"Outdoingest Fellers"

"Hit's right smart unhandy to be po'," and live in a mountain cabin on $575 a year, with a woman and six children to keep--and maybe be neighborly and take in a half-dozen extra ones when their parents die. In the three-room cabin there is no heat but from the fireplace, no window, no plumbing. The hill woman is much in childbirth. After six or eight children she may die. The mountaineer takes a second woman, perhaps a third. What becomes of the many young ones, whose blood is of the purest in the U. S.?

Primarily for mountain folk exists Berea College at Berea, Ky. Only 7% of its 1,600 students are admitted from regions outside the Southern Appalachians. Half the students work their way through the Foundation-Junior High School, Academy and College, earn about 76% of their total expenses. No one is too poor to enter. A 16-year-old is not too young; a 63-year-old not too aged. Students are supposed to have $17 for room & board for the first term, but one girl was admitted with 63-c-. Tuition costs nothing. Berea's deficits are made up by subscriptions, endowments, sale of student products. There are many friends, locally and elsewhere. In Manhattan last week Berea was seeking new friends and patrons, with an exhibition--its first--of products of the college's nine saleable student industries. On view were buns, toys, candies, furniture, brooms & brushes, homespuns, rugs, pictures and "kivers" (bedspreads). Mountaineers have plenty of time, which is worth practically nothing to them. Berea attempts to advise them, help them farm and keep house, sell their goods for an honest price.

"Labor" is a required course at Berea; during four years every student must work at least ten hours per week. There are standard courses also, from ABC's to A.B. and B.S. degrees. Visitors to classrooms are impressed with such imaginative hillbilly phrases as: "My home is way up the hollow where the valley snuggles in our little cabin," "I like to read what the goneby men have stored away in their lifetime," "a rage of anger," "the outdoingest feller," "the air from the falls keeps the flowers in motion all the time."

There have been many "outdoing fellers" at Berea since it was founded (as a church) in 1853. In 1885 was graduated the late William Eleazar Barton, who returned to preach at the college church. Dr. Barton always remembered how he plighted troths with a Berea teacher on a hill near the campus. He bought the hill, named it Barton's Pinnacle, willed it to Berea (TIME, Dec. 29, 1930). Dr. Barton, author of many a book on Lincoln and hero of the longest biography in the 1930 Who's Who, sent his son Bruce to Berea for one year. His education he felt would not be complete without that. Son Bruce, now the famed publicist, succeeded his father as a trustee of Berea. He goes to Berea annually, blurbs it liberally, says it is the place where $1 "does more net good than anywhere else." Publicist Barton got 67 friends to pay $1,000 a year to Berea. each of them thus maintaining ten boys or girls. Other benefactors: Andrew Carnegie (library); Dr. Joel Ernest Goldthwait of Boston (Agriculture Building) ; the trustees, who include Banker Melvin Alvah Traylor, Publisher Robert Worth Bingham of the Louisville Courier-Journal, Times, Dr. John Huston Finley of the New York Times, who listed over the radio last week the five things in the world he had always wanted to see: the pyramids, the Sphinx, the Parthenon, the Taj Mahal and Berea College. Trustee Finley has yet to see the last two.

President of the college on the hill, whose campus resembles that of Princeton, is small, white-haired Dr. William James Hutchins. A former Brooklyn pastor, professor at the Oberlin Graduate School, he took the job in 1920. Shy and modest, he wears mist-blue homespun suits from the college shops. Mrs. Hutchins does not wear silk dresses at Berea. Faculty members must conform to regulations: no smoking or drinking. They may be married but students may not. Strictly supervised, the students do not wear fancy clothing, are not permitted to pair off in dark places, for as mountain folk say, "If there's talkin' there's courtin." Dr. Hutchins went to Yale (1892) where there has always been courtin'. So did his son President Robert Maynard ("Bob") of the University of Chicago, to whom Berea gave an LL.D. degree last year. President Hutchins pere will retire at 70 in ten years. Before then he hopes chiefly that Berea will get a new administration building to be named for his predecessor, Dr. William Goodell Frost, who also went to Berea from Oberlin. President Hutchins fils will not retire for many a year. The high post he assumed at 30 is by no means the limit of his ambitions.

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