Hobby Hall

Last week in The Hill School, Pottstown, Pa., there were no students. But in their dispersed homes where they were passing their Easter vacation, the students thought often of their school. For to The Hill two great things had happened.

One was the gift of Alumnus Briggs Cunningham. He bought and presented to the school the ring in which Fisticuffer James Joseph Tunney defeated onetime world champion William Harrison Dempsey in Philadelphia (TIME, Oct. 4, 1926). It will be installed in the rambling gymnasium after the basketball season. Here many students, more paperweight than featherweight, will box, mimicking in miniature the giant punches of the champions who once battled there. Here too will box lusty footballers who later may lead teams at Wesleyan, Yale, Princeton. . . .

The other great thing was the $300,000 building promised by Mrs. Alexander Hamilton Rice of Manhattan, as a memorial to her son Alumnus Harry Elkins Widener. The building has already been nicknamed "Hobby Hall," It will contain lathes, printing presses, cinema machines, dark rooms, telescopes, microscopes, stuffed birds, model engines, yards of linoleum for linoleum blocks, modelling clay, paints. Here students may feed, groom, ride their hobbies, also take courses in natural sciences.