Concord Monitor covers 100th birthday of Dustin '32
When Elden Dustin ’32 was at Bates, reports the Concord Monitor on the occasion of Dustin’s 100th birthday on Feb. 18, his campus job was to shovel coal to keep the furnace running at President Gray’s home. Dustin, who is president of the Class of 1932, would go on to earn a master’s degree in education before a long career as a teacher and principal. “I’ve never stopped learning,” Dustin says, wearing his Phi Beta Kappa tie tack from Bates.
Ralph Bennett, 87, a fellow resident of the Havenwood-Heritage Heights retirement home, was one of Dustin’s students between 1937 and 1941. He rattled off the subjects Dustin taught him during those four years: civics in the first year, algebra in the second, geometry and appreciation of literature and music in the third, English in the final two years.
Family members tell the Monitor that Dustin is a direct descendant, about 11th generation some calculated, of Hannah Dustin, the 17th century New England woman who, captured during an Indian raid, escaped by killing her captors in the night and fleeing in their canoe.
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