Bowdoin College - Bugle Yearbook (Brunswick, ME)

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All through this unstable world, Bowdoin men carry with them a piece of stability . To think of Kenneth Sills from time to time is to know once more what a man of learning and goodness and faith looks like. To remember him proceeding across campus with a kind of upturned look, or speaking in chapel with the conviction of its granite walls come alive, is to bring unique excell- ence into focus again. And what is most affecting is the liveliness of this excellence. We are not recalling the stability of a statue or of a set of maxims, hut the constancy of an ever-adjusting character, not the first by whom the new are tried, Nor yet the last to lay the old aside. A lesser man could have merely preserved the good things he found in Bowdoin; Kenneth Sills kept them integral and added to them manifold. He would have done this at any stage of Bowdoin’s history, and he would have somehow been Bowdoin at any time. One can see him em- bodying President Hyde’s “Practical Idealism” at the turn of the century; one can see him as President Woods, a hundred years ago, talking in Latin with the Pope at Rome, or as President McKeen opening the college’s doors to eight students in 1802. There is a timeless quality about a mail of learning and faith. Yet for us, today and tomorrow, he is one specific person, and there is a selfish hut proper joy in knowing that after the freshmen are graduated, no one can speak of him as “Casey” — as no one can mention the well loved Edith Sills — with our complete warrant and understanding. For though he belongs to Bowdoin forever, he has been our dean and president, our classicist and teacher, our guide, through years of war and peace, never an inert figurehead, hut always a living pilot, who like Virgil’s helmsman, ever clung to the tiller, never loosed His hand from the wood, his eyes from the fair heaven. F. L. G.. '37