<div>
In the process of creating the Class of 1940’s 25-year book, <em>Hank Brewerton</em> wrote several lines that serve well enough to open here this too-thin account of his own life:</div>
<div>
</div>
<div>
<em>“...within this book we sang the song </em></div>
<div>
<em>of youth,</em></div>
<div>
<em>Of growing up to savor middle age</em></div>
<div>
<em>...set it down</em></div>
<div>
<em>To tell how we passed the time."</em></div>
<div>
</div>
<div>
Many a poet, and more than a few philosophers, have declared that death can be defeated by memory—depending upon the kind of recollections that linger and the number and longevity of the portraits that beam forth from the tapestries along Memory Hall, upon the tunes wafting from the memory-boxes that preserve these most precious of our possessions. If there was anyone in the Class of 1940 who would give that theory its fairest test, it would be Hank Brewerton.</div>
<div>
</div>
<div>
As the subjects of our recollections alter over the decades, some memorabilia become out of date, while others keep modernizing themselves; Hank’s image, accompanied by a soundtrack on which splashings and laughter are repeated heavy themes, retains for me a relatively and especially clear and consistent focus. To be sure, there was much more to Hank Brewerton than those obvious linkages to natation and waggery, to laps and quips.</div>
<div>
</div>
<div>
Consider Hank’s linkage to soldiering, a choice affirmed by most of us some 40 years ago. In Hank’s case, the predilection seemed natural and hereditary after a long line of warrior Brewertons, mostly named Henry. A great-great-great-grandfather was a colonel in the British Army, stationed in the northern area of the then-colony of New York; in his name, a town near Oneida is still called Brewerton.</div>
<div>
</div>
<div>
In the eccentric context of the early 19th Century, great-grandfather Henry Brewerton entered West Point at the age of eleven, and graduated at the age of seventeen. In 1845, as a captain (later brigadier general), he became Superintendent at West Point, serving for seven years until relieved by Robert E. Lee.</div>
<div>
</div>
<div>
A distinguished engineer in his day, the name of graduate number 207 was invoked for a number of features, including Brewerton Channel at Baltimore and Brewerton Road at West Point. It was one of Hank’s imposed flippancies as a plebe to flip pats of butter toward the mess hall portrait of this ancestor.</div>
<div>
</div>
<div>
Hank’s grandfather fought in the Civil War, and his father fought in France in World War I. His bent for soldiering, therefore, was no genetic mystery. Accordingly, it was no light tap but a sledge-hammer blow to Hank to be retired prematurely from the Army, or pass from soldiering to consideration of swimming. Before he left his natal territory, the Panama Canal Zone, and headed north as a teenager, Hank Brewerton held every swimming record from 200 meters to one mile, and was the Zone diving champion as well. By breaking the United States Military Academy record in the 220 his first year, Hank achieved a plebe feat rare in those days by being awarded an "A.” Through the 1940 period Hank was considered to be the outstanding swimmer in West Point’s athletic history.</div>
<div>
</div>
<div>
Consider wit and laughter. Simply irrepressible, with sense and style, amused by the foibles of situation and personality wherever he was, Hank was at the center of any group from which laughter erupted frequently. Hank was turned off, and his satire was turned on, by pomp and panoply, by pretense and cant. His humor, genuine and inexhaustible, was expended for amusement, not pain; its character blended with the rest of his approach—energetic, unaffected, generous, droll.</div>
<div>
</div>
<div>
Consider professional talent and competence. Hank became a highly successful writer, teacher, psychologist, counselor, organizer, administrator, executive, athletic official, and educator. He could, when necessary, be tough-minded; yet he had acute antennae highly sensitive to cries for help, even silent cries. It is of exquisite importance that these multiple excellences were achieved despite a physical debility that badgered him intermittently throughout his entire adult life. He always appeared to be “a man of cheerful yesterdays and confident tomorrows.”</div>
<div>
</div>
<div>
A child of the sun, Hank never saw snow until he arrived at Fort Monroe as a “GI” in 1933. The son of an engineer employed by the Panama Canal for 33 years, Hank was born in the Canal Zone in 1914, and began swimming at eight, in the Zone’s Red, White, and Blue Troop. At Balboa High, he was a Big Man on Campus (BMOC)—swimming, captain and star, editor of the paper and yearbook, already endowed with the powerful chest and shoulders that distinguished his configuration.</div>
<div>
</div>
<div>
Since no appointments to the United States Military Academy were available in the Zone, Hank headed northward to Fort Monroe’s West Point Prep School in 1933. Even as a good soldier on that venerable post, joshing the old-Army noncommissioned officers, Hank was again a sort of BMOC; for, with Hank churning away, the post swimming team even beat colleges in the area. When the Corps was expanded in 1935, the Governor of the Canal Zone was at last authorized to fill an appointment to the United States Military Academy; he named Hank Brewerton first.</div>
<div>
</div>
<div>
As a plebe winning an “A," Hank again quickly became a local celebrity around the Plain. Mathematics, however, gave him formidable competition; as the stars on his bathrobe later testified, he was turned out three times and found once. The latter event had its compensations for us; when Hank re-entered, he joined the Class of 1940.</div>
<div>
</div>
<div>
His cadet years were characteristically full. To the <em>Pointer</em>, Hank devoted very large talents; he eventually became the managing editor. In the Dialectic Society, he performed the remarkable feat of writing the books for the 1938, 1939, and 1940 Hundredth Night Shows, each full of wit, satire, burlesque, hilarity; it was difficult to imagine more enjoyable and memorable farce.</div>
<div>
</div>
<div>
In intercollegiate swimming, he set new records again and again. In three years of nineteen varsity meets, he scored 182 points; in eight meets in 1940, he scored 86 points; the 1940 team, of which he was captain, broke six of eight Military Academy records. In 1940, in the 220 and 440 events, Hank became the first official All-American Swimmer Army ever had.</div>
<div>
</div>
<div>
Hank enjoyed life among the goats, and I think, preferred that environment. Like many goats, he could have stood higher than number 430 out of 449; but he was busy doing a lot of more interesting things. He was elected Class Historian. Preferring the Infantry, and Hawaii or the Philippines, he was ranked into the Coast Artillery Corps and shipped to Panama.</div>
<div>
</div>
<div>
Returning from the Canal in 1938, he met Jeanne Huff on shipboard. They were married quietly on 13 July 1940 in New York City’s Little Church Around The Corner, with his lifelong friend from Panama, Dick Dorrance, as best man.</div>
<div>
</div>
<div>
From September 1940 until September 1944, the Brewertons served in Panama. After battery duties, and attendance at Antiaircraft School at Orlando, Florida, and at the Command and General Staff College at Leavenworth, he commanded the 2d Battalion, 1st Coast Artillery. In 1944, he became a member of the United States mission to Ecuador, to teach artillery and establish a war college. Thus, up to that point, he had done very well; he was expected to go far in the military profession.</div>
<div>
</div>
<div>
Fate, however, suddenly intervened. In 1945, in the rare atmosphere of Quito, while riding in a jeep, and without any earlier warning or indication in his life, he suffered a major epileptic seizure. Hank was retired from active service for physical disability, as a lieutenant colonel, in February 1946. The blow broke his heart but not his spirit.</div>
<div>
</div>
<div>
For me Hank illustrated Montaigne’s incomparable wisdom:</div>
<div>
</div>
<div>
<em>“It is our duty to compose our character,</em></div>
<div>
<em>not to compose hooks, and to win, not </em></div>
<div>
<em>battles and provinces, but order and</em></div>
<div>
<em>tranquility for our conduct of life...</em></div>
<div>
<em>Our great and glorious masterpiece </em></div>
<div>
<em>is to live to the purpose ...”</em></div>
<div>
</div>
<div>
In early 1946, he and Jeanne firmly picked up the pieces. By happy chance, Valley Forge Military Academy in Wayne, Pennsylvania, invited Hank on board and took to the Brewertons; and they stayed for “seven wonderful years” until 1952. For the first three months an instructor in math (I), Hank soon shifted into a specialty for which he had great talent, admissions and guidance. Between 1949 and 1952, he also earned a master’s degree in Education and Psychology at Villanova. The nuns in his classes wrote poetry to him, and he to them; they called him their “Martin Luther.”</div>
<div>
</div>
<div>
An opportunity arose in 1952 to form an alliance with a physician in Puerto Rico in founding Continental Schools, Inc., providing an advisory service for Latin American families desiring to send their children to schools and camps in the United States and a “recruiting” service for some 200 schools and colleges and 100 camps. Continental Schools, which also provided psychological testing of youngsters, initially maintained offices in Havana and Caracas, as well as San Juan.</div>
<div>
</div>
<div>
In Puerto Rico, the Brewertons, besides becoming civic activists, produced in 1953 their only child, Jeancita. Gradually evolving a system of age-group development in swimming, Hank became the “father of the Puerto Rico Swimming Association, a consultant to the Commonwealth on swimming programs and pool construction, and Secretary of the Central American and Caribbean Swimming Federation. He conducted the entire participation of Puerto Rico’s 180 athletes in the 1959 Pan American Games in Chicago, and in 1960 organized in Puerto Rico the first Age-Group Swimming and Diving Championships for Central America and the Caribbean, with 350 participants. In 1961, he repeated that performance in El Salvador and in 1962 in Jamaica. A member of the Puerto Rico Olympic Committee, he served as an official in the Central American Games, the Pan American Games, and the Olympic Games. Hank also served as local head (and lifetime member) of the Military Order of the World Wars.</div>
<div>
</div>
<div>
Eventually the pervasive heat of Puerto Rico led them to think of cooler climates. Don Yeuell helped to guide the Brewertons toward a location and position just about ideal: Director of Guidance at New York Military Academy, Cornwall-on-Hudson, a few miles north of West Point. Over the eleven years from 1965 to 1976, Hank’s guidance assisted nearly 900 young persons to select and enter the right college orbit.</div>
<div>
</div>
<div>
Said Brigadier General Fran Roberts, New York Military Academy Superintendent: "Two of Hank’s greatest qualities were his forthrightness and incisiveness...an outstanding counselor of young men and women."</div>
<div>
</div>
<div>
As at Valley Forge and San Juan, Hank undertook other services-President of the West Point Society of the Mid-Hudson Valley; Board of Governors, Mid-Hudson Chapter, AUSA; Vice President of the Association of Graduates, United States Military Academy, 1970-71 and 1975-76. General William Knowlton added an inevitable comment that had seemed for forty years the natural thing to remember about Hank Brewerton: “His sense of humor made him a welcome addition to any gathering.”</div>
<div>
</div>
<div>
Hank officiated at international swimming meets, including the Olympics in Tokyo, Mexico City, and Munich, and in the early summer of 1976 was preparing to participate again, as an official at Montreal. As a member of the Technical Committee of FINA, the international swimming confederation, he had pressed for years for the adoption of the prized concept: a standardized, but tailored, system for age-group swimming development.</div>
<div>
</div>
<div>
Always supplementing, often superseding, all his other activities was Hank’s unique, voluminous, invaluable services for the Class of 1940. Actually, he performed many deeds and duties usually spread among a number of officers in other classes. Almost too many to mention—Hank was the scribe for the 1940 class notes in ASSEMBLY from April 1946 through the June 1976 issues (Bill Knowlton, inveterate reader of class notes, felt that Hank’s column after our 30th Reunion was “a classic”); he was the clearing house for personal and family statuses, addresses, and events for all members of 1940; representative at reunions, alumni gatherings, and data collections; fund raiser and treasurer much of the time; arranger of awards to class sons; logistician and host for class gatherings and reunions; organizer and editor of the 15-year book and the 25-year book, carefully recording in each volume the other contributors, large and small.</div>
<div>
</div>
<div>
Thirty-six years after graduation and commissioning, to the very day, on Friday, 11 June 1976 in Cornwall while Jeanne watched at his side, “God’s finger touched him, and he slept.” The capitulation of that great heart “was over in seconds.”</div>
<div>
</div>
<div>
Thus, as “the day’s out, and the labor done,” Hank was buried quietly among perpetual friends in the West Point Cemetery, attended by his family; official and personal mourners; his lifelong friend, Dick Dorrancc; Don Yeuell’s widow, Mary; and classmates Bryce Denno, Dick Kent, and Jack Wright. Besides Jeanne and Jeancita, Hank left behind his mother and sister Matilde.</div>
<div>
</div>
<div>
Minutes of silence were observed in his memory in places far away. Perhaps a single tribute that would have pleased him much is enough to cite here, from a South African colleague on FINA’s Technical Committee and fellow Olympic Swimming Official:</div>
<div>
</div>
<div>
<em>"His years of endeavor culminated in </em></div>
<div>
<em>the tabling of the International Age-</em></div>
<div>
<em>Group rules...and at his untimely </em></div>
<div>
<em>death the rules were awaiting ratification</em></div>
<div>
<em>by the FINA Congress...I hope that, </em></div>
<div>
<em>although posthumously, he will </em></div>
<div>
<em>get the credit for a job well done."</em></div>
<div>
</div>
<div>
Hank Brewerton had indeed lived to the purpose.</div>
<div>
</div>
<div>
Addressing his classmates, Jeanne says, "he took great pleasure in keeping contact...his classmates took priority...he loved you all."</div>
<div>
</div>
<div>
This, then, is his book, this is “how he passed the time.”</div>
<div>
</div>
<div>
Some of Hank’s many talents have been cited above; but perhaps his greatest talent was one that had to be shared: a talent for friendship. It will not be easy to think of Hank Brewerton without the memory-sound of his voice, in quip and quick laughter. We want to say more than that we thank him, and mourn him; we loved him too.</div>
<div>
</div>
<div>
<em>—Tony Wermuth</em></div>
<div>
</div>