Prophet on a Trapeze

One afternoon a Michigan farm boy rushed home, clutching the first map he had drawn at school. His mother saw that it was marked "A." "I think you are going to be like me, Isaiah," said she. "I think you are going to like geography."

Isaiah Bowman did. From the little boy who liked to pore over stones on his father's farm, he grew up to become the nation's top geographer. He wrote 14 books on the subject, was Woodrow Wilson's boundary expert at Versailles ("Tell me what's right," commanded Wilson, "and I'll fight for it"). His name was stamped on far-off places. There is a Bowman Bay, a Bowman Island, a Bowman glacier.

In 1935, Bowman became president of Johns Hopkins University. "Bow" streamlined the administration, erased the deficit, added top scholars to its faculty. Impressed by his ability as an administrator, Robert Hutchins wrote him: "I once used to think of you as a major prophet. Now, I am inclined to think you are the daring young man on the flying trapeze." Last week, the trapeze was slowing its swing. At 69, Isaiah Bowman decided that it was time for him to retire.

Home of Research. Johns Hopkins, which is about the same age as Bowman, has known prophets before. It was one of the first U.S. universities to emphasize graduate research. Harvard's crusty President Charles W. Eliot had to admit that his own graduate school, "started feebly in 1870, did not thrive until . . . Johns Hopkins forced [it to]." To the tidy campus on the edge of Baltimore went Poet Sidney Lanier, Viscount Bryce, and James Russell Lowell to teach or lecture. Woodrow Wilson, John Dewey and Walter Reed studied there. Its medical school, which often overshadowed the rest of it, also had its prophets: famed Physician William Osier, Gynecologist Howard A. Kelly, Pathologist William H. Welch, Surgeon William S. Halsted.

Isaiah Bowman kept Johns Hopkins' undergraduate program--two years of general education, then two years of study in one of foUr special "groups" (physical sciences, biological sciences, social sciences, the humanities). For him, every educated man had a private contract with society: "To respect that contract is to be mature, to strengthen it is to be a good citizen, to do more ... is to be noble."

Romps on the Floor. A stocky man with twinkling, rimless glasses, Isaiah Bowman has run his university with grandfatherly firmness. He has often irritated trustees with his stubbornness, sometimes infuriated faculty members by prompting men regardless of seniority. Though he sometimes gets up at 2 a.m. and works until dawn, he always has time for children. Visitors often come upon him and his four grandchildren ("Gumdrops," he calls them), rolling and shrieking on the floor, while his wife ("Pistol Packin' Mamma") looks on.

Now he feels too old to run the university: "Were I to insist that I am as good as ever (if ever I was good)," he wrote last week, "such insistence would be in itself clear evidence of senility!"

His next project: to write six books on international affairs.

When President Hamilton Holt of tennisy Rollins College, Florida, turned 70, he decided to give up tennis. But he played just one more game--with Champion Pauline Betz, an alumna. "For the first time in my life," he announced, "I'm going to do something for the last time in my life."

Last week popular Hamilton Holt was 75, and thought it was about time to give up something else. He turned in his resignation as president of Rollins. The trustees wouldn't hear of it, persuaded him to stay on another year.

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