Maine’s first Rhodes scholar ran into history

If you are among the thousands of Mainers who are attending high school and college graduation ceremonies this spring, pause a moment to remember David Richard Porter.

Porter was Maine’s first Rhodes scholar, a distinction that the Bangor Daily News at the time called “the highest honor that can be bestowed upon a Maine college student.” It still is as far as I know even though things British don’t hold quite the sway they once did in this rapidly diversifying country.

Porter’s name has been forgotten today. In 1904, the year the first Rhodes scholarships were awarded, however, he exemplified the best and the brightest – in academic achievement, in athletic prowess and in moral character.

Yet I came to wonder as I read the pile of old news clips I collected from various libraries if Porter ever would have won a Rhodes if it hadn’t been for one event in his life – an awe-inspiring sprint down Harvard’s football field one crisp October afternoon into sports legend.

That’s not to take anything away from Porter’s accomplishment. Winning the Rhodes was a spectacular achievement considering the youth’s early life wasn’t up to the standards most Bowdoin boys were used to.

Porter was born in West Old Town on April 21, 1882, the son

of Willis M. and Esther F. Porter. “His earlier advantages were not all that could be desired, but he made the best use of them,” said the Bangor Daily News story announcing his Rhodes Scholarship on June 14, 1904.

That was said without explanation. It wasn’t until later, after I discovered that Porter had married Alice Hinckley, a daughter of the founder of the Good Will Home and School in Hinckley, that I checked a history of the school by Lawrence M. Sturtevant. The home was for “needy” boys, which could be defined in various ways. Porter arrived there for two years in 1896 with his sister, who became a matron of one of the cottages. According to other records I checked, the siblings’ father, who had been postmaster and a grocer in West Old Town, had died in 1891, doubtlessly putting a crimp in family finances.

Porter emerged as a superstar after ending up at Bangor High School where the newspaper said he “captured about everything in sight in the way of prizes and honors,” and captained the track and football teams as well as the cadets.

He entered Bowdoin College in the fall of 1902, already 20 years old. He had paused along the way to teach school, according to one vague newspaper account. He was already a star athlete, and that fall the famed exploit at Harvard occurred. Scooping up a fumbled pass near the Harvard end zone, “the Bowdoin right end, a tall, lanky chap with a shock of red hair … was off down the field like a frightened deer,” according to a newspaper report.

That story was told about Porter for years afterwards, and it appears in many of the newspaper stories about him, including his obituary. Unlike the tales of cowardice or moral turpitude that dog some men through their lives, this one doubtlessly did Porter no harm and may have helped see him over a few of life’s bumps – as in “Are you the Porter who back in ’02 …”

That same spring Cecil Rhodes, the British industrialist, died, leaving part of his large estate to establishing scholarships to Oxford University for students from the United States, Germany and several countries in the British Empire (more countries have been added today). In 1904 the first batch of scholars departed for England. Porter, who had completed his sophomore year at Bowdoin, was chosen over two other Bowdoin students who had also qualified, Clement C. Robinson, ’03, of Brunswick and John M. Bridgham, ’04, of Dexter.

The examinations used to choose the winners had been apportioned in each state to particular colleges, according to the Bangor Daily News account. “Next year some of the other Maine colleges will have the honor of sending a student to Oxford – Bates, Colby and University of Maine coming in rotation,” it said.

Sure enough, in 1905, Harold William Soule, a graduate of Hingham High School in Massachusetts, was chosen from Colby; In 1907, Bates graduate Wayne C. Jordan of Lewiston was picked; and in 1908 Ballard F. Keith, a Bangor native who went to Old Town High School, was chosen from the University of Maine.

Soule became an educator and then a publishing executive. Jordan died at the age of 38 of typhus in China while working for the YMCA organizing religious and educational programs. Keith became a prominent Bangor lawyer and civic leader.

Porter excelled at Oxford, piling up achievements in academics, sports and leadership that are too numerous to mention here. Afterwards he enjoyed a distinguished career in education as secretary of the YMCA’s student division and founder of the Hi Y Club, which spread to 10,000 high schools and had 250,000 members. Later he went to work for the Mount Hermon School in Northfield, Mass., as a teacher, master and, between 1935 and 1943, headmaster after the headmaster mysteriously was murdered. In 1943 he returned to work for the YMCA, distributing books to Allied prisoners of war through the YMCA’s War Prisoners’ Aid of the World’s Committee. In 1935 he received honorary degrees from Bowdoin and Colgate University. He died in 1973 at age 91.

In 1959, he was portrayed in an interview in an English newspaper as living confirmation of Cecil Rhodes’ wisdom in supplying money so Americans could attend Oxford. By then Porter was 77. His first wife had died and he had remarried the widow of his best friend at Oxford. They lived part of the year in Oxford overlooking a golf course in a house called Pinetops. They lived the rest of the year in Washington, D.C.

Porter leaned back in his study chair and looked out over the golf course. “I love it here,” he said as a distant figure drove down the fairway. He explained how returning to Britain each year regenerated his fervor for the “English Speaking Union” and the shared heritage of the United States and Britain. “I’m a lucky man,” he said.

Perhaps he also felt lucky the reporter never asked him about that famous touchdown run against Harvard.

Note: In my column on “The Penobscot Man” on May 3, I said that James McGillery, a young river driver, died in Spencer Gap on Spencer Stream beyond the outlet to Spencer Pond, which is connected to Moosehead Lake by the stream (See DeLorme Maine Atlas, Map 41). A reader, Marc Johnson of South China, suggests it is more than likely that the Spencer Gap referred to is shown in the DeLorme Maine Atlas on Map 29 as Spencer Gut (“a narrow rock-walled canyon”), which is located on a different Spencer Stream connecting a different Spencer Lake (or pond, if you wish) to the Dead River. The original newspaper story in the Bangor Daily News in 1904 did not state the location of Spencer Gap, and, having never seen either place, I will defer to Johnson.

Wayne E. Reilly can be reached at wreilly@bangordailynews.net.