Our Class History
He who would digress from his accustomed toil and venture to sketch the course of history, whether of school or empire, must resort to more than the mere mechanical accumulation of facts. Otherwise his production shall prove an insipid experiment. It is the proneness of those ingenious historians, who warm the soul and bewitch the brain, to indulge imagination, quite as much as to patronize the shrine of Truth. We enter their market place, linger at their counters of intellectual exchange, intent upon bartering our time and toil for the acquisition of facts, but are soon intoxicated by their fickle wares of pictured story and prophetic panorama.
In the life of every Adam’s son, dude or swain, comes the time when the breast both pounds with wild ambition and surges in the phantasy of love’s caprice. Before marriage is the romance of daring, of venture, of sought acquisition, of heroic affection,—made eager by the leap of an untamed heart; made resolute by the challenge of conquest. After marriage is either the glad romance of possession, perhaps increasing possession, or else the tragic drama of domestic polemic.
A premature class history is like the former state, without the sequence; for the deep and settled experiences of life, whether bright or untoward, are yet in the coming. However, we might gaze into the to-morrows, with hopeful expectancy or anxious solicitude,—that is neither here nor there; for this is a stroke of unyielding history, and is neither romance nor prophecy.
Our story begins in the fall of 1910. We came, in response to the tug of this classic Town, forty-seven in number, from sixteen states of the Union, from Canada, India, and the West Indies. What was our previous condition of servitude? All is to be told in the language of excellence on the files of twenty-one different universities, where each had meritoriously high and distinct recognition. Thirteen came married. Four, Addison, Mohn, Forgrave, and Seaver, since coming, have fallen from grace and respectability.[1] We, of the righteous remnant, are in frenzied suspense for this inevitable state of kiss and bliss.
At the initial reception we bravely ran the gauntlet of learned brows and inquisitorial faces, and by our genial, social versatility, speedily dissipated all suspicion on the part of the Doctors of Theology, that any fatal crudities were inherent in our intellectual or moral constitutions. Before the evening passed, we were deemed the royal sons of the church, and received congratulatory flatteries with complacent passivity. And if holy passion is a worthy theme—our college yells and songs of sacred memory were exploited with reverent and vociferous zest.
In the election of the Mt. Vernon League officers, in the spring of 1911, R. B. Callahan was elected Vice-President and Leader of the Gospel Team; Harold Mohn, Secretary; S. L. Maxwell, Treasurer; H. R. Harper was elected to the Mt. Vernon Book Store; and Willis J. King to the laundry agency.
Two of our number, by coercing the professors, have passed the threshold into the Senior Class; two have become divorced from us by flirting with the four-year course; six, wither by fortune or misfortune, have become apostate, and did not return after the summer vacation; one new man has pitched the tent of his sojourn in our midst;—so by the laws of immutable Mathematics, we are now thirty-eight. Of this number thirty do pastoral work,—exclaim and proclaim, postulate amd [sic] ejaculate, pound and confound!
Of our first year’s experience, Hebrew shall always abide pre-eminent in our memories, like the ghosts of our dead selves, because of its extracting and distracting citation of energy, and its injection of patience, piety, resoluteness, and discipline. Its waws and shewaws and uncanny enunciations constitute a perpetual cadence, which binds us to the ancient Jews, good and devout men, but, the just Lord knows, long dead.
January 30, 1912, was the date of our nativity, as an organized class. Elmer A. Leslie was elected president Harold Mohn, secretary; Willis J. King, treasurer. The last-named man is especially trustworthy, and we do not expect him to abscond with the funds.
In the Mt. Vernon league election, held February 20, 1912, Elmer A. Leslie was elected president; S. L. Maxwell, as general representative of the student body; R. B. Callahan as chairman of the Prayer Meeting Committee; Milton O. Beebe as chairman of the Prudential Committee; B. W. Roberts as the chairman of the Social Committee; and later J. W. Hutchinson as laundry agent. These men in their several capacities already manifest that executive ability prerequisite for the Methodist Episcopacy.
And now our past is revealed. We are not apologetic for the fact that our class record to the present time is brief in the number and modest in the size of its accumulated events. We have, one and all, been silent recipients of knowledge and inspiration; so that in the days to come we may be the more proficient in the dissemination and propagation of truth. There is logic in the modest trust that humble contribution to-morrow may be the legitimate and natural expression of silent receptivity to-day. So forgive one fostered dream: the bright and glowing annals of our class are as yet unwritten.
Thomas Todd Johnston