Resiliency

Dave Luce ’54 does not remember how his brother, John Luce ’50, ended up at Norwich, but he remembers how he did. “I was accepted at UVM [University of Vermont] and the agricultural school. My father was a professor of mechanical engineering, and he didn’t think that was so good,” says Luce. “I was working in an orchard that summer before college and my father picked me up at the orchard and drove me up to Northfield. We sat down with a colonel, and he handed me an application form. I started to fill it out and I was told don’t bother — I was enrolled at Norwich.”

He says that it was “of course, a good move.” His father — who just so happened to teach at Norwich — would eventually become the head of mechanical engineering at the school. “When my father got to Norwich, General Harmon was president,” he says. “Whenever an issue would come up, General Harmon would listen to this side, listen to that side, and make a decision. My father liked that.” This was in stark contrast to the other schools he had taught at, which involved the creation of committees whenever something came up.

John and Dave would graduate as members of the Class of 1950 and 1954, respectively, and the pair took the ethos of the school to heart. “We saw it as a unique university with the concept of its founder and the citizen-soldier. You’re trained to contribute to the wellbeing of the country and be available in time of need for defense,” says Luce. “I think ethics are an important element of Norwich. I hope that Norwich can continue this in perpetuity — it’s done a pretty good job for more than 200 years.”

John would spend life after Norwich practicing what he learned on campus. “My brother had a lot of accomplishments,” says Luce. “He went to work at Westinghouse and was an engineer on the atomic reactor for the Nautilus submarine. He was an avid sailor, and I spent six months sailing with him in the Caribbean. He eventually went on and was a teacher in Florida and taught engineering classes at one of the Florida state universities; he was also a watchmaker.”

John’s approach to life was recognized when he was awarded the Alumni Association’s 2005 Distinguished Alumni Award. “When my brother passed away, all of his Norwich and other belongings were handed to me,” says Luce. “That’s how I happened to have this plate — I wasn’t sure how he came to be given that.”

Luce and his family currently reside in the Pacific Palisades area of California, which was tragically devastated by fires. He and his family lost virtually everything, from their homes to their possessions. “The entire Palisades was just incinerated when I got to the property a couple weeks after the fire,” says Luce. “There was nothing to salvage, really. It was just flat.”

Regardless, he saw the remains of the chimney and the fireplace tongs from his childhood which had survived. “I grew up in Springfield, Vermont, and we lived in a house built in 1790 — so we had eight fireplaces,” says Luce. “This pair of tongs I had acquired when my folks passed away. The chimney was still standing and the hook on the fireplace had these tongs hanging there, which probably date back to the mid-1800s or so. They were the only visible object to be salvaged.”

Luce left but returned a little while later. “I saw a couple steel filing cabinets were standing in what was the garage. I don’t know why I went over to one and opened the door, but there was this plate,” he says. “Everything else was disintegrated, but this plate was sitting on top of there.”
Dave Casey, associate vice president of development, just so happened to be visiting in California at the time. “It occurred to me to show it to him, so that’s how it got into his possession. I had no idea what to do with it,” says Luce. “I had no idea what I was going to do with it.”

Luce values the time he spent at Norwich and thinks that the students in attendance today have made a good decision. “I really like the Norwich philosophy,” he says. “The day I hit the campus in my freshman Rook year, all of us were on campus and we’re all being yelled at and drilled. It doesn’t matter whether you were the big man on campus in your high school or where you came in from. We were all equal at that point.”

In the end, what survived the fire was more than an artifact. The tongs and the alumni plate, worn and burned but intact, became symbols of resilience, of family, of heritage, and of the Norwich spirit that both John and Dave carried into their lives. In the ruins of loss, Dave found a reminder that even when the world seems reduced to ash, some things endure.