Walter Hinchman

In the membership of the Club there have not been many men to whom, in the same degree as to Walter Hinchman, the Century was their life, and whose constant presence was so much as his a part of the Century’s own life. Few of the afternoon groups in the Club were complete without him. From the circle of good-humored philosophers and moralizers on current events, familiar to the Graham Library after the Saturday lunch-hour or of a winter evening, Hinchman was so rarely absent that even now the sense of something missing in the group comes constantly to mind. No one is left with his cherished prerogative of adjusting the logs and stirring the fire on a frosty afternoon.

The mind and heart of Hinchman were so young, his view of life so hopeful, his interest in events so keen, that few of his fellow-members could have realized that he had already passed his seventy-fifth year of life. He lived, indeed, completely in the present, despite his twenty-year retirement from active business, and one seldom heard him talk of the longer past or his own achievement. Yet Hinchman had served in the army of the Civil War, had broken ground in the wilderness for the Pacific Railways, and had gone with the American prospectors into Mexico in the very early days of Mexico’s economic development. Those experiences were only the background for an active intelligence, developed through wide reading and through an accurate and retentive memory. The Century will remember him for his long and loyal service on many of the Club’s committees, but most of all for the kindly and cheerful personality that knew no moods and was always a brightening influence on the conversation.

Alexander Dana Noyes
1921 Century Association Yearbook