Class of 1907

Wilbur Harrington Norcross was born June 28, 1882 in Ralston, Pennsylvania. He attended Dickinson Seminary in Williamsport, Pennsylvania for two years before matriculating into Dickinson College in Carlisle, Pennsylvania as a student in 1905. At Dickinson, he received both his B.A. (1907) and M.A. (1913). He attended Johns Hopkins University for graduate work, receiving his Ph. D. in psychology in 1920.

During this time he was a Methodist minister for one year in Duncannon, Pennsylvania before returning to the Dickinson Seminary to teach Greek and Latin. He became dean by 1912, but left that post to attend Johns Hopkins in 1914. Norcross joined the Dickinson College faculty in 1916 as an associate professor of philosophy and education. When the war interrupted both his graduate studies and his teaching, he served at Love Field in Dallas, Texas as commander of a medical research laboratory for the air service, rising to the rank of major.

He returned to Dickinson in 1920, and, having completed his degree from Hopkins, switched his teaching fields and became an associate professor of psychology and philosophy. Norcross was instrumental in the creation of two distinct departments for philosophy and psychology. In 1924 he became a full professor, and was named to the R. V. C. Watkins Chair of Psychology in 1929.

Robert Fleming Rich was born in Woolrich in Clinton County, Pennsylvania on June 23, 1883. His parents were Michael Bond Rich, from the famous Pennsylvania textile family, and Ida Belle Shaw. He was schooled at Mercersburg Academy and the Williamsport Commercial College before he entered Dickinson College in Carlisle, Pennsylvania in 1903 with the class of 1907. He joined Phi Kappa Psi during his freshman year and played two years on the football team, but left the College in 1906 without graduating to take up a position in the family's Woolrich Woolen Mills. Thus began a long and successful commercial career which saw him become general manager from 1930 to 1959, then president and chairman of the board of Woolrich Woolen Mills. He also engaged in other ventures in banking, manufacturing and utilities.

Rich became active in Republican politics, representing his district as a delegate to the national convention in 1924. In November 1930 he was elected to the Seventy-First Congress to fill the vacancy caused by the death of Edgar R. Kiess. He served for the next twelve years until 1942 when he did not seek renomination, but he returned to the House of Representatives in the Seventy-ninth Congress in 1945 and served another three terms. He retired from politics in early 1951 and devoted himself from then on to his work at Woolrich.

Lewis Guy Rohrbaugh was born on February 24, 1884 in Fowblesburg, near Baltimore, Maryland. He graduated from Franklin High School in Reisterstown in 1903 and entered Dickinson College in Carlisle, Pennsylvania. During his college years, Rohrbaugh became a member of Alpha Chi Rho, Omicron Delta Kappa and the Union Philosophical Society. He graduated in 1907, studied at Drew Theological Seminary for his B. D. degree and earned his Ph.D. at the State University of Iowa in 1922 in philosophy and religion.

He returned to Dickinson as an associate professor of philosophy and religious education that same year and, in 1930, became professor of philosophy and religion. Rohrbaugh was appointed as the dean of the freshman class in 1933. He later also chaired his department. An ordained Methodist minister, Rohrbaugh was also a theology scholar, publishing books and essays such as Religious Philosophy, The Science of Religion, and A Natural Approach to Philosophy. In 1951, he was appointed to the newly endowed Thomas Bowman Chair of Religion, named for the first graduate of the College to be named a Methodist bishop.

Rohrbaugh married Lillian Mae Heffelbower in 1907 and they had one son, H. Lewis Rohrbaugh, who graduated from Dickinson in 1930. He taught at the College until 1953 when he was accorded professor emeritus status. Lewis Guy Rohrbaugh died on June 30, 1972.