Latin School of Chicago - Sigillum Yearbook (Chicago, IL)

Page 29 text:

SIGILLUM The sea down around Java-the Banda Sea, Arafura Sea, Flores Sea, and Celebes Sea-this whole body of Venetian glass water, interrupted by the most timeless and sunblest islands, makes the china and tableware department at Marshall Field's look perfectly dull. Day after day you steam ahead on a comfortable modern freighter, do your eight hours and have the rest of the time to think, read, write, and listen to the fool stories of pearl trading, smuggling, and white men's misadventures in the South Seas. The whole stern, the whole poop deck belongs to the crew. The skipper and the illegitimate other officers are way forward where they don't even see you. There's a big canvas awning stretched on the awning spars-like a yacht. You bring your bunk up out of the fo'csle and sleep on deck without a thing over you. Day after day you steam right through this opalescent water with these green and gold and purple islands drawn up pretty much on parade on both sides, and occasionally you see a canoe like a pecan shell sneaking along close in shore, or you look across at a rain squall and someone remarks, That's the harbor of Bali. Then one morning you are waked up by a terrific racket and clamor. Overside are a whole parking lot of junks, tubs, and lighters painted red, green and blue with dragon's heads and tails carved or painted at the bow and stern. The poop is cluttered with fifty or so brown men, very handsome fellows in turbans and sarongs who gaze at you witha mixture of indifference and contempt that is measured down to within a millimeter of being an insult. That's the East-you've arrived at Samarang or Batavia or Sourabaya. My memories of Chicago Latin are of course associated with UR. P. and Doc McLeod and Percy Whiting and Tom Bosworth. For me, however, they aren't merely memories but ideals. But I know I got a lot of Latin from those men, and I haven't seen anything that I would rather have had. I have no doubt that their spirit is being carried on in the new Latin and that you fellows are sharing the same privilege and the same tradition. Success to the School and to this interesting anniversary event!

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SIGILLUM who really loved the literature he taught, that kindly Scotchman, Mr. MacLeod, who taught us mathematics, and we must not forget Fraulein Arnold in the German Division and Miss DeMerritt in charge of the French classes. To all of them and to the memory of those of them who unfortunately have died, I extend my highest assurance of affection and regard. Being a great teacher has great compensations and among the greatest, it seems to me, must be the knowledge that students, throughout their lives, will remember his high character and example. Throughout all these intervening years, I have never heard any boy make the slightest criticism or speak with anything but respect and affection for UR. Pf' and his associates who labored so stren- uously to pound some sense into our heads, if not by the regular routine, then by prestidigitation, if necessary. Having had the experience of being its editor-in-chief in IQI3, I take particular pride in knowing that The Sigillumn has pros- pered through the years, and is now celebrating with the school this important anniversary. I salute the school, The Sigillumn and The Folio and wish for them all, now and through all the years to come, success and prosperity. Another World CULBRETH SUDLER Culbrath Sudler, ex-,I6, Yale ,2O, one of the original editors of Timz magazine, later connected with Doubleday Paige, he travelled for two years around the world, is at present in the advertising business. I'm sorry I haven't a thing to send this anniversary Sigillum in the form of original work or published pieces. Being an ad- vertising copywriter, examples of my work have been scattered through the magazines and newspapers for the past several years, but invariably over some other signature, a coffee company or a floor polish or a chain of stores, or some other business or financial institution. Uff and on I've been writing a book about a couple of years I spent at sea after leaving college. At the time I wanted to be convinced that the world was not bounded by North Avenue, Dearborn Parkway, Division Street, and the Lake Shore Drive, and I was.

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A letter From Mexico STIRLING DICKINSON Stirling Dickinson, CX-727, Princeton '31, traveller, author and artist whose love of nature manifested itself during his days at the Latin School, his books are Mexican Odyffey, Weftward from Rio, and Dfath if Incidental. If I had received your letter a few weeks ago, asking me to con- tribute something for the anniversary issue, on the value of education, Ifm afraid I would very impolitely have burst out laughing. I never felt so little in need of education in my life. That is rather a bad admission, but if you ever managed to knock a hole in the gas tank of your car and then lie under that same car with your forefinger stopping up the hole, if you have, in addition, gotten stuck in a river for five hours with Indians and burros trying to pull you out, if you have gone on from there over a wild mountain trail and then smashed your battery all to bits some twenty miles from a habitation, and if, finally, you have knocked off the muffier and culminated your three days short cutv to your destination by breaking the rear axle, perhaps you will appreciate why education seemed unessential. What I needed was not Latin, or Greek, or Algebra, but a bigger collection of wrenches, bolts, screws and spare parts. However, since this eventful trip from Chicago to Mexico, I have been getting established in my new home which lies on the mountainside above the fine old colonial town of San Miguel de Allende. Sunshine, warm weather, and pretty fair cooking have done their work, and I now bear no grudge against my car, the road-or education. I imagine a great deal will be said and written in praise of the school, to each student it has meant something different, depending, I suppose, on what particular course that student's life has taken. For myself, it is hard to pick out a single phase of Latin, a single memory, that outshadows all the rest. Yet many times in my Work, writing and landscape painting, I remember the nature study classes with Miss Murray. Whether, on a trip across South America, they have meant a keener interest in the strange fauna and flora, or whether, as today, they mean a greater awareness of details indispensable to a painter, I can only look back with a great deal of thankfulness and not a little longing to the days when we took field trips to the Indiana Dunes, or rode the street car to the wilds', at the end of Lincoln Avenue. And when, the week before I left Chicago, at a particularly dull moment in an autographing party , Miss Murray herself came up to me and asked if I wasn't, by any chance, the little boy who once collected moths and butterflies, I was able to say, very, very proudly, that I was.