room and parted us."

*President Jacobs, on a tour of Wales last June, dropped in at his benefactor's estate, St. Donat's in Glamorganshire. President Jacobs "loves croquet." He, Publisher Hearst, Marion Davies and Daughter-in-law Lorna Hearst were having a game one day when a photographer from the London Taller arrived (see cut).

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