century association biographical archive

Earliest Members of the Century Association

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William Lee Cushing

Teacher

Centurion, 1892–1921

Born 24 July 1849 in Phippsburg, Maine

Died 11 December 1921 in Simsbury, Connecticut

Buried Cedar Hill Cemetery, Hartford, Connecticut

Proposed by William P. Trowbridge and James W. Pinchot

Elected 7 May 1892 at age forty-two

Century Memorial

The loyalty with which he was regarded, on the one hand by his old Yale associates in and about his Class of ’72 and on the other by the thousands of boys who passed through his kindly ministrations at the Westminster and the Hopkins Grammar School, gives the key to William Lee Cushing’s character. Physically impressive, with a benignity which set off his virile force and made him the boy’s ideal of the gentleman of tradition, he was that rather rare figure in our eager and hurried American life which even in England is nowadays becoming a legend associated with the headmasters in the schools of another generation. He had been a member of the Century for nearly thirty years.

Alexander Dana Noyes
1922 Century Association Yearbook