Second Youngest at Third Oldest

On the campus of St. John's College, Annapolis, stands a tulip poplar which some say is 600 years old. In its shade the white colonists made a treaty in 1652 with the Susquehannock Indians. Alumnus Francis Scott Key ("The Star-Spangled Banner") grew nostalgic beneath it in 1806 when he was trying to raise money for St. John's. Here in 1824 the old, fat, crippled Marquis de Lafayette reviewed local troops. Under this venerable poplar are held St. John's commencements every June. Last week it was the scene of the inauguration of St. John's new president, Douglas Huntly Gordon, 30.

Governor Albert Cabell Ritchie, president ex-officio of St. John's board, headed the academic procession, spoke urging young men to enter politics. President Ernest Martin Hopkins of Dartmouth spoke also, said a college's chief objective is to help young men find themselves. Nearby Johns Hopkins sent over its President Joseph Sweetman Ames; U. S. Naval Academy (block away) its Superintendent, Rear Admiral Thomas Charles Hart.

Founded in 1696 as King William's School, St. John's College (so named in 1784) is the U. S.'s third oldest.* It now has the nation's second youngest president, /- President Gordon is the son of the late Douglas Huntly Gordon, onetime owner of the Baltimore News and president of Baltimore Trust Co. His mother is now Mrs. James Wilmer Biddle of Baltimore and Philadelphia. Graduated from Harvard in 1926, Harvard Law School in 1928, Douglas Gordon practiced law in Baltimore, was elected in 1930 to the House of Delegates of the Maryland General Assembly, in which he is to sit until 1934.

He is a busy person. Few days after his inauguration last week he was to argue a case against the City of Baltimore, which for two years he has kept enjoined from building a viaduct which Taxpayer Henry Louis Mencken describes as being "useless as a suspension bridge over the city reservoir." President Gordon is a bibliophile. Some years ago Federal officials seized as "obscene" a set of Rabelais sent him from a European bindery. When Congress passed the amendment admitting recognized classics for private collectors, President Gordon persuaded Secretary Mellon to remove Rabelais from the Treasury Department's blacklist. Lately President Gordon found for his bibliophile friend Boies Penrose, nephew of the late Pennsylvania boss, a post in the history department at St. John's.

Students at St. John's wore uniforms until 1826; black hat, blue coat, trousers grey in winter, white in summer. They took military training until a few years ago, when it was abolished by Lieut.-Colonel Enoch Barton Garey, only military head St. John's ever had. Lieut-Colonel Garey resigned in 1929. Douglas Gordon became acting president last May. Since then he has introduced partial substitution of theses for course examinations, tutorial conferences and individual reading for classroom work.

Only 17th Century library in the U. S. is the 400-volume King William collection owned by St. John's. Among famed alumni: Fairfax and Lawrence Washington (nephews of George Washington) George Washington Parke Custis (adopted son), Reverdy Johnson, U. S. Attorney General (1849-50) under Zachary Taylor, and Amos Walter Wright Woodcock, national director of Prohibition, who when McDowell Hall caught fire in 1909, formed a bucket brigade, rushed into the burning building, saved the King William books from the fate of the John Harvard books in the Harvard fire of 1764.

*Harvard was chartered in 1636, William & Mary in 1693. TIME erred last month in reporting Washington & Jefferson the oldest (1787) west of the Alleghenies. Oldest is Transylvania college (Lexington, Ky.), founded in 1780.

/-Youngest is Lucien Koch, 24, of Commonwealth College (for workers, at Mena, Ark.)

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