Bowdoin's 150th

Write on your doors the saying wise and old, "Be bold! Be bold!" and everywhere "Be bold;" "Be not too bold!" Yet better the excess Than the deject; better the more than less; Better like Hector in the field to die, Than like a perfumed Paris turn and fly.

Thus, in his Morituri Salutamus, Alumnus Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (class of 1825) exhorted the seniors of Bowdoin College (Brunswick, Me.) on the 50th anniversary of his own graduation. Last week Bowdoin, still one of the nation's top-ranking small colleges, celebrated its 150th anniversary. For 2,160 of its bold alumni there are stars in Bowdoin's World War II service flag; for 31 of the boldest the stars are gold.

All over Longfellow's "grove and town" were uniformed students and other signs of war. Civilian enrollment, at 135, was down 75%. A quarter of the faculty of 65 was away on war leave. But Bowdoin was struggling, in the words of President Kenneth Charles Morton ("Casey") Sills, to keep "the flame of liberal education . . . ready for the day when it shall again become a beacon light. . . ."

Mother of Celebrities. Bowdoin was chartered when the people of the District of Maine (then part of Massachusetts) tired of sending their young men to alien Harvard and Amherst. The college was named for Massachusetts Governor James Bowdoin, whose son gave it gifts in cash and kind. Bowdoin in turn gave the Union proportionately more Civil Warriors than any other U.S. college and has produced more celebrities per square inch of campus than any rival. Among the celebrities was Longfellow's '25 classmate, Nathaniel Hawthorne, who, at an annual tuition-and-room cost of $34, highlighted four rowdy years with occasional bouts of cards and liquor.

Some others:

P: Franklin Pierce, fourteenth U.S. President.

P: Calvin Ellis Stowe, who taught religion at Bowdoin while his wife Harriet wrote Uncle Tom's Cabin.

P: Robert E. Peary, who nailed the college banner beside the U.S. flag at the North Pole.

P: Cyrus Hamlin, founder of Istanbul's Robert College, named for the New York merchant who paid for the site.

P: Robert Peter Tristram Coffin, poet and Bowdoin professor of English, who last week trod Longfellow's trail (in Brunswick's First Parish Church) and read a sesquicentennial poem of his own composition.

P: Three Republican U.S. Senators: Maine's Ralph Owen Brewster and Ohio's Harold Hitz Burton, onetime roommates (class of 1909) who attended last week's celebration, and Maine's Wallace Humphrey White.

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