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

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Reminiscences HOWARD VINCENT O,BRIEN Howard Vincent O'Brien, '06, Yale 710, author, columnist of the Chicago Daily News, and commentator whose journalistic work has made him one of Ch1cago's most enjoyed and widely read newspaper men. RITING pieces for papers is for me something like a post- man's taking a nice long walk in the country for the amuse- ment of his day off. However, when I was in school, I once asked John lVlcCutcheon for a contribution, and the promptness with which he gave it has remained in my memory as an antidote to natural indolence. I first went to C. L. S. when football players wore striped blazers and sideburns, I had been shed, with audible relief, by the neigh- boring University School,but I was not released from the animosity of the Sheldon School-a public institution whose inmates main- tained a bloody warfare with us little patricians to the west and north of them. Many were the combats staged in Lincoln park for the possession of bats and balls and the right to play. There was something of dictatorship of the proletariat even in those days. Only fragments of my educational career remain in my memory, such as the time E. A. Bates, in a burst of rage, hurled his copy of Thucydides at me-and I made a fair catch. I remember this doubtless because it was the only time I ever caught anything successfully. In fact my inability to catch anything was so great that being unable to get on the school team, I got up one of my own. I played third base and was captain-until the second inning of the first game, when I was deposed from both places. I then withdrew from baseball, and with another boy started a paper. It was what the French call a success fou,until suppressed by the school authorities. Another thing I remember was the plaintive wonder of the math teacher, a Mr. McLeod, that I could attend his classes in plane geometry almost every day, and year after year, and never get beyond the first proposition. Mr. Bosworth remains green in my memory, too, because he was the first person to make me conscious of words, thereby making himself responsible for much that I am sure he regrets. The school, in the old days, was ruled by R. P. Bates, in the upper register, and by Mabel Slade Vickery among the girls and small fry. UR. Pf' ruled with an iron hand. I met him shortly after the present building was completed, and I asked him what he thought of it. He shook his head. Too bad the architect didn't consult me,', he said, I could have given him some useful advice. For

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School Days, School Days PAGET K. CADY Paget Cady, ,127 Yale II6, active in athletics and activities of school, is now connected with a brokerage firm. During one of your seductive sales talks, calculated to per- suade a venerable grad to contribute something to the Sigillum , you suggested that he just grab a pencil and a sheet of paper and let nature take her course. All right-here goes. Add to the prescription a warm spring day, inducing more than my usual mental and physical lethargy, and I am transported back to a room in the old Latin School on Division Street-spring of IQI2. Bugs Meadowcroft, baffled, as aren't we all, by the differ- ence between Gerund and Gerundive, has been given the historic you7re out gesture by R. P. Bates, and has glided with dignity from the class room. Obvious terror grips the rest of us, with the possible exception of such poker faced men of the world as Haven Requa, Red Kiernan and Dutch,, Meier, for we all face the possibility of over-time with no extra pay. Hunt Wentworth is drawing pictures behind the concealment of his Cicero propped up on a pencil. R. P. spots him with his all-seeing eye. We wait for the explosion. Instead, R. P. deftly sails a small book so that it clips the prop out from under the Cicero. There is a crash, a wave of laughter, and Hunt's face and neck gradually turn a beautiful crimson. Cady, translate the next paragraphf' My mind turns even blanker than it was-a neat trick indeed. We have not reached the end of the day's assignment but are well paSt the place I have figured we will reach and, of course, we early believers in labor-- saving efliciency never prepare more than necessary. Opportunely, a very small and terrified boy sidles in-sent up by Miss Strong from the seventh grade for discipline. He stammers an account of his sin. R. P.'s leonine roar of displeasure rattles the chairs. The cowering mite is ordered to sit in the corner with his face to the wall. He does so, trembling perceptibly. R. P. swings back to us,lgrins broadly and winks. We stifle our laughter so as not to spoil his act. My personal problem is still unsolved. Thank heaven. There goes the bell-saved for another twenty-four hours. The bell is just my telephone-a friend wanting to know why her stocks have gone down so far, and here I am once more called on to recite and again unprepared. I

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SIGILLUM one thing, I would have had a telephone at each pupil's desk, so the little darling could be in communication with his mother at all hours of the dayf, That sentence sizzled with all the accumulated acid of a lifetime teaching school. It must be a hideous trade! As I look back on my own ingenious ways of being pestiferous, I marvel that some teacher, driven beyond endurance, didn't push me off the top of the building. The closest I came to that was when a 6th grader held me by the wrists out of a third story window. Certainly he couldn't have performed that feat alone. I must have been a Willing accomplice. What extraordinary creatures little boys are! I have been asked when I decided to make a vocation of letters. Well, I had a printing press as a very small boy, and in the summers used to hang around the office of the newspaper in the town where we stayed, I was editor of the Folio and the Sigillum, and it would thus appear that I was definitely headed for journalism. As a matter of fact this did not occur to me. For some reason, not now clear to me, I was bent on becoming a mining engineer. I took preliminary exams for the Sheffield Scientific School, but before I could proceed further on this tack, my natural incapacity for mathe- matics became too obvious to be ignored. So I shifted to Academic, drifted through four more-or-less miss-spent years, being on the boards of several college papers, and finally emerged-into the advertising buisness. Having now spent a number of years in the profession of jour- nalism, as the books call it, or as a newspaper man Cas newspaper men describe themselvesj, I should be in a position to give advice on making a career of letters. I can't. The only advice I can offer is to avoid specialization. Both from the standpoint of material advancement and individual satisfaction, the broadest education is the best. More than ever before, it is now impossible to prophesy what occupation one will eventually follow. The speed of change has increased so greatly that the young man of today must be pre- pared for constant alteration in his status. It is dangerous to be narrow when a dentist may have to dig ditches and a plumber may have to be a philosopher. 1 And so, young sirs, I would suggest that in Leacock's phrase, you mount Pegasus and go in all directions at once.