Harvard College Class of 1889, secretary's reports and annual bulletins, 1898-1935: Emil Charles Pfeiffer

The class secretary’s printed reports on the members of the class of 1889. Found 10 Oct 2026; read from the scans and their text. Page numbers are approximate where the text was used.

• Report III (1898): “Emil Charles Pfeiffer. In business at 7 Tremont Place, Boston.” The class poem printed in the same report has a stanza on him: “Who ever owned such centrifugal bones / As his, our pride, E. C. Pfeiffer, ‘Paul Jones’? / Here was his bet made and here did he start / Posing at first as the nude in art … Pfeiffer the poet, the schoolmaster too, / Also the head of the Varsity crew. / Like a wandering Jew round the world doth he pass, / And renders immortal our glorious class.”
• Report VI (1909): born at Portsmouth, N.H., May 2, 1865; parents Joseph Sylvester and Genovefa Elizabeth (Karche) Pfeiffer (father a bank teller, Portsmouth); Portsmouth High School; admitted 1885 as a special student, left in senior year. College interests: University and Class crews, the Advocate, Delta Upsilon, Deutscher Verein, Hasty Pudding, the Institute, St. Paul’s Society, Total Abstinence League. “Married Frances Holbrook, at , June 15, 1898” (the place left blank). “Children Alice Phillips, Aug. 25, 1899.” Business: school teacher. Address: University of Nevada, Reno. 1888-91 taught in the Boston public schools; Aug 1891 to 1893 superintendent of schools at North Attleborough, Mass.; 1904 with the Natick and Cochituate Street Railway; 1905-07 with the Merchants Mutual Electric Light & Power Co., Santa Barbara; 1908 principal of the high school at Gardnerville, Nev.; now “specializing on work along sociological lines” at the University of Nevada.
• Report VIII (1919): assistant auditor for research and statistics, General Development Co., Los Angeles. He had helped with Americanization extension classes for the Y.M.C.A. National Council at Seattle, Astoria and Salem, and in the autumn of 1918 was acting librarian and relief registrar at Mather Field aviation camp, Sacramento. “His daughter, Alice Phillips Pfeiffer, graduated in 1917, from the Classical Dept. of Huntington Hall, South Pasadena, Calif., and took a post graduate course in 1918, in special agriculture.” He writes of his work on “the Translator,” a device to make aeroplane landings safe, and signs off “‘Bill’ Pfeiffer.”
• Annual Bulletin 12 (1927): new address, 10449 Cheviot Drive, Los Angeles. A later bulletin (about 1931-32) gives 3715 Keystone Avenue, Palms.
• Annual Bulletin 19 (1935), obituary: “Emil Charles Pfeiffer died at Los Angeles, Calif., December 3, 1934, after a long illness.” It repeats his career, giving “from 1909 to 1914” at the University of Nevada, and adding 1893-95, “taught school in Cambridge and Somerville,” and 1895-1904, “he tried many occupations, keeping a summer hotel, writing for magazines, inventing an attachment for fountain pens, traveling salesman, lecturing, etc.” He had been captain of the University Crew “for a short time” and an editor of the Harvard Advocate. “During the later years of his life, he was an invalid, resulting from paralysis. Pfeiffer married Frances Holbrook, June 15, 1898, and they had one daughter, Alice Phillips, born August 24, 1899, who graduated in 1917 from the Classical Department of Huntington Hall … married Robert Hall Carter, and has a son, Warren Holbrook, born September 8, 1925, and all of whom survive him.”

His death certificate gives 25 Nov 1934 (death-certificate-emil-pfeiffer-1934), and the Tacoma register Alice’s birth as 25 Aug 1899 (birth-register-tacoma-1899-pfeiffer).