Actuary
Centurion, 1905–1926
Born 12 March 1860 in Williamstown, Massachusetts
Died 3 January 1926 in Brookline, Massachusetts
Buried Rockland Cemetery
, Sparkill, New York
Proposed by Harold Jacoby and Emory McClintock
Elected 7 October 1905 at age forty-five
Century Memorial
Few fields of human interest have not been explored in the talk of the Graham Library on a wintry Saturday afternoon. If the controversies of home and foreign politics have held the first place, with social problems and personal reminiscence coming next, nevertheless no self-respecting Centurion in one of the easy-chairs would hesitate to engage in the profundities of divinity and science. One or two would occasionally follow John Tatlock into astronomical discussion. If Tatlock had not been a banker and a life insurance actuary, he would surely have taken his place with Simon Newcomb and Flammarion; in his earlier days he had in fact served for three years as chief astronomical assistant at Wisconsin University. Possibly it was the mathematical side of his favorite science which turned him to actuarial pursuits as a vocation. That side of things certainly always interested him; he was perhaps the only Centurion to whom the work of the annual auditing committee was pure delight, and who even volunteered as supernumerary on a committee which had lost its way.
But to Tatlock, mathematics was not a cold and abstract study. It was only the handmaid to the celestial organism on the one hand and to human society on the other; it only quickened his interest, which was of the liveliest sort, in the affairs of common experience. His professional attitude towards the realities was shown when, with his fellow-actuaries of the great life companies, he took the stand at the grilling legislative investigation of 1905, which exposed to public view the abuses of life-insurance practice of the day. At the end of Tatlock’s testimony, the legislative committee’s counsel went out of his way to compliment Tatlock on his clear and sane ideas of the purpose of such companies. The Graham Library’s particular memories, which embrace so long a list of notable individualities, will surely have a place for that portly figure with the serious face, the inevitable after-luncheon pipe, and the gratified chuckle that responded to a humorous turn in the conversation.
Alexander Dana Noyes
1926 Century Association Yearbook
