Word: coffining
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...high last Saturday night. It seems Mr. Brooks gave an excellent speech, Mr. Bradley was loquacious; Mr. Conn was potting up the house, and everyone was happy. Oftentimes junior officers consider entertaining senior officers'' wives what one might say a bit of burden, but in the cause of Mrs. Coffin, wife of Lt. Coffin, it was a pleasure. Unmarried members of Class F hope they does well when they walk to the altar. Members of Class F enjoyed having Lt. and Mrs. Coffin as class sponsors very much...
Fish Market. Son of a wealthy Manhattan family (merchants and philanthropists). Coffin went to Yale ('97, Skull and Bones, Phi Betta Kappa, now a fellow of Yale's Corporation), studied further in Scotland and Germany. Back in the U.S. he went to Union, was ordained a Presbyterian minister in 1900. His first parish was a room over a Bronx fish market. There he preached "damnation with the Cross in it," displayed such zeal that his congregation vowed the odor of sanctity overcame the odor of fish...
Five years later, he went to take over run-down midtown Madison Avenue Church. The rich came to the church, the poor East Siders went to the chapel which the church supported. Coffin abolished the chapel, brought the two congregations together. He abolished pew rents (a daring innovation in those days), got new parishioners by following moving vans in the neighborhood, ringing the bell before the family got settled. He regularly took his folding reed organ to tenement houses at 2 in the morning to hold a service for neighborhood street railway workers arriving home from the night shift...
Freedom for Schoolmen. Coffin's fame spread to England and Scotland, where he was often a preacher. He declined a call to Edinburgh's Free St. George's Church, Scotland's leading parish. He received twelve honorary degrees (five Doctorates of Divinity), including one from the Jewish Theological Seminary, one from the Faculté Libre de Théologie Protestante, Paris...
...Coffin became Union's president. The onetime Presbyterian seminary (it became interdenominational 51 years ago) appealed to him as a place "to turn out men of adventurous spirit, unfettered by tradition." No one was surprised that he administered a ticklish job with complete fair-mindedness. He took both radical students and faculty members, notably Methodism's Harry F. Ward, in his stride, refused to oust Ward. Said...