Goodbye, Messrs. Chips

Each year, U.S. colleges and universities must say goodbye to many a famed and favorite figure. Among those retiring in 1958:

Indiana University's slight, white-haired Kenneth Powers Williams, 70, who began teaching mathematics at Indiana in 1909, since 1944 has found a second field of excellence--writing Civil War history. That year he decided to follow an old interest, write a short book on the war's last year. Commencing work at 6 a.m., teaching classes in an authoritative, no-nonsense fashion in the afternoon and writing more history at night, Mathematician-Historian Williams began to produce something far different--an orderly, exhaustive study of Northern command: Lincoln Finds a General. With two volumes out, the work was assessed as potentially "the soundest military history of the North yet written," earned similar high praise with succeeding volumes (the sixth and last is already outlined).

Illinois Institute of Technology's Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, 72, architect of stark, skeletal glass and steel skyscrapers. Widely reckoned to be one of this century's three most influential architects (with Frank Lloyd Wright and Le Corbusier), German-born Mies was trained as a stonemason. He headed Germany's revolutionary Bauhaus group of artists and architects from 1930 until Nazi pressure forced him to close it in 1933, migrated to the U.S. in 1938. Popular renown came, along with occasional harsh words from Wright and other critics, with Mies's design of Illinois Tech's clean-lined campus, a gaunt set of Chicago apartments, and his career-capper, Manhattan's glass and bronze Seagram building (TIME, March 3). Replies thickly accented Mies to attacks on his decoration-bare style: "I don't compromise. I would rather sell potatoes.''

Princeton's energetic Sir Hugh Stott Taylor, 68, noted physical chemist who headed the department of chemistry from 1926 to 1951. has been dean of the university's Graduate School since 1945. Lancashire-born Chemist Taylor studied with Nobel Prizewinner Svante Arrhenius at Sweden's Nobel Institute for Physical Chemistry, has stayed in the U.S. since he came for a "brief visit" in 1914. Known for his work in catalysis, photochemistry, radiochemistry and chemical kinetics, he was knighted by Queen Elizabeth II in 1953.

The University of Michigan's Elizabeth Caroline Crosby, 69, topflight neuroanatomist and the first woman to be appointed a full professor at Michigan's medical school. For five years after she got her Ph.D. from the University of Chicago in 1915, intense, energetic Elizabeth Crosby served as principal and superintendent of schools in Petersburg, Mich., at one point also coached the boys' basketball team. She began teaching at the U. of Michigan in 1920, during her years there wrote and edited some of medicine's basic works on neuroanatomy, gathered probably the largest collection of sub-mammalian and mammalian brains in the world. At Ann Arbor, she earned a sparkling set of honorary degrees and a sentimental tag from student physicians: "Angel of the medical school."

Yale's Ralph Henry Gabriel, 68. Sterling Professor of History, and deveoper in 1931 of a pioneer course in American thought and civilization. To such students as A. Whitney Griswold. now Yale's president, Gabriel presented a systematic, thought-prodding evaluation of the history of ideas in the U.S. Writing summers in a shack in the New Hampshire woods, he has filled a shelf with basic texts in American history, including his widely read The Course of American Democratic Thought. He lit few Roman candles while lecturing, nevertheless attracted up to 400 students to his classes.

Johns Hopkins' William Foxwell Albright, 67, expert in Palestinian archaeology. Big (6 ft.), bald Sand-Sifter Albright began to explore Palestine in the days when such explorations consisted chiefly of dismounting from one's camel and commencing to dig. A scholar instead of a treasure hunter, he painstakingly collected and fitted together pottery fragments scorned by some earlier diggers, succeeded in bringing a large measure of order to the history of Palestine in the 3,000 years before Christ. Among his qualifications for archaeology: great physical durability and a command of some 25 languages, including enough man-in-the-oasis Arabic to keep his workers in line. Albright was in the U.S. when the Dead Sea Scrolls were found, but photographs were airmailed to him, and he was the first scholar outside the Holy Land to verify their age and authenticity. His observation, bearing the Scrolls in mind: "Of all sciences, the two making the most progress today are nuclear physics and Palestinian archaeology."

Ohio State's lofty (6 ft. 3 in.), legendary John Woodworth Wilce, 70, who piled up a record of 78 wins, 33 losses and 9 ties as football coach from 1913 to 1928, then gave up muscle nurture to practice medicine, has headed the university's health service since 1934. Himself a seven-letter man at the University of Wisconsin and an all-Western fullback in 1908. Dr. Wilce did more than any other coach to give Columbus a permanent football mania, led his teams to three Western Conference championships. He studied bone mending between sessions of bone breaking, earned his M.D. in 1919, went on to do research on the effect of athletics on the heart (conclusion: no permanent damage). Wilce had an intellectual's approach to football, once experimented by painting State's locker room bright red to inspire his meat eaters.

Columbia's Allan Nevins, 68, De Witt Clinton Professor of American History and winner of two Pulitzer Prizes for his biographies of President Grover Cleveland and U.S. Secretary of State Hamilton Fish. A stumpy, explosively energetic man who impatiently brushes away his age and anything else that interferes with his 6:30 a.m.-to-11:15 p.m. workday, he has written some 25 volumes, edited a dozen others. Historian Nevins was an editorial writer on the New York World and other papers until 1931, joined Columbia's staff as a full professor that year. but never found time to take a Ph.D. Among Nevins' projects: American Heritage Magazine, which he helped to found and Columbia's Oral History program for recording the views of history-worthy living Americans.

The University of Illinois' stiff-collar-and-high-shoe-wearing Thomas Whitfield Baldwin, 68, one of the world's leading authorities on Shakespeare. Coatless, but sheltered by a black hat and fortified by a furled umbrella, he has stalked about the Illinois campus on long, ruminative walks since 1925, disdains to use an elevator to reach his fourth-floor office. A marathon motorist, he wrote many of his Shakespearean studies during cross-country trips in a house-trailer. Among his noted works: a volume on the playwright's education (William Shakspere's Small Latine and Lesse Greeke), and another, published in 1957, proving that Shakespeare wrote a play, probably now surviving under another title, called Love's Labor's Won.

Harvard's intense, slightly built Harry Austryn Wolfson, 70, probably the world's foremost historian of religious philosophy. He went to Harvard as a freshman in 1908, has spent almost the entire time since in his book-sandbagged study at the Widener Library and his tome-cluttered flat near by--where, a friend relates, the scholar once searched unsuccessfully for a book in the refrigerator, thought a moment, triumphantly fished it out of the unlit oven. Ranging widely and deeply, he began with medieval Jewish philosophy, went on to trace with minute thoroughness the works of such men as Spinoza and Crescas back to the ancient Hebrew, Christian, Moslem and Greek philosophers, took time out only to catch every film shown at Harvard Square's second-run theater. Says Scholar Wolfson: "It is wonderful to start with an original text, an unstudied text, and to realize that there is nothing between you and this text. You try to find out everything that is implied in every term, every phrase, to get behind the words into the man's mind."

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