The Two Towers: Main

officer on campus. Rangy, long-geared, the Dean was known by the students for forty years as Spider Roys. He had had a heavy load for much of the time, carrying one-third of the school's instruction in his department of Mechanical Engineering, besides being chairman of the committee on Courses of Study and Degrees and chairman of the faculty. All the way he had fought the battle, sometimes an unpopular one, for a strong undergraduate program. Named vice-president in 1956, Dean Roys held that office until 1963, when he retired after fifty-three years of dedicated service to Tech.

Dean Roys was also chairman of the board for a time until he was succeeded in 1954 by Philip M. Morgan. Mr. Morgan was the son and grandson of two former trustees and for a period served on the board simultaneously with his father. Under Morgan leadership the school was guided through a time of reorganization much as it had been organized under the surveillance of community leaders. There was no gainsaying the editorial comment made by the Worcester Evening Gazette that W.P.I. was a "famous technical school, founded as a community institution and grew up as one." For anyone who overlooked this traditional community participation and support, there would be trouble.

School started in the fall of 1954 with a sense of well-being, two hurricanes, and an unbeaten, untied football season, which rivaled the year of 1938, when weather and football had had a similar collusion.

Doc Carpenter, who retired in 1952, was still on the bench to watch the Engineers win and to share the satisfaction of his successor, Robert W. Pritchard.

Varsity athletics had had short shrift during the War. There had been hardly enough men to fill the spots on the diamond in baseball. Intramural activities had been nevertheless strong, especially after Aldus Higgins had given playing fields for soccer and tennis (Edwin Higginbottom was coach for both) in the name of the Class of 1893. But with the exception of Pete, the mascot, commended by Admiral Cluverius as "presumably a good student and well behaved," no one had received any awards. With the victory celebration after the football season in 1954, teachers, trustees, teams, and students agreed Worcester Tech had turned the hard corner of the past and was headed in a new direction.

Still--over the campus could often be heard the metallic clang of the old Tech bell, its sound covering the grounds like a heavy blanket of reminder. More than likely it was only a call for Nils Hagberg, the campus chief of police, but sometimes in an eerie moment there were persons who wondered who was ringing it-- John Boynton or Ichabod Washburn.

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