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Brigadier General <em>Theodore Harwood Dillon</em> (USA Ret.), who was born in Indiana 6 January 1883 and was graduated from USMA in 1904, died 10 July 1961 in St. Petersburg, Florida. At his request his body was cremated and the ashes committed to the territorial waters of Florida.</div>
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General Dillon was commissioned a second lieutenant in the Corps of Engineers. He often said he owed his standing in his class to an upper classman, himself among the goats, who believed the way to punish a plebe was to make him study.</div>
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He served his country in many capacities: as assistant director of Public Works in Cuba, on mapping and survey work in the Philippines, and in the construction of the Dalles Celilo canal in Oregon. He was electrical engineer and superintendent of Gatun Locks and in charge of the Locks Division of the Panama Canal from 1915 to 1917.</div>
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In World War I he was assistant chief engineer, First Army, American Expeditionary Forces in France, playing an important part in the operations at Chateau Thierry, San Mihiel, and the Meuse-Argonne. In taking over the quarters of his opposite number of the German Army in a move into forward positions, he discovered two stories down in the concrete dugout a grand piano and a magnificent mahogany desk. He never knew what happened to the piano, but the desk followed him from place to place as long as the war lasted.</div>
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After the Armistice he became technical adviser and department chief of the War Damages Board, American Peace Commission in Paris, 1919. He liked to reminisce about his golf games in Paris with John Foster Dulles, the Aga Khan, and Lord Derby. He said Bernard Baruch did not play golf, but being a financier he went along to place the bets.</div>
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General Dillon resigned from the Army in 1919 to become Professor of Electrical Engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology where he remained for five years. He went to Harvard as Professor in the School of Business Administration. He served at one time as President of the Executive Board of the Boston Chamber of Commerce. He resigned from Harvard to accept the position of Director of Personel and Shipping with the United Fruit Company of Boston. Later he became assistant to the company president. He was Director of Publicity and Public Relations at the Carnegie Foundation, Washington, D.C., in 1939.</div>
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In World War II, General Dillon was recalled to active service and was commissioned as Chief of the Transportation Division, War Department, Brigadier General Frank P. Scowden of the Quartermaster General’s Office making the presentation. Asked how he went about organizing transportation on such a gigantic scale, General Dillon replied that he called into his office the presidents of a leading railroad, a leading steamship line and leading bus and truck lines and acted upon their advice. He also served as assistant chief of the newly formed Transportation Corps. However, his pet project in World War II was the development of the amphibians called “ducks” for which he staged an early demonstration on the banks of the Potomac. These pet “ducks” played an important part in all the invasions and became a decisive weapon of war.</div>
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General Dillon was awarded the Distinguished Service Medal and the Legion of Merit. He was an expert marksman, winning the National Individual Rifle Match in Seagirt, N. J., in 1906.</div>
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In 1948 he was named Director of Engineering for the Atomic Energy Commission and was associated with the construction of the government laboratory in Los Alamos, N.M.</div>
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He was married in 1911 to Susan Elston Baxter, daughter of Colonel and Mrs. John Baxter, in Yokohama, Japan. There were no children. After his retirement in 1949, General and Mrs. Dillon lived in Edgartown, Martha’s Vineyard, Mass. He took an active part in the village life, serving for a time as principal of the high school, chairman of the library board of trustees and as trustee of the hospital.</div>
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General Dillon was a man of many facets seeming to do well everything he attempted. Late in life he wrote a play entitled “Masque” based on the Turkish poem by Fasli, a symbolic interpretation of the Persian legend “The Nightingale and the Rose.”</div>
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The Dillons moved to St. Petersburg, Florida, in February, 1961, purchasing a lifetime lease on a suite of rooms which they furnished with their choice collection of antiques, in the Lutheran Towers Retirement Hotel. Mrs. Dillon continues to reside there.</div>
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General Dillon is succeeded in the Long Gray Line by his grand nephew, Thomas Richard Gordon, USMA 1961, recently commissioned in the Artillery. To this grand-nephew he bequeathed his West Point memorabilia with the admonition in the language of the upperclassman, “Mister, you had better be good.”</div>
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<em>—Hazel Dillon Harney</em></div>
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