A Little Imprudent

The Rev. Jeremiah Chaplin rested on his oars and gazed with tired satisfaction over the Kennebec River valley. He had rowed 20 miles upriver. There, he decided that June day in 1818, was an ideal site for his Maine Literary and Theological Institution.

A hundred years later, the site no longer seemed ideal. A smelly paper mill and a railroad yard hemmed in the school (now renamed Colby College).

In 1930 Colby decided to move to a hillside spot just outside Waterville, Me. The college had a new president, Franklin Winslow Johnson, a square-jawed Colby graduate, who had written a clause into his contract declaring that he would not have to raise funds. But he spent most of the next 13 years doing just that. (Notable catch: $200,000 from the Saturday Evening Post's George Horace Lorimer '98.) By 1942, when Johnson retired, the first of Colby's new Georgian buildings blossomed amid the trailing arbutus on Mayflower Hill.

This week, as construction began again after a wartime halt, ex-President Johnson, now 75, turned up at commencement to make an announcement. He had already given Colby $11,000; now he wanted to give it $96,000 more--adding up to more than his $104,000 salary in 13 years as president. Explained Johnson shyly: "A schoolmaster doesn't earn much money, but I have lived frugally and made some prudent investments. I would be able to give the college more if I hadn't made some imprudent ones, too."

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