By Linda Grace-Kobas
Fifty years ago on June 15, 1947, The New York Times Magazine published a cover story on the Cornell Class of 1947. The article described how this energetic postwar class was different from any other that preceded it, with about a quarter of the men already married with children. Ninety percent of the seniors in the College of Engineering were veterans. Job prospects for all graduates -- including the women, in those preliberation days -- were excellent. Author Gilbert Bailey called members of the Class of 1947 "perhaps the most cheerful and optimistic citizen in the country."
What happened to the nine seniors profiled in the Times article? With the help of Barlow Ware, '47 class correspondent, the Chronicle sought them out. Here they are again, first as described in the Times in 1947 and then updated a half-century down the road:
EDITOR -- Barbara ("Bimby")
Everitt of Urbana, Ill., one of the best-known
girls on the campus, is president of the Panhellenic
Council and women's editor of The Cornell
Sun. She hopes to get a magazine job in New York.
UPDATE -- "We women who were in Cornell during wartime were liberated 10 or 15 years earlier than much of our generation," "Bimby," now Barbara Everitt Bryant, says. Her life has been a successful merging of work and family, an early model of the balancing act still faced by women.
Bryant majored in physics at Cornell, though she said her father joked that her "real major" was the Cornell Daily Sun. Because of the war, she said that women took over many roles on campus that had previously been for men only.
"I had some enormous responsibilities that introduced me to more in life than was traditional," Bryant says.
After graduating from Cornell, Bryant did get a magazine job and worked as an editor and technical writer for McGraw Hill. She did freelance writing while her children were small, and after her youngest child started school, she earned a Ph.D. from Michigan State University. Over the next 19 years, she worked her way up to senior vice president of Market Opinion Research in Detroit and directed major national survey projects for three presidential commissions: Gerald Ford's Commission on Observance of International Women's Year, Jimmy Carter's Commission on World Hunger and Ronald Reagan's Commission on Americans Outdoors.
Of her time as a working mother -- well before that became the norm for American women -- Bryant says, "Anytime you take on two big roles, they together add up to more than 100 percent of your time. The balancing act always ends up with a lack of sleep -- another thing I learned at Cornell and the Daily Sun.
"I don't think you'll ever solve all of the stresses," she adds. "My husband and I twice had a commuting marriage. Define for yourself what parts of each role are most important to you and prioritize those. Be clear with the person you marry about what your career drives are and understand what his career drives are. I've always said: Marry the right person and choose the right boss."
In 1989, President Bush appointed her director of the Bureau of the Census; she was the 31st director and first woman to head the agency, which she led through 1993.
A belief in "numbers and optimism" was the attribute that The New York Times in a 1990 profile said accounted for Bryant's willingness to take on that politically and logistically challenging duty. The article noted that Bush hoped her strong background in both statistics and public relations would quell Congressional critics of the Census and increase public participation in what has been termed "the biggest government operation outside of a war." She directed a workforce of about 350,000 temporary employees "with every mayor and congressperson breathing down my neck." She initiated the monumental task of moving the Census to computerized information collection and quality management.
Bryant wrote Moving Power and Money: The Politics of Census Taking (New Strategist, 1995) about that experience.
She has no immediate plans for retirement. Bryant designed and is directing the survey research methodology for the American Customer Satisfaction Index (ACSI), a national economic indicator co-sponsored by the University of Michigan Business School and the American Society for Quality Control.
Married to engineer John H. Bryant, Bryant has three grown children and eight grandchildren. Reviewing a life full of published writings and honors, what gives her satisfaction?
"The neighbors all thought my children would end up with problems because of my working," she laughs. All three went to college and have successful careers.
SALESMAN -- Robert Gallagher, 24, spent three years at Cornell before the war, became a Navy pilot, then returned to captain the basketball team. A history major, he will go into insurance with his father in Chicago.
UPDATE -- Bob Gallagher's life has been filled with success. The innovative and aggressive insurance practices he and his brothers developed in the 1950s and '60s propelled their father's Chicago-based family business from a five-person company in 1947 to what it is today: Arthur J. Gallagher & Co., the eighth largest insurance broker worldwide, listed on the New York Stock Exchange. After serving for almost 30 years as president and chief executive officer, this grandson of an Irish immigrant is now chairman of the board of the company. A review of his career, with its business and charitable activities, as well as awards and honors, would fill a book.
These days, though, he glosses over all that. What he really wants to talk about is the Big Shoulders Scholarship Program and the dream he shared with the late Cardinal Joseph Bernardin: to rescue at least some of a "lost generation" of inner-city kids.
"We simply can't abandon a whole generation of kids into a bottomless pit that gets deeper with every year," Gallagher says. In 1994, he endowed the Gallagher Scholars Program with a $500,000 gift to the Archdiocese of Chicago to give scholarships to inner-city children so they can attend Catholic schools, where they follow a 10-point "code of conduct" that requires them to set goals and helps them develop self-confidence. To date, he has given more than $5 million to the scholarship program.
Gallagher movingly describes the relationship that grew between him and Bernardin during the last few years, as they worked together to build the Big Shoulders Program. During that time, Gallagher's daughter, Lauren, underwent treatment for, and died of, cancer, even as the Cardinal was waging his personal battle with the disease, which claimed his life late last year.
Gallagher considers his Scholars Program to be a special tribute to the memory of the Cardinal, who wrote in a personal letter to Gallagher only weeks before his death, "In a society that is experiencing profound growing pains in the face of an expanding global economy, there is no more useful gift than a good education."
Gallagher plans to continue working to expand the Big Shoulders Program and the Gallagher Scholars as a "top priority."
He also is very involved with Cornell activities, particularly its athletic program (he endowed the Robert E. Gallagher Basketball Coaches Chair and is a member of the Cornell University Council). He has been married since 1949 to Isabel Lyman; they have three grown daughters in addition to Lauren, a son and 13 grandchildren.
ENGINEER -- Former PFC William T. Rice of Lawton, N.Y., will take his degree in mechanical engineering. Engaged to be married in February to a Cornell co-ed, he has an engineering job starting at $232 a month.
UPDATE -- Rice did marry his coed, but his expected $232/month didn't quite
happen. When the new Cornell graduate arrived at the Worthington Pump and
Machinery Co. in Harrison, N.J., after graduation,
he was told his work week had been shortened to exclude half-days on Saturdays; his
starting salary was reduced to $210/month. Or, as he comments, "less than one-tenth
of what a starting engineer gets today."
After spending the next 10 years at Worthington, working his way up to branch manager in Wilmington, Del., Rice joined the DuPont Co. and again rose through the corporate ranks. After 14 years with DuPont, he remarks with an engineer's typical understatement, "I then decided the bureaucratic large corporation life was not for me."
Rice then began his own firm, Yachting Tableware Co., to manufacture and sell personalized non-skid dinnerware for boats. "For nearly 20 years I displayed the products at boat shows and built the business and greatly enjoyed the entrepreneurial life," he says. "I sold the business and am now retired."
Rice's wife, coed Joan Binder, died in 1995, after sharing 48 years of married life with her engineer. They had three daughters, all in their 40s now, who added two grandsons to the family tree. Early this year, he remarried and now lives in Wilmington, Del.
Through all his moves since 1947, Rice has kept two copies -- now "quite brown" -- of The New York Times Magazine that featured him and his classmates.
"I lost that head of hair I had 50 years ago," he reports. But what he was able to store under that hair kept its luster. "I must say that the Cornell engineering education has stood me in good stead during my entire career."
DOCTOR -- One of the graduating seniors at Cornell is Gisela ("Cy") Teichmann, 20, a blue-eyed girl from Washington, D.C. A premedical student majoring in zoology, she hopes to become a doctor in five more years.
UPDATE -- Teichmann earned a medical degree and married. She retired in 1995 as medical director of United Cerebral Palsy of Nassau County after a long career in medicine and pediatrics. She currently resides in Washington state on the Bay of Bellingham with a home overlooking the Canadian Cascades.
DIETITIAN -- Beatrice Carlson, 21, of Staten Island, N.Y., wanted to be a dietitian "since grammar school." She will receive her degree in home economics and next autumn will begin her interneship [sic] at an Albany hospital.
UPDATE -- "I was just in the right place, in the dorm, when the man came through," Carlson remembers as the reason for her inclusion in the Times article about her class, "and I knew what I wanted to do after graduation." Carlson followed through on her career plans and became a teaching dietitian at Bridgeport Hospital and the University of Bridgeport in Connecticut. She married Thomas M. Murray and did substitute teaching after she had children. Later, she worked at the private Fannie A. Smith School in Bridgeport, retiring about 12 years ago. She now lives in Southbury, Conn.
PHYSICIST -- Making Phi Beta Kappa was easy for Harry Rogers, 23, of Baldwin, N.Y., although he changed his major subject four times. He will go on to take graduate work in physics -- "or maybe I'll get married instead."
UPDATE -- Rogers delayed graduate school to get married right after graduation and went to work at General Electric in Schenectady, where he stayed for 22 years. He and his wife had three children. While at GE he earned a Ph.D. in metallurgical engineering from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. After retiring from GE, he accepted a position as professor of materials engineering at Drexel University, retiring in 1991. Now retired and residing in Berwyn, Pa., Rogers is a volunteer archaeometallurgist at the University of Pennsylvania's Museum of Anthropology and Archaeology where, he says, "there are always these weird things to investigate."
STEEL MAN -- A married man and a "big man on the campus," Tom Berry of Fairmont, W.Va., is "glad it's over." His age, 32, and record in engineering helped him get a job with the American Iron and Steel Institute.
UPDATE -- In a short 16-year career after graduation (he died in 1963), Berry made his mark on some of the largest engineering projects of the time. He joined Dravo Engineering's contracting division when he left Cornell and served in managerial capacities on a mining and tunneling project in West Virginia and later on the New York Aqueduct Project and on the rebuilding of The Point in downtown Pittsburgh. "He had a solid balance to him," one of his classmates remembers. "We looked up to him as a father figure." Berry's son and three daughters all have Cornell degrees.
OIL MAN -- John Henry Hogg came back to Cornell last fall after a year in the Pacific, where he lost his right hand. Now 28, he has a wife and two little girls and a job with an oil company in his native Pennsylvania.
UPDATE -- "The arm prosthesis presented a challenge allowing no complacency," Hogg says, referring to the injury that earned him a Purple Heart. Complacent is definitely not the word that describes this veteran's life. He and his wife built their own home. They had three more children. He spent 30 years with U.S. Steel, retiring as manager of engineering at the manufacturing plant that produced five of the company's massive continuous casting machines. Then he did freelance work surveying properties, using a bronze transit that is more than 70 years old, and worked at the Space Age Testing Equipment Co. in Grove City, Pa., as a design engineer. In spite of all this activity, Hogg comments that his achievements of the past 50 years have been "very modest." Now, Hogg says he occupies his time with some surveying work, golf "with questionable skill," and church activities, including the choir. He and his wife enjoy their nine grandchildren and four great-grandchildren.
LAWYER -- Barry Cohen, ex-sailor from Brooklyn, N.Y., has a wide variety of interests ranging from journalism to law. After graduation he wants a job in advertising before entering Harvard Law School, He is still only 20.
UPDATE -- "Fifty years have passed and I have, almost literally, returned full circle to my undergraduate days as a literature major above Cayuga's waters," Cohen says. "In Sarasota during the winters I have been happily teaching Homer's Iliad and Odyssey....After four decades deep in the bowels of the Internal Revenue Code and the regulations of the S.E.C., these subjects are, indeed, refreshing. Hopefully, they will also keep the 'little gray cells' from decay." Cohen leads an active life of travel and "intellectual curiosity." He promises himself that one day he'll begin "proper and regular exercise." A prototype boomer, he sometimes wears a T-shirt that proclaims "I still don't know what I want to be when I grow up." Cohen never entered the advertising field but instead interned at a law firm after graduation, earning $15 a week. He went to Yale Law School, and later earned an LL.M. in advanced taxation at New York University Law school. For the next 40 years, he practiced law in New York City. The father of two daughters, he remarried in 1990 after 28 years as a "post-divorced bachelor." He expects to continue to study and travel extensively. After all, he says, he's "still only 70."