Chase Mellen

A Centurion who was for many years an associate and close friend of Chase Mellen remarked the other day that Chase—named for his father’s law-partner Salmon P. Chase—“never lost the manners and mannerisms of the Englishmen with whom he associated” as a student at Brasenose, Oxford. “He affected none of these; he absorbed them naturally and without knowing it. His conceptions of life and living, particularly in politics and economics, were molded by his life over there in a measure hardly realized by him.” In the twenty years of his constant attendance at the Century, Mellen was indeed the embodiment of the handsome, even tempered, public-spirited, sports-loving English gentleman of the Old School. His partner declared that, in American politics, Mellen was “on the right of rights, and had a hard time in tolerating anyone with a leftist slant.” Seventy years after Appomattox, Mellen was still writing of “the rebel States.”

He lived for many years at the edge of the golf links at Garden City, Long Island, and for a generation was a respected and trusted figure in the activities of the golf club and of the Protestant Episcopal Cathedral and Church School. He twice served New York City in the Corporation Counsel’s office, and as general counsel of the City Charter Revision Committee appointed by Centurion Charles E. Hughes.

To the astonishment of some of his companions of the Century billiard-room and card-room, Mellen revealed himself, in a pamphlet printed four years ago, as having witnessed a phase of the conquest of the Great West by the effete East. In 1871, at the age of eight, he accompanied his father, a founder of Colorado Springs, into the wild Territory of Colorado. Those were the days when tuberculosis was consumption and a railroad station was a depot. Young Chase learned from a Ute (who later became a bad Indian) how to make and use a bow and arrow; he served as rodman, leveller and transit man, and as leader of surveying parties; he learned telegraphy. He saw a brutal husband thrashed by a self-appointed punitive committee and thereafter believed “that the whipping post, under legal sanction, would be a most effective cure for bullies, incipient gangsters, and other misdemeanants.”

He lived to see himself described as Chase Mellen, Senior, by reason of the political prominence of his son Chase Mellen, Jr., in whose achievements he took great pride. Another son also made him happy by his exploits as an oarsman at Oxford, where Mellen himself had rowed on a victorious Varsity crew.

Geoffrey Parsons
1939 Century Memorials