The Two Towers: Main

A college needs equipment, books, buildings, playing fields and money--but most of all, it needs men, men like Charlie Allen.
      --Tribute to Charles M. Allen from the A.S.M.E.

members of the A.S.M.E. stood in deference to Professor Allen when he entered their meeting in 1947, he showed his surprise, but soon recovered composure with a wave of the hand: "Not me. I've paid my way."

Indeed he had paid his way, receiving only half salary for his teaching schedule, the rest of his livelihood earned by consulting. All office expenses of the lab, the furniture, telephone, and even stamps he had paid for himself. He made no complaints, and he would have been the first to say that the most valuable thing he gave to the school was his successor, Leslie J. Hooper, a Worcester Tech graduate. Professor Hooper, who had affiliated with the laboratory in 1927, had widely extended its research, but always in the best of Charlie Allen traditions.

Since 1900 the great area of the laboratory grounds, which included two hundred and sixty acres of land and three ponds, had been available to the students of Civil Engineering for a practice area. There they had camped for three weeks of the year and had laid out their imaginary railroads and highways in ideally simulated conditions. They even helped to cut the many cords of wood for Charlie Allen's wood stoves until oil and steam boilers were installed as concessions to progress. "What shall we name this park?" he asked the students one day when they were clearing a fire road through the woods. "Back Acres," said one of the boys --giving the area a name so appropriate that it has never needed another.

Arthur French had retired as head of Civil Engineering in 1933, as an instructor in 1938, but could be seen almost any day of the week in his emeritus corner of Arthur Knight's little office in Boynton. There, puffing his familiar corn cob pipe and throwing his long legs over the edge of the roll top desk, he kept good track of his old department, with special interest in the consulting activities headed by his successor, Andrew Holt. Professor French himself, until well after eighty, supervised many municipal and industrial building projects in the City. He was also instrumental in formulating Worcester's building laws and in supervising the construction of every building on Tech's campus since 1899.

The Washburn Shops reflected the changes in engineering more than did any other department of the school--the Shops, that is, and the Power Laboratory, which had been completely revamped even to its new chimney stack. The old forge shop had been replaced by a modern welding shop under the direction of Carl Johnson, the Horatio Alger professor who had had no formal education but was already the author of textbooks which were used in every important engineering school of the country.

A start had been made in 1931 to refurnish the Washburn Shops with modern machinery; in 1952 there was another spurt of enthusiasm when the old Rawson coupling was adapted to Army helicopters. But it was not the same. Gone now were the old over-