Walter F. Willcox

One evening at The Century, a Cornell alumnus said to one of his former teachers:

“Doctor Willcox, I suppose you are returning to Ithaca tomorrow.”

“No,” Walter Willcox replied, “I am going to Delhi.”

Thinking he meant Delhi, New York, his friend said,

“They don’t pronounce it Delhi up in New York State, they call it ‘Delhigh.’”

“But,” said Willcox, “I mean New Delhi, India, where I am going to attend an international congress, the annual meetings of which I have attended in various countries of the world for many years; in fact, I served as its president for some time.”

There was nothing remarkable in the fact that Dr. Willcox should go to New Delhi for a series of long and arduous meetings. But that he should do so in his ninety-seventh year seemed to his Centurion friend surprising.

But this was nothing to the astonishment of all of us when, three years later, in his hundred-and-first year, having survived New Delhi and several other long journeys with apparent benefit to his health, he turned up at a monthly meeting.

“Gentlemen,” he said when President Kieffer asked him to speak to us, “in view of my advanced years, this occasion is a very great one for me. In fact, it may well be the last great occasion of my life. Possibly you would like to hear about the first important historical event that I remember; it was the assassination of Abraham Lincoln.”

A few months before his death at one hundred and three, he could be seen almost daily walking a mile across the hilly Cornell campus. He would tell his friends, “I never had a pain or an ache in my life.”

Longevity by itself is, of course, no great reason for admiration. It is a gift the Lord occasionally gives in spite of Biblical words about dust and ashes. But, as is the case with most elder Centurions, Dr. Willcox had many other claims to distinction. For two generations, forty years, he taught economics at Cornell, began another career as an expert statistician for the Census Department after his retirement.

Walter Francis Willcox was born in Reading, Massachusetts, in 1861. He took his A.B. from Amherst College in 1884, his M.A. in 1888 and his LL.B. in 1906. He came to Cornell in 1891 as an instructor of logic and became professor of economics in 1901. Meanwhile he had served as a statistical expert for the War Department at the end of the Spanish-American War. He took the census of Cuba and Puerto Rico. He was also chief statistician of the Twelfth United States Census in 1900.

True retirement which, from Cornell, occurred, theoretically, in 1931 was impossible for a man with the energy and ideas of Walter Willcox. One of his favorite crusades was his campaign to attain a fairer balance in congressional districting. He also hoped for the reduction of the number of congressmen to 300. When, in 1960, he testified on reapportionment before a House judiciary subcommittee, he delivered this testimony standing; though he was then ninety-eight and though it lasted an hour, he refused a chair when it was offered him.

In addition to being the oldest member of The Century, Willcox was also its senior member [among 1964 decedents], having been elected in 1905.

Roger Burlingame
1965 Century Association Yearbook