H. Hamilton 'Hammy' Bissell '29 (1911-2000):
'Doing What He Loved, In a Place He Loved'

As the Academy's first director of scholarships, H. Hamilton "Hammy" Bissell '29 crisscrossed the country in search of students who were "long on brains and short on cash."

Dear Mr. Crawford,
. . . Had I written you at any time during my college course, there would have been little to say that would justify my having received the scholarship

In this 1935 letter, Hammy Bissell wrote that he could "ask nothing better" than the chance to spend his entire career at Phillips Exeter.

[you provided for me]. The fact that I kept my marks above average was due more, I fear, to the necessity of keeping a scholarship than to any keen intellectual interest. The few prizes which I attempted to win I failed to capture. . . . Those that I did receive came as a complete surprise. During my junior year, for example, I was given the History and Literature prize; in the spring of my senior year I was offered a year's fellowship to the University of Cambridge, and finally, the day of graduation, I was elected to Phi Beta Kappa.
      At the same time I was offered a position teaching at Exeter. I wish I could tell you who were responsible for my having been able to go to college how thrilled I was at this opportunity. It was what I had hoped for ever since leaving school. I gave up the fellowship with but little regret and came to Exeter, where I am now in my second year . . . It now seems possible that I may have the opportunity of spending the rest of my life here. I could ask nothing better. . . .

Very truly yours,
Hamilton Bissell

I n this 1935 letter to his benefactor, Frank Crawford, H. Hamilton "Hammy" Bissell '29 set his course. It was one that would take him, over the next 65 years, through a host of positions at the Academy, official and unofficial, but which would never waver in its intent of service to others and to his school. And in the course of that service, Hammy-who died last November 17 at the age of 89-would change the lives of hundreds, even thousands of students, just as his own life had been changed.

'The Smartest Fellow in School'

Henry Hamilton Bissell was born in India in 1911 to missionary parents. His father died suddenly when Hammy was very young, and the family then moved to West Newton, MA, where Hammy's mother raised her four children on a pension. Hammy entered Phillips Exeter Academy as a lower middler in 1926, on a scholarship. While a student at Exeter, Hammy distinguished himself in both academics and athletics. On one of his first days as a new boy, he was sitting outside Abbot Hall, the dorm assigned to scholarship boys, feeling lonely and out of place. Ernie Gillespie '29, a returning student and a rower, noticed him (or his diminutive size) and invited him to come see the boathouse. Hammy was forever grateful to Gillespie, for he found his feet at the boathouse and ultimately made a name for himself as the coxswain for not one, but two successful crews, the first at Exeter, the second at Harvard.

When Robert H. Bates '29 arrived at the Academy a year later, Hammy was pointed out to him as being "the smartest fellow in the school."(Bates attended Harvard and later taught at the Academy with Hammy.) Hammy's upper-year roommate, Richard Beaman '28, recalls that, to his chagrin, Hammy earned "good grades for hardly any study." This was at a time when as many as 40 boys left the Academy midway through the year for academic reasons. Beaman also remembers that Hammy was "fun, with his ready wit and laugh," characteristics that generations of Exonians would come to appreciate.

Hammy similarly distinguished himself at Harvard, graduating with both a job offer and a prestigious fellowship-the former, to join the Exeter faculty as the Academy embarked on its new Harkness teaching plan, the latter, to study for a year at Cambridge University in England. Hammy asked Principal Lewis Perry if he might start teaching at Exeter after a year at Cambridge, but Perry could not hold the job for him. Bates says that in 1933, only three Harvard seniors had jobs at graduation: Hammy; a classmate who went to work at his father's shoe company; and a young man named Al Nickerson, who had a job cranking the handle on a gas pump. The first two, says Bates, were looked upon with envy; the last with some contempt. But in the end, Nickerson became the president of the Mobil Oil Corporation, and Hammy became "Mr. Exeter."

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