Time to Retire

In colleges and universities all over the U.S., it was time to say goodbye; and some top professors were saying it with finality. Among them:

P: Princeton's Henry Morris Russell, 69, grey, wispy-haired professor of astronomy. One of the world's leaders in his field, he developed a way of measuring movement of stars by photography, established giant and dwarf star groups, was one of two Princeton men to win doctorates in physics summa cum laude. Professor Russell once predicted that, in about a billion years, the earth's atmospheric oxygen will be used up, and in a few billion more "the universe will be thoroughly uninteresting."

P: Princeton's Historian Thomas Jefferson Wertenbaker, 68, Virginia-born chairman of the history department, whose books on the pre-Revolutionary South (The First Americans, The Founding of American Civilisation, etc.) gave U.S. history students one of their liveliest and most authoritative pictures of the Cavalier tradition, the manners & morals, art & architecture of Colonial America. Wertenbaker was twice appointed to Oxford's honored Harold Vyvyan Harmsworth Chair of American History. His advice to students: "Teacher says Shakespeare was a great dramatist; question it. Teacher says Jamestown was the birthplace of the nation; question it."

P: The University of Chicago's Dr. Dallas B. Phemister, 64, chairman of the department of surgery. Shy Dr. Phemister first demonstrated that surgical shock was the result of blood loss from effective circulation; he also devised an operative procedure to arrest bone growth where disease made children's limbs unequal.

P: Yale's Everett Victor Meeks, 68, bulging, Mephistophelean architect, dean of the School of Fine Arts during the 25 years of its greatest glory (so many of its students won the Prix de Rome that they dubbed it Prix de Yale).

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