Polytechnic Institute of Brooklyn - Polywog Yearbook (Brooklyn, NY)

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cizdeolicafion HOMAS L. DONAHUE was the kind of man around whom, in a less self-conscious and sophis- ticated age, legends could grow. He was a different person and meant different things to dillerent people. And sometimes, to those who knew him best, he was several different people at the same time. In a word, there were many Donahues. There was the Donahue who worked as a reporter on the Hartford Courant and the Water- bury Republican and who never forgot his training. This was the man who kept abreast with the news to the end, who was out on Court Street every morning at six to buy his copy of the New York Times and who spent a diligent hour digesting it, to work up an appetite for breakfast. He was always hot on the track of a story - in Poly, in the Brooklyn Club, on the streets of Brooklyn Heights, his home base for many years. He even knew the temperature in a score of American cities each day. This was the Donahue who kept a hand and two eyes on the Reporter for almost all the 30 years he was at Poly, without in any way infringing on its freedom, and who protected it stubbornly from any infringement. His home and his office were at the disposal of the Reporter staff whenever they needed it. There was Donahue the teacher, who could bawl out students mercilessly, but never to the point of no return, always ready to relent and to put his arm around the errant studentis shoulder. He knew the pressures young students are under in a tough engineering college. That's why he was constantly challenging them to fight him, to assert and express themselves, to have dignity. He knew how to get them to help each other and so make up for defects in teachers or textbooks. In his own way he got solid, hard work out of his students and was conscientious in his conferences and criticisms. There was Donahue the frustrated actor, putting on a show at the drop of a hat, knowing that it was phony, telling you so, but enjoying it to the hilt and making you enjoy it, scattering his bit- ing, brilliant wit with a free hand, anywhere. There was Donahue the property-owner, shrewdly real-estate-conscious, running his house with economic eagerness and yet with a deeply human tolerance towards his tenants, all of whom learned to respect and love him. There was Donahue the disturbed human being, full of conflicts and contradictions often, embarrassingly confessing his own weakness in class, at home over a drink, in a restaurant, unex- pectedly and with no holds barred. Put all these Donahues, plus some more, together, and you have a man who believed in peo- ple, and particularly in students, in spite of or because of weaknesses in himself and in them, who fought with tenacity for just treatment of people and who will be remembered for many a year in Poly, and particularly where Poly Alumni get together. If any man deserved a dedication in our Polywog it was Thomas L. Donahue. Pity he can't read it. He probably would have blue-pencilled it.

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. l 1 -I i .. -.1 ?' N. MENACI-IEM BALFOUR GARY M. BIXON EDWARD FUCHS Ezlilm--in-Clzief Aflanagiug Editor Business Editor Layout Editor Q C5 STAFF

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THOMAS L. DONAHUE