Worcester Polytechnic Institute - Peddler Yearbook (Worcester, MA)

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extremity as a joke threaded its way enjoyably and slowly thr ough his mind to utterance. What a picture he made with his long legs coiled up and carefully folded over each other in an effort to keep them on the platform with the rest of his person, and the number of positions he could occupy in the space of an hour gave us constant cause for wonder! And the questions that his mind conceived to harass us: (1) Would a child, born of a Chinese father and English mother, be an American citizen, if born on a ship flying the French flag, having Span¬ ish papers and resting in an Amer¬ ican port? (2) a. If the wool mar¬ ket were glutted with an excess of wool, what would be the effect on the price of beef? b. How would you finance a war under such conditions? But there is another side to Jenny that brought us closer to¬ gether than these questions, which rather kept us apart, for he knew the answers and usually we didn’t! From him we gained some¬ thing of his kindliness toward erring humanity, some of the char¬ acteristics of the true gentleman, some of his love of fair play and cleanliness in all things, and through him we realized as we never realized before that true politeness is thoughtfulness for others. And these things are of paramount importance, for we should be men and gentlemen first, and scientists, engineers or what-not afterwards. And it was he who instilled into some and developed in others that most valuable attribute, civic and national pride, unobscured by bigotry or prejudice. It was he who pushed back our narrow horizon that we might have a broader outlook on life and its problems, on politics and its mysteries,—on law and its obscurities. It was he who brought home to us that but a few years intervened before we would be called upon to help solve these problems. And for these things we thank him. Jenny came to us from Amherst, via Johns Hopkins. We don’t know but we think we would like to have been his crony at Amherst, for analysis and deduction leads us to believe that they were 22

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■ Professors A lthough every ap - proach to a diploma at the Institute bristles with Sci¬ ence and its queer machines and experiments, Jenny, known to the world as Professor George H. Haynes, amid all this stress and strain, sits peacefully in his inner sanctum and reads,— reads papers, reads men and their actions, totally oblivious and unconcerned with whether the gears in the next building are meshing properly or whether some careless chemist a few doors below is preparing to make a quart or more of nitrogen tricloride. And again, he is one of many, for where will you find another man combining such thorough knowledge of his subjects with such delightful irony and equipped with such a voice for utterance? Where will you find a man so refined and thoughtful of others, so broad, yet so congenial? The mere mention of Jenny’s lectures brings a smile of pleasant reminiscence and amusement. How delicately he could shake theo¬ retical hands with the Standard Oil Co., his soft voice telling all the while what a damnable, corrupt business it was; how graphically he would denounce the tariff without saying one word against it, his delicate irony telling so clearly and entertainingly what he retrained from saying. We remember with amusement his far-away look at the Washburn Shops while the late arrivals struggled and tumbled over the rapidly outstretched feet in an effort to gain their seats noise¬ lessly; we recall his twitching lips, nervous tongue and oscillating pedal 21

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red-letter days, filled to their utmost capacity with life and activity. Only such a youth could have become the widely read, broad minded, cultured gentleman that we are so glad to ascend Tech Hill with. k ROM the most recent map ¥ showing the geographical distribution of nicknames on the Hill, we find that the top floor of the Salisbury labora¬ tories bristles with them; in fact, if nicknames were a key to popularity, Doctor Jennings would be far and away the most popular man on the Hill. Beily, Beilstein, Hatchet-Face, Old Sleuth, Hughie and the Detective constitute his more common aliases; only the Fresh¬ men call him “Doctor Jen¬ nings.” Harvard’s Class of 1889 was the proud possessor of this devotee of tennis and lover of derivations. He later studied in both Berlin and Heidelberg, and if Emil Fischer ever did anything that the Senior Chemists haven’t heard about, it probably isn’t fit to tell. Qualitative Analysis was the first subject in which Hughie chaperoned us; it was here that he paid us monthly visits just after the issuing of the marks, bearing individual records of each man in his hands and accompanied with a personal lecture as to the results of the previous month’s work. At that early date in our career, he had us scared “stiff,” and we never tr ied to tell our side of it. Probably it is just as well, for now that we have gotten well over our fright we still find that we can’t tell him anything. And yet this personal display of interest in the work of the individual is one of the qualities that we have come to admire in the man who has been guiding our footsteps; his constant attendance during thesis work and his active participation in the solution of the various problems that presented themselves are characteristic of him. And then came History of Chemistry! Only his marvelous ability as an entertaining lecturer, coupled with his carelessness in the use of the letter E on the type- 23 —4