Goodbye, Messrs. Chips

Each year, U.S. colleges and universities must say goodbye to many a famed and favorite figure. Highlights among 1955's retirements:

The University of Rochester's George Hoyt Whipple, 76, Nobel laureate and for 32 years the kindly dean of the medical school. The son and grandson of physicians, Whipple earned his own M.D. at Johns Hopkins, worked for a while as a pathologist in Panama shortly after the start of William Gorgas' antimalaria campaign; after serving as a professor at the University of California, he went to Rochester in 1921 as head of a school that was still only a bleak patch of earth. An awesome but beloved figure ("When he comes into a classroom,'' a student once said, "the silence is deafening"), he built up two great hospitals, a school of nursing, clinics for cerebral palsy and psychiatry, turned Rochester into one of the top medical centers in the nation. Meanwhile, he also found time to study the indispensable role of certain foods, principally liver, in the formation of hemoglobin--a discovery to which thousands of victims of pernicious anemia today owe their lives.

Smith's Mary Ellen Chase, 68, silver-thatched, silver-tongued bestselling author (Silas Crockett, Mary Peters}, whose courses in English literature have long borne, by Smith custom, the proud and simple label, "Chase," and whose domestically detailed quizzes have been immortalized by a bit of campus doggerel: "What were the colors of Pamela's socks ?/Long white jobs with classy clocks./What did Don Quixote masticate ?/Old fried pidgeon served up in state." Whether reading Pater aloud by her own fireside, working out a Latin anagram, or putting her students through their paces in class, Teacher Chase cast her spell over thousands of Smith girls by her uninhibited showmanship, once astounded her doctor by babbling off the dates of all the Roman Emperors while coming out of the ether after a tonsillectomy. Mistress of the masterly digression, she could wander from a description of Isaiah as "the Shelley of the Bible" to a full-fledged dissertation on skylarks, and this would remind her of the meadows around Britain's Grantchester, which in turn might--or might not--bring her back to the subject at hand. "I have learned," she once wrote, "that to know precisely what I am doing in any given class, at any given moment, is a state of mind as intolerably dull for my students as for myself."

Colorado College's lean, leathery Major General William Hanson Gill, 68, who at the request of the regents in 1947 took over the presidency "for a few months while they looked for a suitable man," to his own surprise has remained ever since. Holder of both the D.S.C. and the D.S.M., General Gill led the battle-worn 32nd (Red Arrow) Division through New Guinea and Philippine campaigns, which climaxed in the surrender of General Yamashita. Then, after a bout with malaria, he settled down in Colorado Springs. In his office at 8 each morning (and woe to the subordinate who got in later), he started the college's first building program in 25 years, set up its first R.O.T.C. unit, established its honor system. But more important than the administrator was the man himself--an exacting but kindly president who could cut a caper at a fraternity dance or ceremoniously crown a campus queen, was such an indefatigable gardener that he kept the neighbors for blocks around in fresh vegetables.

Cornell University's Chemist James B. Sumner, 67, the first scientist ever to crystallize an enzyme. An abrupt, laconic man who could answer a three-page letter in a sentence or two ("This doesn't make sense. Better try something else"), and would often blurt out to a comparative stranger whatever was on his mind ("My wife's in Sicily. She has sinus trouble and thinks climate has something to do with it. I don't. Do you know anything about sinus?"), Sumner achieved a special sort of triumph in his lifetime. Having lost one arm in a hunting accident, he was told that a one-armed man could never become a chemist. Then, when he started to work on enzymes, most scientists scoffed, and even after his experiments succeeded, many still refused to believe him. Later other scientists began to crystallize other enzymes, gradually confirmed the belief that enzymes are catalysts that stimulate activity within the body. Finally, the day came when Sumner won a Nobel Prize and a private chat with Sweden's King Gustaf V. Included in their chat: how a one-armed man manages to serve in tennis.

The University of California's bouncy, egg-shaped Political Scientist Samuel C. May, 67, father of the university's Bureau of Public Administration, the first institution of its kind in the world. Though he claims to be "the only professor in America who has not written a book," May has made his contribution by building up a vast storehouse of knowledge and by furnishing Government officials with a steady flow of facts and figures on every sort of subject from "Comic Book Regulation" to "The Senile Aged Problem in the U.S." Among his former students and associates at the bureau: Earl Warren, Senator Knowland, and 45 of California's city managers.

Princeton's Walter T. Stace. 68, onetime British colonial official (he was mayor of Colombo, Ceylon), now one of the leading philosophers of the English-speaking world. A shy, retiring scholar, Stace started out training for the ministry at Dublin's Trinity College, has combined his studies of Western classic philosophers with quiet reflection on the world's religions. "Civilization," he concluded, "is organized goodness," and goodness comes, not from reason or faith alone, but from a "moral intuition"--a sense of the eternal order ruled by a god who is at once the ultimate mystery and the ultimate, but unprovable, reality.

The University of Idaho's Edward F. Rinehart, 70, expert animal husbandman of the university's extension service and senior counselor to the state's sheepmen and cattlemen. Since he first arrived in Idaho in 1912, "Riney" has come to know as much about the grazing lands and livestock history of the state as any man alive, laid the groundwork for Idaho's bull-grading system, kept his scattered clientele well supplied with learned but simple reports. Traveling by car, train and horse, he became a familiar figure in the barns and ranch houses of Idaho, and wherever he went, his rambling advice was awaited and welcomed almost with awe. "You'd think," says one cattleman, "that he wasn't listening to you at all. And then after a while, Riney would say something. Then he'd start for the door, stop there and say something else, then pick up his hat and say something else--and finally, all the time fixing to go, he would have told you all you wanted to know."

Harvard's Pitirim Sorokin, 66, a Russian artisan's son who became the first professor of sociology at the University of St. Petersburg and later at Harvard. Brash, brilliant young Sorokin ran away from his father at the age of nine ("My father was good man, except when he was drunk"), managed to get himself enough education to enter the University of St. Petersburg. A social revolutionary, he was arrested three times by the Czarist police, served as one of Kerensky's secretaries, was later arrested three more times by the Communists. Exiled in 1922, he soon came to the U.S., and with the publication of his monumental Social and Cultural Dynamics, a study of the fluctuations of "sensate" and "ideational" cultures, he set the academic world to wondering whether it had found a new Spengler. Today, a mysterious mixture of crackpot and genius, Pitirim Sorokin has his colleagues wondering still.

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