Mr. Mac

Of the 50 young men Woodrow Wilson hired to inaugurate his famed Princeton preceptorial system, many became noted educators. Nine were subsequently made chairmen of their departments, four became deans.

There was one of the 50 who earned no string of degrees, published no learned works, never became a department head or a dean. "I shall die an associate professor," said snowy-haired, 71-year-old Francis Charles MacDonald, A.B., last week. "I didn't succeed very well, but I had good fun."

Born in Bangkok, Siam, the son of a

Presbyterian missionary, "Mr. Mac" came to the U.S. at ten, eight years later en tered Princeton's class of 1896. He was teaching English at Lake Forest College when Wilson invited him to Princeton in 1905.

He liked President Wilson's new system of intimate teaching and hated formal lec tures. ("To do the same thing twice a week was horrible.") He timed his evening "precepts" so that his students could take in the first show at the movies. Many a lad who foregathered in Mr. Mac's smoke-filled apartment with six or seven fellow advisees stayed on till midnight, listening to the talk about poets and poetry -- some times, at the meetings of Mr. Mac's Freneau Club, hearing from the poets them selves: Vachel Lindsay, Robert Frost, Amy Lowell et al.

In summer and on leaves of absence, when orthodox colleagues were plugging away at research, Frank MacDonald traveled to Hawaii, to India, Siam or Siberia.

"Going places and doing things, bumping into people I knew, that was the excitement," he says.

Mr. Mac's visible accomplishments were a book of poems, a code long used by the State Department, a mystery story, and a diary--supposed to contain one of the most detailed histories of Woodrow Wilson's controversial administration--which he burned "because it was too risky to leave lying around." But his greatest accomplishments were invisible and unrecorded: in the years before his final retirement in 1936, Mr. Mac befriended and spurred many a young Princetonian.

Next spring, when the $4 million Harvey S. Firestone Memorial Library begins to rise on Princeton's campus, it wall contain a special poetry room dedicated to Francis Charles MacDonald. The anonymous donor of $20,000 prefers to be known only as "a grateful advisee of Mr. Mac's."

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