The Two Towers: Main

I should call the whole plan a failure both from the academic point of view, and from the military point of view.
      --Ira N. Hollis, 1923

the shoes were green, with mold, certainly not from envy of anything in Boynton Hall's basement.

Now tomorrow would be better, thought the students, but tomorrow was a long time coming. The athletic program was suspended almost entirely during the war, prompting the observation: "Football did not possess even the merit of character building during this period." And Tech's director of Physical Education was far away in France, directing a Y.M.C.A.-sponsored training program in the recreational centers of the French Army.

When in the fall of 1918 the school became one of the five hundred in the country which were taken over as Army training centers, the whole structure of Worcester Tech was torn apart to accommodate the program. Fraternities were turned into barracks, the classrooms into drill halls. On a floor at balcony level over the unfinished swimming pool, a mess hall was set up where Fred Margerum, the school's electrician, became mess sergeant, thanks to proverbial Army magic. His lemon meringue pie was something to be relished and remembered.

The opening of school was delayed until the 11th of October in 1918 because of the flu epidemic, which slapped hard at the whole community. For only a month thereafter the students were part of the war effort--wearing uniforms, standing in frequent reviews, and subjecting themselves to supervised study and military drill. When in November the Armistice came with its great roar of relief, the school decided to terminate the military arrangement. By Christmas the curriculum had slipped back into some semblance of normalcy, but school spirit dragged its heels for a long, long time.

One part of the Institute which prospered with the war was the hydraulic laboratory, which in 1915, because of repeated generosity, was named the Alden Hydraulic Laboratory. George Alden, too, had come back to the Tech fold, appointed to the board in 1912 at the time of Mr. Higgins' death. Mr. Alden's interest centered primarily on the laboratory in Holden, perhaps because Charlie Allen kept it there.When in 1908 a meter station was to be placed across the street from the main laboratory, Charles Allen had taken the plans to Mr. Alden. With no other preliminary than the reminder of the man in the Bible who put his hand on the plow and was advised to keep it there--an allusion to the fact that Mr. Alden had suggested the laboratory in the first place--he asked Mr. Alden to finance the meter station project.

It was not too difficult to persuade Mr. Alden, so strong a friend was he of anything experimental. At Norton Company, of which he had become president, Mr. Alden had his own draftsman and experimental program. This former professor had the obsessive wish to find a mechanical method of determining the grinding grade of abrasive wheels. His frustrations at being unsuccessful in this respect made him flare up in frequent arguments with his