100 years ago in The Record
Thursday, Sept. 19, 1918
“For the first time in the history of the Rensselaer Polytechnic institute a woman has become a member of the faculty,” The Record reports after Marie de Pierpont is appointed assistant professor of French. De Pierpont is the wife of longtime RPI French professor Arthur de Pierpont. Since the U.S. entered the world war last year, “There has been constant and growing demand for the French language, and the R.P.I. trustees feel fortunate in having such masters as Professor de Pierpont and his wife,” our reporter notes, “The appointment meets with hearty approval.” Arriving on campus today is Captain Harry A. Van Velsor, who will take charge of the institute’s 650-man student army corps. Previously athletic director at Buffalo High School, Van Velsor “qualified high as a student of human nature. In his particular line, he cannot be beat.” “The boys at R.P.I. will find in him a great and true friend,” says Professor Wilbur C. Batchelor of the physical education department, “He knows boy life intimately and while a strict disciplinarian won’t be found a hard task master by any means.” Batchelor and Van Velsor are graduates of the Springfield Training school and toured the country together with the school’s nationally-renowned gymnastics team in 1910.
Lieutenant Palmer Writes of Service
Lieutenant Eldorus Palmer, a “well-known young resident of Lansingburgh” is serving in France as an army dentist with the 306th Machine Gun Battalion. His parents share two recent letters from their son with Record readers today.
On August 13 Palmer described American troops’ “wild chase after the Hun,” i.e. the Germans. “The past few days have been full of rush and excitement, and work. I have seen more of real war than my wildest dream could imagine. I have been on the battlefield and am now where every American will some day be proud to have been.
“I never saw such desolation. Whole villages where every home has at least one shell hole torn through it. Fields impossible because of great gaps in the ground from shell fire. Woods where machine gun actions have left only sticks of trees once green with leaves, salvage dumps of bloody clothing, rusty guns and piles of ammunition left behind by the Germans.”
On August 20 Palmer wrote: “Nowhere you travel do you miss some evidence of the suffering France has borne in this war. Whole villages that are but a pile of broken stone, quiet and wistful little French windows with small children whose daddy has been killed at the front, and where once they were happy in a gay city.”