Walking Dean

One day last week as spring sunshine slanted down across the smoked brown rooftops into little Gramercy Park, Manhattan, a vigorous, courtly gentleman whose well-brushed grey hair and resonant voice belied his 73 years, handed $1,000 and a bronze medal to an Irish gardener named Hannan.

History has but a fleeting smile for kindly old gardeners who like little children. Even the all-chronicling New York Times might have skipped Gardener Hannan, his medal and purse if the smiling man who presented them on behalf of the mothers and fathers living about the park had not been the Times's perennial speechmaker and medal-bestower, Dr. John Huston Finley.

If it was blessed for Dr. Finley to give another honor last week, so was it fulfilling for him to receive at last the whole measure of a distinction which he has supported for many weeks. Since the death of famed Rollo Ogden last February, Dr. Finley had functioned as Acting Editor of the august Times. Last week in a sedate little editorial paragraph undoubtedly pruned to the minimum by Dr. Finley himself, he was proclaimed the Times's Editor-in-Chief. Thus he became ex officio, the dean of U. S. journalism.

Dr. Finley's two sons and daughter grew up years since and moved away from the Maytime tulip beds in iron-fenced Gramercy Park. But the Park and its gardener continue important to Dr. Finley. "Every day I walk ten miles," he explained. "And every day I walk in Gramercy Park."

Walking has been health to many men.

To Editor Finley it has been more. "As a farm boy in Illinois," he said last week, "I remember leaving my plow, going to the house and changing into my suit of blacks, walking eight miles to take an examination in solid geometry which I had studied by myself, passing it and walking eight miles home again. A good walk clears the mind, stimulates thinking. I walk to the Times office each morning. At least once each year I walk around Manhattan [32 miles]. I have walked 70 miles in a day in the White Mountains. Several times I have walked from New York to Princeton. Even on an ocean crossing I will walk 100 miles. Gramercy Park's circuit is just equal to the deck circuit on the Aquitania."

Pulling his pedometer from within his coat, Pedestrian Finley pointed to it. "By actual mileage I walked around the earth in seven years. On that trip I walked for two weeks with Hilaire Belloc though he didn't know it. I slept with Robert Louis Stevenson in a little inn at La Ferte in France. I made a three-mile side trip one night to be with Rousseau. My work here at the Times is really very confining. I have to be at my desk daily. Walking trips through Scotland, Asia, or Australia are my chief recreation."

Dr. Finley then explained his imaginative scheme: "It's a sort of game I play. I decide what country I want to visit, get the guide books and journals of great men who have traveled there. Then I map out a course and each day I walk as many miles as I would actually have to walk to get to my chosen destination for that night."

On the medal which went to Gardener

Hannan last week was the figure of a walking boy and the motto "a la Sainte Terre" (to the Holy Earth). "I designed the medal years ago," finished Dr. Finley. "It was when I was Commissioner of Education for the State of New York. I visited a home for incorrigible boys about 30 miles from my office at Albany. I talked to them about walking and promised a medal to the first boy who would walk to my office. One day six of them arrived. I had the medals made, walked the 30 miles to the school and delivered them to the boys." Similar medals have since been given by Dr. Finley to Boy Scouts, to friends who have become faithful walkers, to cripples who have overcome handicaps and learned to walk.

As associate editor of the New York Times since 1921, Dr. Finley has been that newspaper's great ambassador of goodwill, speaker of baccalaureates, captain of causes. Thirty-one honorary degrees have been showered upon him, including 19 LL.D.s. In 1927 he received three LL.D.s, one J.U.D. Foreign governments have awarded him 13 decorations. His long career has been distinguished in scholarship.

He served his alma mater, Knox College, as president, 1892-99. He was professor of politics at Princeton from 1900 to 1903, president of the College of the City of New York, 1903-13.

No figurehead editor, Dr. Finley is at his book-lined office on the Times's tenth floor each morning at 9 a. m. He writes a daily editorial, participates each noon in the editorial conference of the publisher, managing editor and editorial writers.

Wearing his honors modestly, he believes in the simple virtues of hard work and honesty, preaches intellectual curiosity and never-ending self-education. To troubled friends he advises, "Read a book, make a friend, take a walk." To himself when impatient with strange people and their causes he recalls the advice his good fishing friend President Grover Cleveland used to give him when he hooked into a wild one: "Go easy on him, Finley, go easy on him."

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