Cole to Amherst

At the end of his first year at Amherst, Freshman Charles Woolsey Cole won second prizes in Latin and math, a fact which he remembers with some sadness: "I was always winning second prizes," he says.

But by the end of his senior year he was editor-in-chief of the Amherst Student, and a Phi Beta Kappa who graduated summa cum laude. Last week Amherst gave boyish, blue-eyed Charles Cole, 39, the best first prize it had to offer--its presidency.

As twelfth president of Amherst, among whose graduates were Classmates Dwight Morrow and Calvin Coolidge, Dr. Cole will succeed President Stanley King, 62 (a fraternity brother in Delta Kappa Epsilon), who is retiring July 1, soon after Amherst's 125th birthday party. As an old grad returning home, Charles Cole well knows the history of Amherst's elm-grown, hilltop campus, which had its start when a group of ardent Puritans from Williams College struck out for themselves, determined to "educate indigent young men of hopeful piety."*

Charles Cole has been married since 1928 to a pretty, witty Smith girl named Katharine Bush Salmon ("It was one of those Smith-Amherst romances"). She has some success as a writer, while he has published four books largely devoted to his specialty, French mercantile practices during the 17th Century.

Most of Professor Cole's 17-odd years of teaching have been spent at Amherst and Columbia. He is LIFE'S adviser on history. At Columbia for a time he helped teach the famed course in Contemporary Civilization, which Columbia proudly considers the daddy of all the new style "integrated" courses.

In 1931 college heads sent Professor Cole packing off to Maine to write a text on physics and the modern world, precisely because he was an amateur in the subject. They guessed rightly that the freshmen would understand it better if a nonscientist wrote it. Professor Cole compressed a summer's reading into some 100 pages, which the Physics Department promptly approved; he thought the assignment "a lot of fun." He is the kind of man who, when he accepted a post as visiting lecturer at Yale, spent the time commuting from Amherst teaching himself Spanish.

Charlie Cole, "at times a disconcertingly bright guy" in the eyes of his friends, has been professor of history at Columbia since 1940, but has taken time out, first to serve as an OPA branch chief, pinning ceiling price tags on laundry tickets and the work of stevedores, then as a Navy instructor in Military Government. In 1943 Amherst got around to borrowing him too, to head an alumni committee to consult on postwar plans. Amherst is heading toward a system of carefully integrated freshman and sophomore years, more freedom for upperclassmen. An inveterate gardener, President Cole's prime worry at the moment is his new formal, presidential garden. "It's not the kind you grow squash in," he says. "More suitable for lawn parties."

*Amherst was founded in 1821, but not by Lord Jeffrey Amherst for whom it is named. Lord Jeff had "conquered all the enemies that came within his sight . . . in the wilds of this wild country," during the French and Indian War (1754-63).

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