Worcester Polytechnic Institute - Peddler Yearbook (Worcester, MA)

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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

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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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the same sentences had described and amused preceding classes for years before. And what does it matter? It served a purpose and kept us good natured through the remainder of the hour, which was worth a great deal. He was our best-beloved then, and won our undy¬ ing devotion by his loyalty to athletics; winning or losing, he was always cheery in his out¬ look for the Future, —the teams which we would turn out when we obtained better facilities,— the remarkable showing we were making under existing conditions, and his enthusiastic recitals of the attitude of the Alumni at the last banquet he attended; how they hung on every word about the struggle the teams were making under such adverse circumstances, how they cheered and clapped in appreciation of our efforts, and the joy with which they too looked forward to the Gymnasium. It was Coombsie who made himself immortal by his single-umbrel- lad attack upon the struggling mob before Boynton Hall, and like the warriors of old, “his mighty weapon rose and fell with untiring strength upon the awed and helpless enemy, who in their efforts to escape the fell blows of this most mighty of warriors, turned and trampled friend and foe beneath their feet, that they might escape the havoc of his terrible progress.” And how we smile when we remember his annual lecture upon smoking and his poor misguided plants who did their darndest to make him embrace the noxious weed. Can you imagine him Sunday morning seated before his plant-stand, a rubber bulb in his hand, lustily forcing air through a pipe that he may, without injury to himself, smoke to a suitable death the vile lice which would 26