Worcester Polytechnic Institute - Peddler Yearbook (Worcester, MA)

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writer, ever induced us to crawl out at eight o clock to hear about the dead ones. His bursts of classic sarcasm at the expense of Priestly and Sir William are filed away in our minds with his biting comments on the modern elixirs of life—“Peruna” and Lydia Pinkham s Remedy. And then a half year of peace intervened before we again met him in Organic Chemistry. What a subject it is! How we struggled with the “funny pictures” of the carbon atoms, and what a deuce of a time we had to remember the volumes of material that he told us so easily! One of his lectures constitutes a “three-reel” picture that we hear so much about, but we finally obtained a few doubtful fhckerings of what he was driving at, and some of us passed the course. The other profs kept us up all night studying, and Doctor Jennings insisted on having us all at Organic lecture at eight the next morning. On the grounds of insomnia only can we explain his consistent arrange¬ ment of eight o’clock courses. Senior year he disagreed with us, or we with him, on every pos¬ sible occasion. When we had about decided to take Foundry, he recommended Surveying, because you “could lay out a tennis court so beautifully” with it; then when we were plan¬ ning to choose Bacteriology instead of Analytical Chemistry, the option was abolished, etc., ad infinitum. Some day we shall probably appreciate the wisdom of the perpetual eight o’clocks, the du¬ plicate notebooks, the stock-room system and the host of other inconven¬ iences to which his inven¬ tive genius gave birth. But these were things of mo¬ mentary inconvenience and irritation. The pleasant things about our “Hughie” that we shall remember long after these little grouches have been forgot¬ ten are his colossal ability as a lecturer in imparting 24

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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

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life and interest to the dullest subject on earth,—History of Chem¬ istry,—and his interest in the work of the individual. ND whose voice is it that A 1 first salutes the Freshman, after the President has told them how ignorant they are and how hard they must labor to retain a foothold on the Hill? “Coombsie’s,” comes the answer. “Correct, Archibald! Go to the head of the class.” Zelotes Wood Coombs, A. M., but to us he is and al¬ ways will be, Coombsie. It is not without reason that he is called “the Freshman Profes¬ sor” for he is the one member of the Faculty who is privileged to feast upon their mistakes and ignorance, to guide their unwary footsteps, to lecture them upon their childishness and comb their matted thoughts. Shall we ever be able to forget his lectures? Oh yes, we have practically done that already; but never will we forget their occurrence, with their invariable opening of “The themes are coming in with commendable regularity,” and the running fire of comment on the previous week’s themes. The bulletin board which was always “coming up the Hill”, the “vice” in the shops, the “principle idear,” “I would due,” “English decent,” and similar errors furnished material for his discourse. “Who I Am, and Why I Came to the Institute,” has furnished us with food for reflection ever since its writing, and “A Classical or Technical Education” is still an undecided point in our minds. The mere fact that “the beetle-browed villain” and the “fero¬ cious dog” were both old and decrepit before we ever heard of the Institute was a trifle that we failed to consider. We did n’t realize that the “apple orchard” on the “Walk to Wachusett” had been plundered every year, until any self-preserving farmer would have cut it down and sown buckwheat in its place, nor did we know that 25