Goodbye, Messrs. Chips

Each year, U.S. schools and colleges must say goodbye to many a famed & favorite teacher. Among 1949's retirements:

Smith College's Eleanor Shipley Duckett, 68, crisp, brisk author and scholar of Latin and medieval literature (Anglo-Saxon Saints and Scholars; Gateway to the Middle Ages) whose Latin 28 was one of Smith's most uncut classes. A D.Lit. from the University of London, Miss Duckett for years shared a trim white house with her West Highland white terrier Gregory (named after Gregory the Great) and Novelist Mary Ellen Chase (Silas Crockett, The Bible and the Common Reader); she has long celebrated the completion of each Chase book by buying its author an ice cream cone.

Loomis School's Nathaniel Batchelder, 69, stiff-backed headmaster of the Connecticut boys' school. Harvardman Batchelder helped plan the school which five childless members of Connecticut's Loomis family (merchants, lawyers, teachers, divines) decided to found so "that some good may come to posterity through the harvest ... of our lives." As the squirish "Mr. B.", he spent 35 years of his life turning Loomis into one of the top U.S. prep schools.

The University of Michigan's Hereward T. Price, 69, roly-poly Shakespearean scholar and associate editor of the university's Middle English Dictionary. The son of a British missionary, he was born in Madagascar, went to Oxford, taught in Germany, was drafted into the German army in World War I, was captured by the Russians, escaped to edit a newspaper in Peking, finally got to Michigan in 1929. Through 20 years' teaching Professor Price never got over the wonders of Shakespeare, could hardly read a line without striding about the classroom and thundering at his students: "It's beautiful!"

The University of Illinois' James Garfield Randall, 68, most scholarly of the Lincoln biographers (Lincoln and the South; Lincoln the Liberal Statesman), a mild and modest man who could usually be found on Sunday evenings in his kitchen, making talk and scrambled eggs for his favorite students. From other historians Randall won respect, though not always agreement. A Lincolnian with Southern sympathies, he scorned the school that looked upon the Civil War as an "irrepressible conflict," chose to regard the war as the tragic error of an emotional and "blundering generation."

The Harvard Law School's Thomas Reed Powell, 69, testy expert on the U.S. Constitution. A stout man with a bristling mustache, Vermonter Powell was a pitiless and unpredictable examination marker. Known among legal scholars as the "dean of constitutional law," he was once asked whether he would take a Massachusetts teachers' oath to support the Constitution. "Certainly," replied Powell. "It has been supporting me for the last 25 years."

The University of California's Waldemar Christian Westergaard, 67, authority on Scandinavian history (Denmark and Slesvig, 1848-1864; The First Triple Alliance). Plump, pleasant Professor Westergaard long ago gave up classroom seminars ("hard seats don't mean hard heads"), preferred to teach in his own library, smoking a four-foot-long Danish pipe.

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