In the spring of 2009, shortly after the death of Edward Connery Lathem ’51, Dartmouth’s revered onetime dean and librarian of the College, I stepped into 6 North Balch Street in Hanover to begin the sad process required of the custodians of his will. Little did I know that this ritual would bring me face to face with the startling, even disturbing, contents of a humidor once owned by a cigar-loving and long-deceased American president.
Mr. Lathem, as he was known to all except a favored few, had died some weeks earlier in his office at Rauner Special Collections Library inside Webster Hall. President James Wright, knowing that I was part of the handful of Lathem confidants, had called me, opening the conversation with the simple words, “We have lost Ed Lathem.”
“Lost him?” I asked my former history advisor in unfeigned disbelief. “You can’t lose a guy who walks around campus in a black suit with a white tie.”
Then Dartmouth’s 16th president explained that my great friend—a man who had called me almost every day for a decade, maybe more—had died.
I had a wonderful father, a Dartmouth man, class of 1947, but Ed Lathem was part father (he advised me in times of professional disappointment, always with great selflessness and wisdom); part brother (we shared a love of literature, writing, freshly carved turkey, and Marriott points); and part boon companion (in my years as a Dartmouth trustee, he would hop in my rental car for the trip down to Boston’s Logan Airport and then, in white tie and with a manuscript to edit, sometimes mine, take the bus back to Hanover).
It was a relationship that resulted in three books, including Miraculously Builded in Our Hearts, our 1999 volume of speeches, letters, articles, and documents that was a successor to Francis Brown’s A Dartmouth Reader, published in 1969. It was a book that we knew almost nobody would buy and fewer would read. Ed’s obsession with the details of that volume led to one of the most remarkable meetings I’ve had in more than 50 years as a writer and editor.
Ed gave me a summons and not an invitation. He told me to fly to Boston from Washington, D.C., where I then was The Boston Globe bureau chief. At Logan Airport, we met in the USAirways Club, where he proceeded to show me the galley proofs.
The issue, Ed told me gravely: Should the pages of our book have 39 lines of type or merely 38?
If we went for the higher number—Ed seemed to care desperately about this question—we might save a page or two. We two native New Englanders, devoutly dedicated to parsimony, went for 39. We left Logan believing, as Ed’s friend the great poet Robert Frost, class of 1896, said in an entirely different context, that our decision had made all the difference.
Ed had married a remarkable woman, Elizabeth “Betty” French, in 1957 at a wedding where Frost served as best man. Betty, a Hanover native and daughter of one of the founders of the Hitchcock Clinic, was the first female physician at the clinic and first woman to attain the rank of full professor at Dartmouth Medical School. Her contributions are memorialized in the E. Elizabeth French Memorial Laboratory of Clinical Pathology, established after her death in 1992, and in an endowed professorship.
They were an accomplished couple, and Ed was a true eccentric to boot. Indeed, I never knew anyone quite like Ed, and neither did the two other custodians of his will—my friend Peter Gilbert ’76, for 15 years the executive director of the Vermont Humanities Council, and Ed’s physician, Edward J. Merrens ’88, Med’94, now chief clinical officer for Dartmouth Health.
It was, of course, Ed’s effect on all of us that mattered far more than his effects. But one of those effects had special meaning for me and my family.
Ed made it clear that he wished for me to inherit 10 signed copies of first-edition Frost books of poetry, the hand-loomed rugs Betty had made, and a captain’s chair that bore an image of Dartmouth Hall. To my daughter Elizabeth ’10, a violinist who later became chief operating officer of the San Francisco Symphony, went more than a hundred classical recordings.
And there was one more thing: Calvin Coolidge’s humidor. Ed wanted me to have it.
That afternoon, when Merrens and I entered the Lathem home, eerily quiet but in perfect order, I took a few steps toward the humidor, eager to see what was inside the airtight box that had once held the 30th president’s favorite Cuban cigars. I knew that at one time, Coolidge had used the humidor to store letters from his father, who administered the presidential oath of office to his son by the light of an oil lamp at 2:47 on a Vermont morning 103 years ago. Maybe the letters were still there.
When I picked it up and started to lift the lid, Merrens all but screamed, “Don’t open the humidor!” I was mystified.
I had never smoked a cigar or even seen a humidor and thus was curious what the inside looked like.
“Why not?” I asked.
“Just don’t,” he answered.
As a lifelong reporter accustomed to asking impertinent questions, I pressed on. “Why?”
Merrens simply pointed to the humidor and whispered the word “Betty.”
It turned out that Ed had placed the ashes of his beloved wife inside Coolidge’s humidor.
Hours later, I attended the spring concert of the Dartmouth Symphony Orchestra. At intermission, I ran into President Wright and told him I had spent the afternoon at the Lathem house.
He paused not a second before blurting out: “I hope you didn’t open the humidor.”
I hadn’t. But my wife insisted on the removal of Betty’s ashes before the humidor arrived at our home on Pittsburgh’s Murray Hill Avenue.
As for Betty and Ed, their ashes were distributed on a quiet hillside in Enfield, New Hampshire, pillowed, as Calvin Coolidge said in his lyrical tribute to his native Vermont, just across the river, “on the loving breast of our everlasting hills.” As for the humidor, it has an honored place in our home, where I have lovingly filled it with copies of the letters Coolidge’s father sent to him. Coolidge would have liked that. Ed, too.
David Shribman was for 16 years executive editor of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. He has written five books on Dartmouth lore, including Dartmouth Undying, prepared with Jim Collins ’84.
