The Two Towers: Main

under Stratton's roof seem to be such a strange alliance, and the way both staffs were growing, there was evidence that sooner or later one would crowd out the other. "Golly," said Edwin Higginbottom, emphasizing his point as well as the second syllable, "these boys have to make a life as well as a living. They're hungry for the humanities. It's the old story all over again--if your son asks for bread, do you give him a stone?"

The most visibly significant change in departmental life at W.P.I. was that all the buildings were for the first time given doors leading toward Boynton Hall. Always before the departments had pointedly avoided facing each other. Now it was beginning to look as if nothing ever again would be strictly electrical, chemical, or mechanical.

This was the open-doored campus that greeted the tenth president of the Institute in 1962. After almost a hundred years of establishing and proving itself, Worcester Tech was finally ready to assert itself.

Ready, too, was the three-star general who became its president --Harry Purnell Storke. General Storke's most recent assignment had been as NATO Commander of the Armies of Greece and Turkey. His career had ranged from field artillery to public information, from the Italian campaign of World War II to the command of 114,000 United Nations troops in Korea. He was also at home in academic surroundings because of his teaching experience at West Point and Iowa State College. "I have great faith in American youth," confidently said the new president.

President Storke soon learned the traditions of the Institute and labeled them as "solidly based, completely practical, and wisely foresighted." By fortuitous coincidence he had spent several summer days before his inauguration with one of Tech's professors who knew the school both objectively and subjectively. Carl G. Johnson, who was in the process of raising funds and interest for the new Materials Engineering Laboratories, was both old and new. He had been on campus since he was ten years old, first as an errand boy in his Uncle Johnny Jernberg's forge shop. In 1957 he had been named full professor; in 1962 he became the first John Woodman Higgins Professor of Engineering. A1though Professor Johnson had maintained part or full-time teach-