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Changes came over The Hill after its young King left. A certain tension in its atmosphere was relaxed. The place was pervaded first by the mellowness of its acting headmaster, ancient Greek Professor Alfred Grosvenor Rolfe; then by the robustious inefficiency of Dr. F. Boyd Edwards, who was called from a New Jersey pulpit to be headmaster; finally by the brisk but sympathetic force of James Isaac Wendell, formerly executive secretary to Dwight Meigs, who succeeded Dr. Edwards two years ago. (TIME, Sept. 24. 1928.)
After he left the school, Dwight Meigs changed too. "Family interests" were given as the reason for his departure. His father had left extensive timber lands in Tennessee which needed administering. But old Hill boys noted that just one year after leaving the school, Dwight Meigs was divorced.* Stories circulated which bore out the dormitory gossip of 1914 to 1922 at The Hill, that Dwight Meigs enjoyed, with characteristic thoroughness, other things than discipline and leading prayers. In the autumn of 1923 he married Ruth Payne of Harrisburg. Pa., and went to live in Knoxville, Tenn.
One night last week Dwight Meigs of Knoxville telephoned his four best friends, asking them to come straight to his apartment and help him "put over a big deal." Knoxville had just had a bad fire. Perhaps, thought his friends, Meigs had thought up a way to recoup from Knoxville's ashes some of the losses, in timber and realty, which had practically ruined him in recent years. Or perhaps— for he had come to be regarded as Knoxville's most cultured and cynical citizen, a leader in the town's "fastest" set-perhaps he had some particularly diverting joke to play.
The friends found Dwight Meigs, once a King, with a revolver in his hand, a bullet hole in his head. They sent the body to aged "Mrs. John" at Pottstown for burial. Old Hill boys were genuinely sorry.
"SoCalled Banquet"
Rutgers University's sophomores last week held their annual banquet. Taken aback were they when Dr. Fraser Metzger, Dean of Men, notified them before receiving an invitation that, "having ceased to go to banquets which were mere drunks," he must decline for Dear Old Rutgers. Further remarks:
"I'm through going to so-called banquets where the kick of modern hooch and cheap entertainment are substituted for the pleasures of breaking bread with a group of your classmates."
*Mrs. Ruth Averell Meigs now lives in Manhattan, conducts a successful decorating business on Park Ave. Her daughter Marcia was a debutante this winter.