"From this Quartet"

IN THE 1898 American, yearbook of Alma College (Mich.), can be found the following statement to the right of the picture of William Franklin Knox of the Graduating class: "If you had seen me five years ago, you wouldn't know me now." Senior Knox had undergone some changes indeed. He had come pretty green to the campus in 1893 on the advice of a Presbyterian minister who told him he would be able to work his way through at Alma.

Within three years he had organized, coached, and captained Alma's first football team, which went through the season undefeated and took the scalp of Michigan Aggies (now Michigan State) 18 to 16. He had been active in Y. M. C. A. work, sprinted on the track squad, joined Zeta Sigma (local), and marched with the Cadets. To top it all, he had gone off in his senior year with Teddy Roosevelt's Rough Riders to fight the Spaniards. Now, in 1898, he was about to get married to a campus sweetheart and start working on a newspaper.

IF HIS Stanford classmates had seen Herbert Hoover, 31st President of the United States, in 1898, they wouldn't have known him either. At that time he was three years out of college, 24 years old, earning $7,500 a year as a mining engineer in Western Australia. That was good money before the year 1900.

Herbert Hoover had hardly been elected by his Stanford mates as the "graduate most likely to succeed." In college he had managed a student laundry and a newspaper agency. He had flunked German and English in the entrance exams, and didn't write off a con in English until his senior year. But this ponderous and solumn Iowan had introduced a scheme for handling athletic, social, and campus organization funds that eliminated waste and graft to a "T". Few people noticed that he was also a wizard with a slide rule and geology maps.

IN 1898 William Edgar Borah was seven years out of the University of Kansas law school and thinking of moving to Idaho, or some place where he could practice law with success. Borah had matriculated from Lyons, Kansas, and had returned there to practice. He hoped to be appointed city attorney, but after three months of deliberation, the council turned him down. On what grounds, it is not known.

At Kansas Borah had been something of a racy collegian, a lad of midnight escapades, and whisper it softly in Lyons, of the "flowing bowl."

A FUTURE University of Kansas graduate, one Alfred Mossman Landon, was, in the year 1898, eleven years old and living in Pennsylvania. Six years later his father took the family out of Kansas to prospect for oil wells, and one of his wells "came in." So in 1904, when son Alfenrolled at the University of Kansas, he didn't have to work his way through college, as had college men Knox, Hoover and Borah. Alf joined Phi Gamma Delta, the "rich boys fraternity" of his day at Kansas, and proceeded to make a reputation for himself of being stingy. He had the first tuxedo in town, yet be campaigned successfully to cut the ice cream course from the house menu. He fought hard to have only one orchestra instead of two at the spring lawn party, but failed.

From this quartette, Herbert Hoover, William R. Borah, Alfred Landon, and Col. Frank Knox, the Republicans this summer may pick a presidential candidate. If they do, the candidate will be one college man who doesn't believe in tampering with the Constitution.