Columbia's Eccentric Hand

COLEMAN O. PARSONS

^OME years ago I started contrasting real and fictional
misers. Then, when the CoUyer brorhers were found in
their Harlem house, booby-trapped and starved to death
undet tons of precious trash, memorabilia from corks to pianos
long out of tune, I was questioned by reporters—an eccentric pro¬
fessor in pursuit of eccentrics. All rhis caught the sharp eye of the
Curator of Columbiana, the late Milton Halsey Thomas, who
wrote me on July 2, 1947, about Oliver Kane (later King) Hand
of the class of '83:

Poor OIlie came from a very good family, and was elected to Phi Beta
Kappa at college. He seems to have contracted some kind of disease
in the Spanish-American War which affected his brain, and he was a
little queer for the rest of his life.... Most of the time he was a hermit,
living in what approached squalor in a walk-up apartment on | 526
West] 12 2 Street.... He never was absent from any Columbia dinner
or celebration. He adored the memory of Dean Van Amringe and al¬
ways genuflected when he passed a statue or portrait of the Dean. He
was the one man who dared to heckle President Butler and frequently
corrected him in public addresses, or interspersed 'Amen', 'Ble.ss his
heart' or other appropriate remarks. . . . After his death, I visited his
apartment, and found conditions approaching the Collyer house. . . .
There were several boxes of family correspondence, which we
saved... .

It is through these countless oddments that a family history can
now be traced. Among the immediate forebears of Ollie's father,
Thomas Jennings Hand, was rhe landscape and portrait painter,
Moses Hand, who sank ro house-painting for a living. Of his chil¬
dren two married, and three lived a total of 202 years wirhout
union or known offspring. As they drifted toward celibacy, the
American Hands clung to their living and to their dead. jMore dis-