This year’s Honorary Degree recipients have been named. The degrees will be conferred at next Saturday’s Commencement exercises. Babson College has been awarding honorary degrees since 1959.  It is worth noting that these degrees were not only awarded at Commencement.  A list of those awarded honorary degrees can be found at the Honorary Degree Awards page on the Babson College Archives website.

R. C. (Rip) Rybnikar

Babson College Archives

This week’s sixty year old student newspaper is now available. Please note that their academic year had three terms.  Their year began later and so the 1949 Beaver  will continue until the June 10th issue.

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Babson College Archives

The Babson student newspaper from 60 years ago this week.

R. C. (Rip) Rybnikar

Babson College Archives

Grace Margaret Knight Babson died on this day in 1956.  She was 82. She and Roger had been partners in life and work and were married for 56 years.

Grace was born in South Hadley, MA on December 12, 1873. Her father, Rev. Richard Knight, was a Congregational minister and missionary.  Grace met Roger Babson in grammar school in Gloucester.  But when Rev. Knight moved to Minnesota, Grace joined him and graduated from high school in St. Paul. She attended Mount Holyoke College until her father died.  In order to support her mother she attended the Massachusetts General Hospital School of Nursing,  She and Roger became re-acquainted near or after the time he graduated from MIT in 1898.

Roger and Grace were married March 25, 1900. In his autobiography Roger famously says of her “instead of telling me how wonderful she was, she let me tell her how wonderful I was.”{p. 74] They had not been married long when Roger contracted TB. They left Wellesley Hills and went west to explore the “fresh air” cure.  It was assumed that Roger and Grace would not return because he would not survive.  After a while they returned and they decided that Roger would found his own business. While trying the “fresh air” cure in Wellesley Hills, their daughter Edith Low Babson was born on December 6, 1903.  Roger & Grace formed the “Office of Roger W. Babson” a year to the day later.  This evolved into Babson’s Reports and Babson Statistical Organization.

Grace played an important role but it was almost always in the background. She was present with sound advice and unconditional support. When Roger was inspired to build a residential campus for his new Babson Institute, Grace gave support which included matching gifts. She funded the building of the Richard Knight Auditorium in her father’s memory. She consistently supported the library.

She was firmly committed to education. In 1927 she co-founded Webber College in Babson Park, FL. Named for her granddaughter Camilla it was designed to teach business fundamentals to women in much the same way that Babson Institute was to teach men.

Grace took an active interest in collecting the works of Sir Isaac Newton. Working from her husband’s use of Newton’s Third Law of Motion as a leitmotiv for his business she amassed the third largest collection of Newtonia and the largest on this side of the Atlantic. She was named an Honorary Fellow of the Newton Society. She even arranged for the acquisition of the foreparlour that had been in his St. Martins Street home in London. The Grace K. Babson Collection of the Works of Sir Isaac Newton was a labor of love. These Newtonia were collected by her and given to the Institute. She made the decisions as to what to purchase. She did not simply write checks although a curator was hired to hunt for and review possible additions to the collection.

Grace and Roger spent half the year in Lake Wales, Florida and the other half in New England. She died in Weston on April 30, 1956. She is buried with her husband in the Babson plot on the Babson College campus.

R. C. (Rip) Rybnikar

Babson College Archives

Nona was born in Milford, Maine on April 28, 1889. Her parents were Daniel (born in Ireland) and Ellen M. (Kelleher) Dougherty (born in Bangor, Maine.) She was an Honors graduate of the Massachusetts General Hospital School of Nursing. It was through her nursing that she met Mr. Babson. He had just returned to Wellesley after World War I service with the Department of Labor in Washington when he developed problems with his appendix. His wife Grace, also a graduate of the Massachusetts General Hospital School of Nursing, asked the school to send over one of their best recent graduates. Nona arrived and nursed Mr. Babson through his recovery. It was in conversations during this recovery that the planned Babson Institute went from being a strictly correspondence school to a residential school.  When Mr. Babson emphasized the importance of character building as part of the educational plan Nona wondered out loud how he planned to build character at a distance. Roger took her her point and included a residential school as part of the planning for Babson Institute.

She stayed on, first to nurse Mr. Babson’s company through the influenza outbreak, and then in many roles with Babson’s Reports over many years. For much of her years in Wellesley she was the intermediary between Mr. Babson’s businesses and Babson Institute. Roger’s wife of 56 years, Grace Knight Babson, died on April 30, 1956. Roger married Nona on June 1, 1957. She died in Gloucester, MA July 13, 1963. Roger Babson died March 5, 1967.

Most of the Nona’s influence on the Institute was behind the scenes. She did, however, leave a visible mark on the campus.  In 1950 she funded the creation of a gate at the main entrance on Wellesley Avenue. This was known as the “Doughtery Gate” and was the main entrance to the campus until the 1970s.  (At the back side of the Lunder parking lot one can see the remains of the pillars of this entrance.) The building of Babson Hall, Gerber Hall, and Kriebel Hall with the added construction of new residence halls forced the reworking of campus roads which created College Drive and the current Forest Street entrance.  When the Forest Street entrance was built the plaque from the Dougherty gate was moved there were one can still find it.

R. C. (Rip) Rybnikar

Babson College Archives

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Here is the Beaver from 60 years ago this week.

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Babson College Archives

The 1964 Babsonian is now available on the Timeline.

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Babson College Archives

This week’s sixty year old Babson Beaver.

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Babson College Archives

At yesterday’s Towm Meeting the 4 C Award and the Walter Carpenter Prize for Exceptional Contributions to Babson College were awarded.

This year’s 4 C Awards went to Nellie Pineault (MBA 2003) of Athletics; Sandy Sweetman of  Facilities; and Elizabeth Bristol of Graduate Programs and Student Affairs.

The Carpenter Prize was awarded to Professor Bob Turner of the Accounting Division.

Congratulations to all and thank you for your service.

R. C. (Rip) Rybnikar

Babson College Archives

The 1962 and 1963 Babsonians are now available.

R. C. (Rip) Rybnikar

Babson College Archives