The Two Towers: Main

running track, a truck for the ground crew, tennis courts, new boilers and stokers, tools and laboratory equipment. Sometimes an alumnus found himself signing for an evergreen tree or a foot of sidewalk. A. J. Knight, the Superintendent of Buildings and Grounds, who was as anxious as the president to have things "ship-shape," set up a thorough program of repairing buildings, walks, and landscapes. Harry Sinclair (himself a Tech man, and the only one who could boast that both his father and mother had been Institute teachers) paid for the extensive project of tree surgery.

At the first Commencement at which Ralph Earle officiated as president, several honorary degrees were given. Only twice before had such a degree been given--to himself the previous year, and to Henry P. Armsby, first man in the alphabetical list of graduates of the first class, at his fiftieth reunion in 1921. Four months later, Mr. Armsby died.

In 1926 the same thing happened in the case of George I. Alden. With only a few months intervening, there then came the successive deaths of Charles G. Washburn and James Logan, both of whom also had been given long-deserved honorary recognition.

George Alden, the oldest at eighty-three, had been too feeble to attend the Commencement exercises. He nevertheless had had the satisfaction of equipping the Alden Hydraulic Laboratory with a completely new building in that year. He had extended its boundaries and set up a trust fund for its permanent endowment. He had also set up his entire estate, estimated at three million, in a plan of benefaction which would in time rival any other in the community for its generosity. In its specifications there was liberal provision for the "promotion of industrial education."

Mr. Alden, with his rare combination of abilities both scientific and practical, had traveled far from the confines of the Alden homestead in Templeton. Completely unaffected by the affectation and sophistication with which he learned to live, he kept his country mannerisms and memories to the end of his life. In his later years he found a retreat on a Princeton hillside, where he often sat to watch the sunlight as it slipped back and forth through a stand of willows before going on to light the great valley beyond. It was long after Mr. Alden's death before anyone noticed how similar was this Princeton view to one with which he had grown up--on the other side of the mountain.

On the day the new Alden Hydraulic Laboratory building was dedicated in 1926, another long-time friend of Tech died. R. Sanford Riley, president of Tech's famous Class of 1896, had been literally a neighbor of the school, having lived in the old Higgins house on the corner (his wife was Katharine Higgins) since 1912. In friendly and financial ways, he and his family had continued to support Tech and through him many ties with the school's past had remained unbroken.

Like Milton Higgins before him, he kept horses--not Buckskin,

A. J. Knight

There is no such thing as a self-made man. Men are made by what they go up against.
      --James Logan, 1930

George I. Alden's benefactions and Charles M. Allen's skill have transformed the Chaffins plant into the best college hydraulics laboratory in America.
      --The Journal, 1926