John Och was born in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania in November 1914. He graduated from Harrisburg Catholic and entered Dickinson College in nearby Carlisle with the class of 1937. He pursued a scientific degree, competed on the track team, and was a member of Sigma Chi fraternity. Following his studies at Dickinson, in 1939 he earned a master's degree from the Philadelphia College of Pharmacy and Science and took work as a pharmaceutical salesman for a firm in York, Pennsylvania.

Och entered the navy in 1942 and was commissioned in October. Beginning in January 1943, he served seventeen months of sea duty before returning home to be married in June 1944. On October 1944, Och was serving on a heavy cruiser in enemy waters when he was washed overboard during a storm and lost.

Sydney Novell was from Norristown, Pennsylvania, where he graduated from high school. He spent two years at Dickinson College in Carlisle, Pennsylvania in the Ph.B. course as a member of the class of 1939. He was a member of Phi Epsilon Pi fraternity but withdrew before his junior year.

Captain Novell lost his life in the service of the United States during the Second World War but the details of his sacrifice are presently not available.

Birth: May 20, 1803; Mifflin County, Pennsylvania

Death: March 22, 1864 (age 61); Memphis, Tennessee

Military Service: USA, 1861-64

Unit: Paymaster

Alma Mater: Dickinson College, B.A. (Class of 1824)

William Brown Norris received his bachelor of arts degree from Dickinson College in Carlisle, Pennsylvania in 1824 and began to study law in Bellefonte. In 1826 he was admitted to the Centre County Bar and began to practice law. However, a loss of his voice forced Norris to abandon that profession; he then moved to Lewistown and became engaged in the iron industry. After several years in this trade, Norris was a surveyor from 1848 to 1852 and was a surveyor for the port of Philadelphia.

A jack-of-all-trades, Norris then entered the insurance business, in which capacity he served until being appointed paymaster of the United States Army. While serving in the army, Norris died in Memphis, Tennessee on March 22, 1864.

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.

Reverend Eugene Allen Noble was born in Brooklyn, New York on March 5, 1865. He prepared for college at Trinity School in New York City and went on to the Centenary Collegiate Institute in Hackettstown, New Jersey. He received a Ph.B. from Wesleyan University in 1891. In 1892, he married Lillian White Osborn, his spouse until her death in 1930. After graduate work at Northwestern University, he became a member of the New York Eastern Conference of the Methodist Church. Noble served in several capacities in the ministry, including a term as the Superintendent of the Methodist Hospital in Brooklyn beginning in 1896. He returned to the Centenary Collegiate Institute as president from 1902 to 1908, and thereafter was named as the president of Goucher College in Baltimore, Maryland. He was the secretary of the First National Peace Congress held in Baltimore in 1911 and was the editor of its proceedings. By this time he had also been awarded honorary degrees from St. John's College, Wesleyan, and Dickinson.

Charles Nisbet was born on January 21, 1736 to William and Alison Nisbet; William was a schoolteacher at Long Yester near Haddington, East Lothian County, Scotland. By 1754, Nisbet had completed studies at both the high school of the university in Edinburgh and had entered Divinity Hall to prepare for the ministry. He was licensed by the Presbytery of Edinburgh on September 24, 1760, and began preaching at churches in the Gorbals, near Glasgow. On May 17, 1764, he was ordained in the Presbytery of Brechin and assigned to a church in Montrose, in Forfar. Two years later, he married Anne Tweedie and his first son Thomas was born. The Nisbets had three more children, Mary, Alison (1773) and Alexander (1777).

Active, studious, and blessed with a remarkable memory, Nisbet could speak nine languages, and developed a high reputation in Scotland for scholarship. He became a member of the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland, and was outspoken in his defense of strict Calvinism. He was awarded a doctorate of divinity degree from Princeton University in 1783; it was Nisbet who had recommended fellow Scotsman John Witherspoon for that institution's presidency.

Charles Casper Nickel was born in Loysville, Pennsylvania in 1916 and was a graduate of Duncannon High School. He entered Dickinson College in Carlisle, Pennsylvania in 1933 but left after one year of study in the scientific course. During his time at the College he was a member of Theta Chi fraternity. Eventually, he attended journalism school and became an editor and publisher in Perry County, Pennsylvania.

He joined the army soon after Pearl Harbor and served two years before being commissioned at Fort Eustis, Virginia. He was assigned to an anti-aircraft battery in the Pacific theater. On December 8, 1944, during a Japanese attack on the Buri Airfield on Leyte Island, he was mortally wounded and died the next day. He was buried in Dulag Cemetery on Leyte, Republic of the Philippines.

John A. Nicolson was born in Laurel, Delaware on November 17, 1827. He was educated at a preparatory seminary in Nelson County, Virginia, possibly the Presbyterian school at Lynchburg, and entered Dickinson College in Carlisle, Pennsylvania with the class of 1847 in 1843. He was elected as a member of the Union Philosophical Society but withdrew from the College in 1845. He studied law in with Martin W. Bates in Dover, Delaware and took up practice there in April 1850.

He was briefly superintendent of schools in Kent County in 1851 and extended his civic duties in a very different role in the county when he became brigadier general of militia in 1861. He was elected to the United States Congress in 1864 as a Democrat, beating Republican and Ultimate Unionist Nathaniel Smithers, a fellow Dickinsonian. He served two terms, during the first on the Committee of Elections and in the second the Appropriations Committee. He returned to private practice in Dover in 1869.

In August, 1848, he had married Angelica Killeen Reed of Dover and the couple's son, John Reed Nicholson, served later as the chancellor of the high court of the state of Delaware between 1895 and 1909. John Anthony Nicholson died in Dover on November 4, 1906 and was buried in the Presbyterian Cemetery there.

Image courtesy of the National Archives.

Harry W. Nice was born in Washington D.C., on December 5, 1877 the son of Methodist minister Henry Nice and his wife Drucilla Arnold Nice. The family moved to Baltimore, Maryland soon after and he was educated in the public schools there. He was prepared for college at Baltimore City College and entered Dickinson College in Carlisle, Pennsylvania with the class of 1899 in 1896. He studied at the College for only one year. He left to study law at the University of Maryland, where he graduated with a LL.B degree in 1899.

Nice began a long and distinguished political career with the Republican Party when he was elected to the Baltimore city council in 1903. In swift succession, he served as secretary to the mayor of Baltimore, supervisor of elections in the city, and as a state's attorney. In an initial run for governor in 1919 when he went down to narrow defeat to his law school classmate and grandson of a Dickinsonian in the class of 1853, Albert C. Ritchie. He then distinguished himself as a tax appeal judge between 1920 and 1924 but came to national prominence in 1934 when he defeated the sitting the Democratic governor, his old rival Ritchie, on the unlikely platform that Ritchie was not doing enough in Maryland to aid in President Roosevelt's national recovery efforts. His effective political career came to an end before the end of the decade, however, when he was defeated for re-election in 1938 and again in the 1940 Senate race in Maryland.

William Neill was born to William and Jane Snodgrass Neill in McKeesport, Pennsylvania in April 1778 or 1779, though the exact date is unknown. When still an infant, his father was killed by a band of Indians, and soon thereafter his mother died as well. After of her death, William and his five siblings were scattered among family relatives. Neill moved to Canonsburg, Pennsylvania where he attended country schools and later became a clerk in a country store. In 1797, he entered the Canonsburg Academy with the intention of becoming a Presbyterian minister. He enrolled in Princeton University, graduating in 1803. He immediately took a job as a tutor at Princeton, and on October 5, 1805 he married his first wife, Elizabeth Van Dyke, with whom he had two children. In that same year, Neill became a pastor in Cooperstown, New York, and while there he tutored James Fenimore Cooper and his brother Samuel. He would later take positions in Albany, New York and Philadelphia. In 1809, his wife Elizabeth died, and on February 25, 1811 he married Frances King.