Richard Vivian Curnow Watkins was born July 31, 1888 in Mount Carmel, Pennsylvania to Matthew K. and Jennie Curnow Watkins. As a child, he lived at the family’s home at 102 North Hickory Street. He attended Conway Hall, Dickinson College's preparatory school in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, and entered the College proper in 1908 and pursued Special Studies. His brother, M. K. Watkins, was already a student at the College and graduated in 1909. At Dickinson, Watkins became a member of Phi Kappa Sigma, but during his junior year, he was forced to withdraw from school due to his failing health.

After withdrawing, he moved to Brown’s Mills, New Jersey, and later to Burlington. Despite leaving school, however, he maintained a friendship with Professor Wilber H. Norcross, head of the psychology department at the College who had been at College with him in the class of 1907 and a fellow member of Phi Kappa Sigma. On September 12, 1927, at the age of thirty-nine, Watkins died of a lingering illness in his home in Burlington. In 1929, the Richard V. C. Watkins Chair of Psychology was established with $50,000 left to the College in Watkins’ estate. Later that year, his friend Norcross became the first professor to hold the new position.

Norman Watkins was born in Minersville, Pennsylvania in 1919, the son of a Dickinson Law School graduate. The younger Watkins prepared at Baltimore Polytechnic and entered the Dickinson College in 1940. He withdrew in 1942 to attend the Dickinson School of Law. He withdrew from there in January 1943 to enlist in the United States Army.

Watkins received his commission in July 1943, and in October left for combat duty in Europe as commander of a platoon of Combat Engineers. His unit participated in the D-Day landings, and, after sufficient rest, was then sent back into action in Normandy.

On July 27, 1944, Lieutenant Watkins was killed in action at the head of his platoon.

Littleton Washington was born in Washington D.C. on November 3, 1825, the son of Lund Washington, whose forebears were cousins of the family of the first president. He enrolled with the class of 1845 at Dickinson College in Carlisle, Pennsylvania and, while there, was an active student, gaining election to the Belles Lettres Society. He was forced, though, to withdraw from the College due to family financial difficulties. He found gainful employment instead as a clerk in the U.S. Treasury.

Washington became a freelance journalist and then took the opportunity offered in a job as assistant collector in the United States Customs House in San Francisco, California, traveling by ship via Panama. He landed in the city at the time of the vigilante violence of 1856 and actively stood with the legal city government against the mob violence designed to rid the city of law breakers. With Buchanan's election, his position went to another and he returned to Washington, this time overland by way of Mexico, experiencing sundry adventures along the unruly and dangerous route. Back in the capitol, he drifted somewhat, fighting the occasional duel and moving on the fringes of government. He supported the hard-line Democrats and, when the split came, he followed his states' rights leanings, at one point helping to organize a pro-southern group called the "National Volunteers." When hostilities commenced in April 1861, he left Washington for Richmond.

Francis Warlow was born in Philadelphia the son of A. Judson and Mathilde Warlow on July 29, 1909. He was educated at schools in Allentown, Pennsylvania and Baltimore, Maryland before earning his undergraduate degree at the Johns Hopkins University in 1931 with a major in English and a minor in Geology. For almost ten years after his graduation he was an instructor of English at the Carson Long Military Academy in New Bloomfield, Pennsylvania. He was called up for military service in the Army Air Corps in January, 1941 and became an expert on the production of training films in Hollywood. In 1944, he was given command of the Sixth Combat Camera Unit, Thirteenth Army Air Force taking combat footage of fighter and bomber operations in the Pacific. He ended the war with the rank of Lieutenant Colonel.

David Harrison Walton was born on October 21, 1830 in Shenandoah County, Virginia, near the town of Woodstock. He entered Dickinson College in Carlisle, Pennsylvania and graduated with his class in the early summer of 1854. He was a superior student and a member of the Union Philosophical Society. Following his undergraduate years, he studied law in Lexington, Virginia.

He practiced law, and when the Civil War broke out he helped raise a company in his home county that became Company K of the 33rd Virginia Infantry, nicknamed the "Shenandoah Sharpshooters," and was commissioned as its first commander. The unit became a part of the Stonewall Brigade that fought famously at the first Battle of Bull Run (Manassas). In June 1862, with the regiment and brigade suffering some discipline and leadership problems, Walton was reduced to the ranks of the 33rd. He fought as an enlisted man and was wounded at the second encounter at Bull Run (Manassas) in August 1862 and was soon restored to the rank of lieutenant before the unit was engaged at Antietam (Sharpsburg) in September 1862. He continued with the 33rd and was wounded in action at Cedar Creek in October 1864.

Following the war, he returned to law practice in Woodstock. David Harrison Walton died in his hometown on July 7, 1876 and was buried in the Massanutten Cemetery in Woodstock. He was forty-five years old.

Robert Walsh was born in Plains, Pennsylvania in March 1920 and graduated from Plains High School in 1937. He spent one year at Dickinson College in Carlisle, Pennsylvania as a member of the class of 1941 between his freshman year at Pennsylvania State University and his graduation from the University of Scranton. While at Dickinson he was a pledge of the Phi Kappa Psi fraternity.

He enlisted in the Army Air Corps three weeks after Pearl Harbor; he trained in Alabama before basic flight school at Shaw Field in South Carolina and advanced training at Marianna Field in Florida, where he was commissioned in December 1942. He left the United States for active duty in March 1943. Walsh became part of the India-China Wing and on May 15, 1943 was posted as missing in action when his aircraft failed to return from a flight between India and China. Early in the following year, his parents received word that his body had been found with his crew in the wreckage of his aircraft in northern Burma, the victims of Japanese fire, and he was declared as killed in action.

James Wallace was born on March 14, 1818 to a prominent Dorchester County family in Cambridge, Maryland. He entered Dickinson College with the class of 1840 in the autumn of 1836. He was elected to the Belles Lettres Society and graduated with his class in the early summer of 1840. He returned to Cambridge and studied law, gaining admittance to the Maryland bar in 1842 and opened a successful practice.

His success and his local prominence brought him into politics and he served a term in the Maryland house of delegates between 1854 and 1856 and moved on to the state senate between 1856 and 1860. In 1856, having become involved with the American Party, he was a presidential elector, duly casting his ballot for Millard Fillmore. After the outbreak of the Civil War, he helped raise the First Maryland Volunteers (Eastern Shore) in August 1861 and took command as its colonel. The unit was intended to protect Union interests on the Eastern shore and elsewhere in Maryland but in July 1863, the First found itself at Gettysburg fighting on the third day of the battle around Culp's Hill. In the regiment's only day of pitched battle during its entire service, and with Wallace in command, it met and mauled the First Maryland Regiment of the Confederate States Army that contained many of their friends and neighbors from coastal Maryland. The regiment, and its colonel, ended its enlistment and mustered out two days before Christmas in 1863.

From Bloomfield, New Jersey, Alvah Wallace was a political science major in the class of 1964 at Dickinson College in Carlisle, Pennsylvania. He was a member of Omicron Delta Kappa honor society, president of Sigma Alpha Epsilon, and a R.O.T.C. graduate.

Lieutenant Wallace died at Brooke Army Hospital Burn Center in San Antonio, Texas in December 1964. He had been critically injured a month before in the crash of his army aircraft at Fort Bragg, North Carolina where he was a pilot with the 82nd Airborne Division. The incident took place just two weeks after his return from his deployment with the United States Peacekeeping Force to the Dominican Republic. An alcove at the Boyd Lee Spahr Library commemorates his life.

Ernest Vuilleumier was born on March 1, 1894 in New York City, New York. He graduated from the University of Pennsylvania in 1914 and obtained his Ph.D. from the University of Berne, Switzerland through a 1916 Rosengarten traveling fellowship. While he was there, the United States entered the First World War and Vuilleumier made his way to France to enlist with the 162nd United States Infantry in Bordeaux in 1918; he later served with the Chemical Service. He had begun his teaching career at the Drexel Institute of Technology in Philadelphia before going abroad and he worked as an industrial chemist between 1919 and 1920 after returning.

Henry Vethake was born in British Guiana, in what was then the county of Essequibo, on May 26, 1791 to a family of Westphalian educators. His father, Fredrich Albert von Vethake, taught for a time at Vassar College. Henry arrived in Boston in 1797 and later moved to New York City where he received some of his early education. He graduated from Columbia College in 1808 and in 1813 taught mathematics and geography for a time at his alma mater. He went that same year to a similar position at Queen's College, New Jersey, now Rutgers University. He moved on to Princeton in 1817 for four years, teaching mathematics and chemistry, until he took up the chair of mathematics and natural philosophy at Dickinson College in Carlisle, Pennsylvania. He also taught chemistry for a time.