Alden March

In a chair by the southwest corner window in the East Room his friends in the Century used to find disposed a long gaunt figure of very nearly the bodily proportions of the Father of His Country. It was topped by a fine head and a deeply marked countenance, strikingly like the early Peale portrait of Washington, the soldier. And this was less surprising because, on his mother’s side, the occupant of the chair was of the Washington kin—as on his father’s he was of the line of John and Priscilla Alden. The face and the figure belonged to Alden March.

A busy newspaper editor all his life, in harness till shortly before his death, March had in that craft hosts of friends—as he had also in many other walks of life. His desk in the New York Times office was not only a center of news assembly and dissemination, but a rallying place for talk illuminated by his ripe wisdom, quizzical humor and ready wit. That corner in the East Room found him on his days off browsing among the magazines and taking it easy. There he sat until a friendly fellow Centurion hove in sight. Then he looked up with the smile which always transfigured his rugged and somewhat melancholy face when business or solitude could be exchanged for conversation with his cronies. If you were the friend it lighted upon, you drew up a chair and let him start the ball rolling. At first—usually—the talk ranged around among old acquaintances not forgot—what of good or ill fortune had befallen them—jokes about this one and that, punctuated with the chuckle. But it ranged wherever the interests of the friend in the other chair took it. It might be world affairs or politics. But it might just as well be poker games, or detective stories or picking the winner at the races—March was good at that. And you made a great mistake, if you were going to the track, if you did not take along March’s list of Best Bets—and follow it religiously. Anyway, if March was a party to it, the conversation never got dull. Those who knew him best in the Club used to watch that corner, take up a favorable position and considerately wait for him to look up from his reading.

March came of an academic family. His father, Francis Andrew March, author of a Thesaurus, was for half a century Professor of English in Lafayette College. Alden was born in Easton (September 29, 1869) and was educated at Lafayette; one brother succeeded to the father’s professorship, another is now a professor at Union. Alden himself actually taught school down in Virginia (at Keswick where there is a Hunt) just before (’way back in 1891) he started his life’s career as a newspaper man on the Philadelphia Press, of which later, in an interval of his service on the Times, he was editor and president. Another brother is General Peyton C. March—under whom as Chief of Staff many wore uniforms in the war which did not end war after all. And Alden March’s interests (as somebody wrote) were as varied as the field of the news which he covered so long and with such ability. The men who worked under him and with him leaned upon his judgment, counted confidently on his kindness, cherished his companionship. If the Century saw less of him than the newspaper offices he served and adorned, it was not that March loved the Century less but that he was unsparing of himself in his devotion to duties that were devourers of the time some of the rest of us steal from duties not perhaps so compelling.

Geoffrey Parsons
1942 Century Memorials