Annual Meeting 1944: Friends Historical Association

BULLETINOF Friends Historical Association Vol. 34Spring Number, 1945No. 1 ANNUAL MEETING 1944 FRIENDS HISTORICAL ASSOCIATION THE ANNUAL MEETING of Friends Historical Association was held in the auditorium of The Historical Society of Pennsylvania, 1300 Locust Street, Philadelphia, on Eleventh Month 27, 1944. The President and Treasurer presented their annual reports, and the Directors whose names appear on the opposite page were elected for the ensuing year. The President read a memorial minute of the Board of Directors for the late Editor, Thomas Kite Brown, Jr. (published in the Autumn, 1944, number of this Bulletin, p. 53). Upon the recommendation of a special committee appointed to suggest a new Editor, Thomas E. Drake was chosen to serve for a period of two years. Membership statistics presented by the President disclosed a net gain of six members for the year, bringing the total to 586. Coming as it did at the end of the tercentenary year of William Penn's birth, the meeting was, in a sense, a culmination of the Tercentenary celebrations. Henry J. Cadbury gave a paper on "William Penn, Just Among Friends," an interesting contribution to our knowledge of Penn, which is printed in this number of the Bulletin. Elizabeth Gray Vining also took the audience with her on informal travels in England in 1937 "On the Trail of William Penn." Her account of her adventures in gathering material for her biography of Penn made most of her hearers wish that they too could experience the joys of bicycling in the Penn country in the softness of the English spring. Following the presentation of the papers members of the Association enjoyed looking at the exhibit of rare Penn relics provided 4 BULLETIN OF FRIENDS HISTORICAL ASSOCIATION by The Historical Society of Pennsylvania, and partook of light refreshments. AMIDWINTER DINNER is fast becoming a tradition with Friends Historical Association. The third of such annual affairs took place on Second Month 22, 1945, at The Whittier, Fifteenth and Cherry Streets, Philadelphia. The dinner itself, which is perhaps the most important part of this gathering devoted primarily to sociability, was served with the dispatch to which we have become accustomed at The Whittier. The food was better than usual, certainly better than one usually finds in wartime banquet rooms. The hobby of collecting was the theme of the speakers. President William W. Comfort, whose introductory remarks could happily be more extended than usual because of the inability of Cornelius Weygandt to be present, told of his recent triumph in collecting the six-hundredth member of Friends Historical Association, a long sought-after goal. Thomas E. Drake, Curator of the Quaker Collection of the Haverford College Library, and a collector therefore by profession, explained how a librarian may find a hobby in "Collecting Collectors" rather than books, since book-collecting is a part of his job. Carroll Frey, Editor of the Penn Mutual Life Insurance Company, told droll stories of his adventures in running down William Penn material for the library. Francis R. Taylor, the only non-professional collector of the three, though all successful collectors must have the enthusiasm of the true amateur, gave glimpses of the never-never land of Quaker fiction in which he often delves. The lessons of the evening, if such there were, were two: that three speakers and a chairman can finish an evening at nine o'clock if the chairman has the will and the way, and that there is a great deal of fun and a great deal of room in the field of Quaker collecting. ' I ? THE growing list of fiction in which Quakers appear as characters may be added three short stories about Indiana Friends by Jessamyn West, a birthright Friend and graduate of Whittier College. The stories were published in The Atlantic Monthly, July, August and December, 1944, and were entitled "A Likely Exchange," "First Day Finish," and "Lead Her Like a Pigeon." Vol. 34, Spring 1945 ...