Cornell Alumni News - eCommons@Cornell - Cornell University

CORNELL ALUMNI NEWS
March 1967
• For the better part of a year during
World War II, a series of mimeographed
reports on the Cornell scene and life in
Ithaca were mailed out from Boardman
Hall. Their author was Frederick G. Marcham,
a history professor who found that
he could not otherwise handle an evergrowing
correspondence with his former
students and undergraduate friends in the
armed forces all over the world.
He wrote to them about getting up at
6 a.m. to fish for 10-inch browns; about
the potatoes he was growing on a small
farm outside Ithaca; and about the best
place on campus to watch birds.
Newsletter No. 1 had this to say about
slumbering students:
MAN
WITH MANY
MISSIONS
Boardman Hall
February 14, 1944
". . . These Army and Navy boys, that
is, of course, all who had not originally
entered as Cornellians, are a remarkable
bunch. They make the oddest group of
students any of us have ever taught.
They sleep. What they do at night I
don't know; indeed, I don't like to imagine.
But in the day time they sleep. They
sleep in lectures. They sleep in recitations.
They sleep in eight o'clock classes.
They sleep immediately before lunch.
And, of course, all the more soundly
March 1967
BY MRS. TOMMIE BRYANT
immediately after lunch. My long experience
in History 61 has, of course, made
me well acquainted with the sleeping student.
I always believed that no class was
complete without a sleeping student and
a sleeping dog. [That, by the way, reminds
me that most of the campus dogs
have gone and that one famous description
of a lecture of mine, "laughs and a
dog fight," could no longer apply.] I was
always interested in the sleeping student
and I got to know pretty well the sleeping
habits of a great many. But this knowledge
counts for little in face of the
scene which I see before me daily. Whole
rows of students sleep. Last Tuesday
morning I taught a class at 9:00. I decided
to begin it by a pep talk. In the
space of ten minutes I spoke on the folly
and scandal of this practice of sleeping.
By the time I had finished half the class
was asleep. In the course of the rest of
the hour the best part of the remainder
decided to follow suit.
Professor Frederick G. Marcham
The newsletters attracted a large following
and, were one to put together a composite
"typical" response by lifting actual
sentences from some of the many answering
letters he received, it might read this
way:
"Hi, Trout Taker—
"I just drained your letter dry of all
the news and feel much better. You surely
write about things that hit the spot. This
is being written in a tent on the edge of
a hayfield in Normandy. We play softball
in a pasture and dodge cows as we chase
the ball.
"Before I got shipped here, I had a
couple of chances in the ring. I certainly
learned some very good and useful things
from you and Ray. One of these is that
combination left jab to the head, left hook
to the stomach, and right cross to the
head. It still works.
"Well, 'Prof,' please be sure to keep
me on your mailing list, and one of these
days I'll be seeing you and Cornell (which
is practically one and the same thing).
By the way, would you happen to know
Lacey's APO number? I lost track of
him after we left Scott AFB.
A former History 61 sleeper."
Frederick George Marcham first appeared
on the Cornell campus in the fall
of 1923, a deceptively slight, sandy-haired
young Englishman of 25. Born in Reading
(the birthplace also of historian Goldwin
Smith) in 1898, he came from a modest
background, the son of a brewery laborer
who later operated a pub, The Plasterer's
Arms. At age 11 he won a scholarship to a
large English public school, Christ's Hospi-