moted were the Alumni Fund, started in 1924, and alumni participation
in student recruiting. The Techni-Forum was a development of
this latter interest, a program in which principals,
science instructors, and guidance counselors were invited to come
to Boynton Hill to make their own appraisal of the Institute.
Publicity had been a divided load shunted from person to
person for many years. In the old days the very word had been
avoided as sounding too commercial, but in 1925 Charles J.
Adams, the professor of English, had been appointed with candor
"to direct publicity." An excellent speaker with a brilliant
repertoire of stories, he developed a series of radio broadcasts,
announcements, and lectures. It was he who conceived the idea of a
Tech's Founders Day to be observed each year on November 11.
When Professor Swan inherited the task of public relations, he
continued the observance of placing wreaths in Rural Cemetery,
where all the founders of Tech (with the exception of John
Boynton ) had been buried. Then the group of school officials
and student leaders climbed the long hills to the little town of
Mason, New Hampshire, there to place on Mr. Boynton's memorial
stone a memento of a school's ever-growing gratitude. Renaming
the yearbook the Peddler was a by-product of this emphasis on
history, and thus grew the legend of John Boynton as a
peddler--a romantic, but nevertheless exaggerated impression.
In the redistribution of departments after the War, English
(which now was headed by Edwin Higginbottom) and Mathematics
(under Raymond K. Morley) both moved to Stratton, "or
the old M. E. Building." By this time both departments had
acquired new status, the first for its inclusion of literature as well
as composition, the second for its higher and deeper technical
applications.
Professor Morley, who had been the Sinclair professor of
Mathematics since 1921, provided a good bridge from the old
to the new approach. He was entirely familiar with the old and
undisturbed by the new. With either one it was impossible to count
the pieces of chalk as they broke off into the waste-basket
from Professor Morley's restless fingers while he lectured. This
scholarly professor, with his helpful way of translating the
abstract into the tangible, produced an understandable set of models
which were envied and imitated by mathematics teachers across
the country.
Meanwhile the Mechanical Engineering Department was stretching
comfortably in its new quarters, the Higgins Laboratories,
where in 1949 Gleason H. MacCullough, an acknowledged expert
in applied mechanics, had succeeded Francis W. Roys, who
was becoming increasingly active in administrative duties. Almost
half of the degrees granted by Worcester Tech were from this
department of Mechanical Engineering. The new laboratories,
their own best testimony to the development of mechanical
engineering, provided space for experimentation in heat transfer, lub-
