Letters

The Indian Mounds

Your article on the Indian mounds evoked a nostalgia attack: I remembered a classroom in Morse-Ingersoll Hall in the spring of 1949, branches of new buds scraping the windows. Professor John Eells (English) in his Milton class had assigned original verses in iambic pentameter to see if we dug the meter. My sophomoric attempt came out:

Indian Mounds

The passerby in winter sees these mounds
As islands all immured with moats of ice:
In spring irreverent lovers woo their maids
Upon these graves, and summer brings
The herd of anthropologists who dig them up.
How different when in tangled wood we find
An Indian mound half-hid among the vines
That decorate the grave: what magic fills
Our mind to hear the whisper of mute oaks
That tell what Winnebago walked this trail.

— Stan Moore’51
Park Forest, Ill.

Thanks to Harry Moore

I just received my Beloit College Magazine and was saddened to hear of the death of [trustee] Harry Moore. As generations of international students are aware, he had such an enormous reach with his generosity, ensuring that we all made it to Beloit, usually with a little help from him.

I will be eternally grateful for his support of my own education, as I’m sure others are. I want to express my condolences and send best wishes to his family and say thanks for his incredible contributions to education in both the Bahamas, at Beloit College, and in and around every community he was in.

— Natalya Marquand’02
South Korea

Beloit vs. Hamburger U?

Congratulations on the fall/winter 2003 issue of Beloit College Magazine—the best issue I have ever read. The early history of the Round Table impressed upon me how seriously, even passionately, the early editors of the paper took their work. (Although I don’t think they stood up to my own Round Table article in 1978 on how Beloit compared to McDonald’s Hamburger University.) The article on Professor Emeritus Dave Dobson’s top-secret U.S. government assignment back in the ’60s—to see if he could design a nuclear bomb from scratch, without any special expertise—was fascinating. And it was great to finally find out what was under those Indian mounds.

Thanks for an enjoyable hour of reading this Saturday morning.

— Dan Hurley’79
Upper Montclair, N. J.

RELATED LINK:

Read a profile about Dan Hurley, the "60-Second Novelist," first published in the spring 2001 issue of Beloit College Magazine.

EMAIL:

Susan Kasten - Editor, Beloit College Magazine