Goodbye, Messrs. Chips

Each year, U.S. colleges and universities must say goodbye to many a famed and favorite teacher. Among 1952's retirements:

Baylor's A. Joseph ("Dr. A.") Armstrong, 79, who at seven used to scribble on his school slate "A. Joseph Armstrong, prof, of Greek," eventually became a professor of English and the world's No. 1 collector of Browning. In term, white-haired Dr. A. used to rise at dawn each day for a five-mile prebreakfast hike, taught with explosive severity ("Son, you sound like you have a mouthful of mush"), worked with such ferocity that he left the rest of the campus panting ("I hope to die on Saturday," he would say, "so there'll be no necessity to miss classes"). To earn money for his collecting, he started the Armstrong Educational Tours, raised a fortune for manuscripts, first editions and such items as Browning's ring and snuffbox. The collection is now housed in a $2,000,000 Renaissance library on the Baylor campus at Waco, Texas--"a place," said Dr. A., "where young people can meditate on great thoughts . . . the most beautiful building in the world."

Bowdoin's Halifax-born Kenneth C. M. Sills, 72, longtime (34 years) president of the college. A former Latin instructor, famed for his fidgets (he used to tear whole handkerchiefs to shreds while teaching), "Casey" Sills mellowed into a pleasant, paunchy "ex-scholar," famed for his love of Dante, for eating (so goes the legend) eleven lobster stews at a sitting, and for liking to run his piny campus just as if Longfellow were still there: "Excellent teaching in wooden halls is much better than wooden teaching in marble halls."

Bryn Mawr's lively Classicist Lily Ross Taylor, 65, who in 25 years has set hundreds of unsuspecting girls to lapping up Lucretius, devouring Vergil, plunging into everything from the politics of ancient Rome to the cults of Etruria. Peering excitedly through her glasses, Miss Taylor started each lecture as a model of good grooming, gradually worked herself up into such a frenzy of hair-rumpling that students were moved to remark: "You can tell how well her class went by the way her hair is standing up."

The University of Chicago's Louis Leon Thurstone, 65, a top U.S. apostle of the mental test. A onetime assistant of Thomas Edison, Psychologist Thurstone explored far beyond the I.Q., devoted himself to devising tests for basic mental functions (e.g., verbal understanding, word fluency, number facility, space thinking, perception, reasoning, shape recognition). His plans after leaving Chicago: to go right on making tests as director of the new Psychometric Laboratory at the University of North Carolina.

Yale's Clarence W. Mendell, 69, former dean of the college and for nearly a generation the "grand old Roman" of the faculty. A tweedy little man with a passion for flashy sport coats and corncob pipes, "Clare" Mendell divided his time between poring over Latin sentence connection, digging up lost Tacitus manuscripts, weeding his vegetables, and just being the sort of gentle scholar that many Yale facultymen have tried to imitate.

Cornell's Peter Debye, 68, Nobel Prize-winning chemist and physicist, author of the Debye theory of the specific heat of solids. Born in The Netherlands, Debye succeeded Einstein as professor of theoretical physics at the University of Zurich, served as director of Berlin's Max Planck Institute until the Nazis drove him out ("Stay at home and occupy yourself by writing a book," they told him), in 1940 finally made his way to Cornell. There, perpetually wreathed in cigar smoke, he pioneered in high polymer research, taught Cornellmen their chemistry, and each year managed to make them like it.

Cornell's gruff Alexander M. Drummond, 67, who in 32 years as professor of speech and drama, has turned Cornell's drama department into one of the best in the country. Like the football coach he started out to be, "the Boss" railed and ranted through hundreds of rehearsals ("May I remind the cast that the audience usually likes to hear the lines that the author has taken the trouble to write?"), badgered and bludgeoned dozens of gawky students into becoming well-known actors and writers. Among them: Sidney Kingsley, Franchot Tone, William Prince, Dorothy Sarnoff, and Dan Duryea ("Strangely enough, he advised me not to become an actor").

Wellesley's cello-playing Thomas Hayes Procter, 66, minister of the Christian Church, professor of philosophy, and perennial favorite of the campus. In class, staring abstractedly into space or twiddling with his vest "twiddle button," "Mr. Plato" led a whole generation of girls through the intricacies of Greek thought (At a girls' college, "you don't have to be good; you just have to be a man"), became their father confessor, often officiated at their weddings--a kindly, rumpled man, who never found time to write a book because he was so "passionately excited by teaching."

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