President Joan Hinde Stewart
Hamilton College

Dear Joan:

Please excuse my familiarity; for me this is a quite personal letter. It goes back to your "Dear Friends" letter of January 31, 2008, dealing with financial aid to students. That letter moved me deeply. I too was the first in my family to attend college, and it fact neither of my parents had any high school at all. But the crux of the matter came when you took up the discussion of outright financial aid versus loans.

It struck me quite deeply that in my case the question of loans never came up at all. I got complete financial support from Hamilton, without any other possibility ever being discussed. I remember how at the beginning of each year, or half year, I sat down with Sidney Bennett, the director of admission and financial aid. We estimated how much total I would need, including living expenses; we figured how much I would earn by working in the dining hall, and the difference was scholarship support. No question about loans; that was it. (It may have been that in those days there was no such thing as a college loan, but what matters is that Hamilton paid for my education outright, without question.)

There is no exaggeration in saying that Hamilton made me what I have become. This goes even to the extent that Hamilton placed me in graduate school. One of my physics professors, Gerry McCue, had some time before my graduation moved to war work at MIT’s Radiation Laboratory. (I finished my classes at the beginning of 1946.) He spoke about me to Harlow Shapley, the director of Harvard College Observatory, and arranged for a personal interview early in 1945; I even stayed with Gerry on the occasion of that visit to Cambridge. I entered graduate school in February 1946; in 1947 I became a junior fellow in the Society of Fellow, and (except for a few years of interruption during the Korean War) it has been smooth sailing ever since. And all of it began with complete support as a Hamilton undergraduate.

There was a long time during which I had no contact with Hamilton; just before 1950 its administration had taken a turn toward what seemed far too rigid a conservatism for me. This hiatus ended in 1990, when I was invited back to one of the October science fairs that the College had begun. And I have paid several visits to the Hill in the years since, culminating in the one in 205 when you "hooked" me as an honorary Sc.D.

It must have been in 1990 that I began making a small annual donation to the Annual Fund. It was your letter of last January, however, that made me realize that a "small donation" was totally out of keeping with what Hamilton has meant to me. I am therefore increasing my annual donations considerably, and will increase the bequest to Hamilton that is in my will. Although I am financially comfortable, I am by no means a rich man; I have a wife many years my junior, who has a tiny pension of her own and no other resources. But I will not again lose sight of what I owe to Hamilton. Thank you for opening my eyes to it.

Sincerely,

Ivan R. King '47