Great local men remembered fondly
Early afternoon, Super Bowl Sunday. The columnist is visiting, with a friend, a cemetery just off Route 201, near Vanderbilt. Later we drive on over to a cemetery from which Perryopolis sprawls in the middle-distance.
We were remembering the dead. Obviously, it means nothing to the dead to be remembered; the dead are dead. The dead are what the living make of them.
“A tree is best measured when it’s down” goes an old saw. The columnist first ran across it while reading about Lincoln. Good old Abe, dead in his 50s of a bullet to the head. Poor guy. Poor America.
Those we recalled on Super Bowl Sunday were, like Lincoln, politicians, public servants.
The first was Edward Dumbauld of Uniontown. If you are a certain age you may know the name; maybe you knew the man himself.
The columnist, visiting the Dumbauld residence on North Mt. Vernon Avenue, was encouraged to take the elevator to the second floor.
As the elevator rose, Dumbauld, his feet planted on the first floor, cried out, “Thus, I rid myself of tyrants!”
He was like a figure from the 19th century. A New Dealer in his youth, he bore, for all of that, a close resemblance to Winston Churchill. He was stout, wore dark suits and old-fashioned, hard-sole, high-top shoes. Class orator at Harvard — a rare honor — in the 1920s, Dumbauld was a wonderful classic speechmaker.
He commanded respect. Once, he addressed a state House subcommittee meeting at the old Holiday Inn on Route 40; there’s no other word for it: the politicians were awed.
A federal judge nominated by JFK and confirmed unanimously in 1961, he remained on the bench well past his nominal retirement in 1976. As a senior judge, he presided in courtrooms across the country.
He could reach back in time and pull out … history. It was magical. He had been close to Robert Jackson. Who was Robert Jackson? FDR’s attorney general, for one thing. Dumbauld was a big deal in Jackson’s anti-trust division in the 1930s.
Jackson’s great claim on history: he was chief Allied prosecutor at the Nuremburg trial of Nazis after World War II.
Judge Dumbauld of Princeton/Harvard knew a lot of smart people. The smartest man he ever met, he said, was Newton Baker. Newton Baker served in Woodrow Wilson’s cabinet as secretary of war. During World War I.
The judge knew his way around the written word. He was the author of a marvelous book about Thomas Jefferson’s travels through Europe before coming back to become president. “Thomas Jefferson, American Tourist” deserves another printing.
The second grave of the day belonged to J. Buell Snyder of Perryopolis and of the United States House of Representatives.
Another New Dealer, Buell Snyder grew into his role, accumulating seniority to rise to the level of appropriations chairman just as World War II was getting underway.
He was, quite literally, a partner in arms (and aircraft and ships, bullets and billets) with Roosevelt. He was especially valuable to Army Chief of Staff George C. Marshall, who played Capitol Hill politics as well as any man (or woman) in history.
Congressman Snyder was responsible for Connellsville Airport, one in a string of airports, he envisioned, accommodating the U.S. Air Corps in the event of a German invasion. It never hurts to be prepared.
He wanted Flying Fortresses to bound off the assembly line. This in the late 1930s.
He bulldozed — figuratively speaking — the town of Somerfield, replacing it with Yough Lake and Dam.
Buell Snyder fathered the interstate highway system, his idea for four-lane ribbons of concrete laid east to west and north to south incubated until Eisenhower came along in the fin happy 1950s.
Snyder promised to put a million men to work laying and smoothing the concrete. It would have been the mother of all public works projects. Dang World War II.
Politicians of that era were big thinkers, big doers. In comparison, today’s politicians seem puny.
Maybe that’s reason enough to recall Buell Snyder, and Judge Dumbauld, to remember both them and their deeds.
They were men, not without flaws, of unique accomplishments.
Why, if we had men like that now …
Richard Robbins lives in Uniontown and is the author of two books – Grand Salute: Stories of the World War II Generation and Our People. He can be reached at grandsalutebook@gmail.com