James Gordon Steese was born on January 21, 1882 in Mount Holly Springs, Pennsylvania, the son of James and Anna Shaeffer Steese. He was a 1902 graduate of nearby Carlisle's Dickinson College, although he had entered with the class of 1903. As a student, he was very active as a member of Phi Kappa Sigma fraternity and the Union Philosophical Society, as well as a number of dramatic and musical organizations. He also served as class historian for the class of 1903 and on the Microcosm board of editors until he was promoted to a higher class year. His three younger brothers John --- who later died in the service during the First World War --- Charles, and George also attended Dickinson but did not graduate.

After graduation, he attended the United States Military Academy in West Point, New York. Graduating with honors in 1907, he was commissioned in the Army Corps of Engineers.

Steese was stationed in Panama working on the Isthmian Railroad and the Panama Canal Project between 1907 and 1912. Afterwards, he was assigned to various engineering projects in the United States with the Corps of Engineers. Just prior to World War I he was promoted to the rank of colonel. In 1919 he served as Assistant Chief of Engineers and Chief of a General Staff Section during a trip to post-World War I Europe. His service in Europe also gained him several foreign decorations.

Kenneth Steck was born in York, Pennsylvania, but grew up in Carlisle, Pennsylvania. He was the son of Dr. and Mrs. A. R. Steck. He attended York Collegiate Institute and the Dickinson Preparatory School before pursuing the Philosophical course at his hometown college as a member of the class of 1919. While at the College he was a member of Phi Kappa Sigma fraternity.

Steck withdrew in the spring of 1917 to join the army and was assigned to the Engineering Corps. He died of pneumonia on April 24, 1918 at his army camp near Anniston, Alabama. He was twenty-five years old and then a corporal. Steck was the first Dickinsonian and the first man from Carlisle to die in the First World War. His death was announced in the Dickinsonian on May 2, 1918. His name is featured on the First World War memorial on the square in Carlisle.

Joseph B. Stayman was born on July 18, 1832 in Hampden Township, Pennsylvania to Christian and Eliza Stayman. His father served for thirty-one years as a trustee of Dickinson College in Carlisle, Pennsylvania. The younger Stayman attended the preparatory school there and then entered the college proper in 1850 with the class of 1854. He withdrew before graduating and went into business in nearby Mechanicsburg.

Stayman maintained his business career until his retirement. He left it only to enlist very briefly as a private in the Pennsylvania Militia in a company his father raised during the September 1862 emergency during the Civil War. His brother Milton, who also attended Dickinson College with the class of 1856, joined with him in this same unit.

Stayman married Mary A. Shelley of Shiremanstown, Pennsylvania, and the couple had three sons and a daughter. One of these sons, Joseph Webster Stayman, graduated from Dickinson with the class of 1898. Joseph Benton Stayman died on July 14, 1901. He was four days short of his sixty-ninth birthday.

John Stayman was born on September 28, 1823 in Cumberland County, Pennsylvania. In the matriculation register of Dickinson College in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, he listed an Eliza L. Stayman under the title of Parent or Guardian. During his years at Dickinson, Stayman was a member of the Union Philosophical Society. He graduated with the Class of 1841.

In 1845, Stayman was an assistant in the Grammar School, but doubts about his teaching abilities led President John Durbin to remove him from the teaching staff. Stayman then turned to music, giving lessons in Carlisle and Harrisburg for ten years. In 1861, he returned to the College as an adjunct and then full professor of Latin and French. From 1867 to 1869 he was the professor of ancient languages, and was professor of philosophy and English literature from 1869 to 1874.

(Simon) Walter Stauffer was born in Walkersville, Maryland on August 1888 the son of John Hanson and Ellen Nelson Stauffer. He attended area public schools, then Conway Hall Preparatory School in 1906 and 1907, and entered Dickinson College in Carlisle, Pennsylvania. He became a member of Sigma Alpha Epsilon and graduated with the class of 1912.

After a time in Maryland as an insurance agent, he moved to York, Pennsylvania and began a career as an executive in the manufacture of lime and crushed stone. He, in fact, became president of the National Lime Association between 1936 and 1946. He was involved also in other concerns in banking, timber, and utilities. He was vice president and chairman of the executive committee of the York County Gas Company from 1950 to 1960, and a director of the Columbia Water Company. He was elected to the Eighty-third United States Congress in late 1952 as a Republican. He lost his next election in 1954 but regained his seat in the Eighty-fifth Congress in 1956, only to fail again in re-election in 1958.

Joseph Spencer was born on March 21, 1790, in Beverly, Talbot County, Maryland. He was privately educated in Philadelphia, and became a teacher at the Episcopal Seminary there, being ordained in 1819. He left in 1820 to become the principal of Washington Academy in Somerset County, Maryland. Just two years later, Spencer accepted the position of professor of languages at Dickinson College in Carlisle, Pennsylvania. The Board of Trustee minutes of July 27, 1822 show Spencer was unanimously and officially elected with permission to be active in the ministry of the Episcopal Church of Carlisle during his tenure at the College.

Although Spencer spent eight years at Dickinson, rebellious students and fear for his personal safety marred his stay. For example, on February 25, 1825, he received an anonymous letter from a student who wrote in concern for Spencer's well being. The student stated that “Private conspiracies have been formed…against your life. Your body I must confess has 4 times in my own certain knowledge been rescued by the entreaties…of 2 or 3 of your friends, from severe flagellation.” The student cited the reason for these conspiracies and threats to Spencer's life as the professor's own doing, stating “your severity toward the students in general has caused it.”

Carroll Spence was born at Mount Clare, the family home, on the outskirts of Baltimore, Maryland on February 22, 1818, the son of naval hero Robert Traill and Mary Clare Carroll Spence. He was educated privately and then in the law department at Dickinson College in Carlisle, Pennsylvania in the class of 1842. He began his practice in his home state and was soon elected to the state house. In the election of 1852, he campaigned on behalf of Franklin Pierce and the Democrats in Maryland and was a presidential elector. In recognition of his efforts, Pierce, when elected, nominated him as the ninth United States minister to the Turkish Empire.

Spence took up his appointment in August 1853 and spent four years in Constantinople, negotiated the first treaty between Persia and the United States, visited much of the Middle East, and lobbied strenuously for the religious freedom of Turkish Christians and the rights of Muslims to convert. He, in fact, served as the president of the Auxiliary Bible Society of Constantinople.

Spence returned to private life in Baltimore after his term ended in 1858. He died on August 9, 1896 following a lingering illness. He was seventy-eight years old.

Jack Spangenberg was born in Scranton, Pennsylvania on August 26, 1918. He attended Clarks Summit High School and the Keystone Academy before entering Dickinson College in Carlisle, Pennsylvania with the class of 1939. Small in stature, but, according to his classmates, not in ideas, he served on the staff of the Dickinsonian and was a member of Phi Delta Theta fraternity. He graduated with his class and went straight on to the Dickinson School of Law.

Spangenburg was admitted to the Bar in November 1942 but by August 1943 he had completed Officer Candidate School at Fort Benning, Georgia. He was sent to Italy with an anti-tank unit in January 1944, and was slightly wounded at Cassino in April. Spangenburg returned to duty and was killed in action in Italy on July 10, 1944. He was twenty-five years old. On August 19, 1944, his son, John Michael, was born at home in Pennsylvania.

Boyd Lee Spahr was born on April 18, 1880, in Mechanicsburg, Pennsylvania. There he grew up in the first block of South Market Street; his father was a local merchant. Young Spahr attended Dickinson College's preparatory school in nearby Carlisle, and then matriculated in the College proper with the class of 1900. Charming and athletic, he played tennis and joined Phi Kappa Sigma and the Belles Lettres Society. He was editor of The Dickinsonian and through other activities came to earn the nickname “Yodeler.”

Upon graduation he taught history for a year at the Preparatory School and published a collection of stories, Dickinson Doings. He then enrolled at the law school of the University of Pennsylvania, and he remained a Philadelphian the rest of his days.

Seemingly a figure from a Louis Auchincloss novel, Boyd Lee Spahr dominated Dickinson for much of the twentieth century. He served on the Board of Trustees from 1908 until his death in 1970; from 1931 to 1962 he was the Board’s president. Witty and urbane, he deftly governed the College, variously choosing and controlling trustees and presidents to shape Dickinson into an ideal he often declared, “to make Dickinson the best small liberal arts college.”

Adam C. Snyder was born in Crab Bottom in Highland County, Virginia on March 26, 1834 to John and Elizabeth Halderman Snyder. He prepared for undergraduate studies at the Tuscarora Academy in Juniata County, Pennsylvania and entered Dickinson College in Carlisle, Pennsylvania in September 1856 as a member of the class of 1859. Snyder enrolled at Dickinson with James J. Patterson, whose father had helped found Tuscarora. While at the College, Snyder was elected to the Belles Lettres Society, but he transferred to Washington College in Lexington, Virginia in 1857 to complete his education. Snyder studied law under Judge J. W. Brokenbough in Lexington, Virginia and was admitted to the Virginia bar in 1859. He opened a practice in Lewisburg, Virginia soon after.