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

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THOMAS L. DONAHUE

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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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7 refiiclenf 5 ezifiage N ADDRESSING the class of 1960, I do so with feelings of respect and almost envy. As you go forth into the seventh decade of this century, you go into a world revolutionized by scientists and engineers, a world where scientific discoveries and engineering application have multi- plied exponentially over the last two hundred years and are continuing at this rate. Many of you in your four years at the Polytechnic have studied areas of human knowledge that were undreamed of when I was a young man. Many of you had the .advantage of an educa- tional program which has been, more and more, oriented toward scientific engineering, towards a firm and solid foundation in the fundamental laws of science, followed by thorough exposure to the engineering sciences. You took part in your undergraduate years in the most forward physical move in the history of the Polytechnic. You were the men who began your undergraduate years on Liv- ingston Street and finished your studies in Rogers Hall. But while you had the advantage of a truly Fine education imparted by an outstanding faculty, you missed some of the nicities of a fine physical plant - e.g., a gymnasium, a Student Union Build- ing. I can assure you that in this coming decade, as you return to alumni gatherings, you will see a truly Greater Polytechnic, a Poly that will grow educationally as it has grown in your years here, and a Poly that will possess a physical plant commensurate with its academic greatness. And so you go into the world as a Poly-educated scientist or engineer. Yet you should view humanity as natural white light which, when passed through a prism, is resolved into a rich and Varied spectrum of colors. You must realize that it is the sum total of them all that gives us white light. Similarly, we have a spectrum of professions and occupations, of atti- tudes and behavior patterns, of traits and personalities, the sum of which is synthesized into humanity. The basis of our democracy is the belief that all persons should have the right, the opportunity, the obligation, and the actual habit of exploring values for themselves, planning and living their own lives. If we recognize this cardinal principle of democracy, we must at once admit that there are many ways to a happy life, many avenues to individual satisfaction. VVe must admit also that all should know something about these many ways of life, not by mere hearsay, but by individual ex- perience! Only if we have been exposed to this marvelous variety of human interests and efforts can we learn to appreciate the richness of humanity within which our professions represent only one sector. If we, as scientists and engineers, are to exert the leadership that is expected of us, we must aspire to the most mature set of values we can develop. We must come to see man's arts and sciences - the beauty of his poetry, the depths of his philosophy, the aspirations of his religions, his complex history, the multitude of political and economic theories - as integral parts of a broad and beau- tiful spectrum, whose synthesis leads to genuine tolerance and human understanding. ERNST WEBER President