Charles E. Putney was a great principal and an inspiring teacher. In the classics his well-ordered mind found a congenial field for interpretation and elucidation. Frail of physique, with all the scholar's nerves and sensitiveness, he yet day after day ploughed through the hesitating minds of his pupils with patience and thoroughness. Particularly as a teacher of Greek did he excel. He led his pupils through the necessary technique of parasangs to the mastery of the sublime secrets of this imperial mother of tongues. He possessed the capacity of taking infinite pains and played no favorites among his scholars. I imagine the responsibility of administration irked his gentle spirit and the rawness of self-centered youth must have tried his conscientious soul.
I never thought of him in those days as a veteran of the Civil War, in fact, did not then know of his martial service, but I can see now how that experience must have fed his hatred of disobedience and disloyalty and increased his zeal for the proper development of the minds of his boys and girls in order that they too might become dependable citizens of the Republic.
His was a kindly nature, though to the pupil who first fronted him he seemed stern, yet this was but the shell, in which daily duty encased him. It was always a pleasure to watch his sense of humor expand itself in friendly smile and expend itself in his low chuckle as some particularly atrocious translation fell from lips unused to expressing ancient thought.
It is hard to measure his personal influence by a sentence but it seems to me as principal and teacher, by precept and practice, he showed how desirable a thing it is to perform the daily task conscientiously and patiently.
Frederick G. Fleetwood, '86.
To me Mr. Putney was a great teacher. I knew him as a friend, my friend and the life-time friend of my father. I knew him as an active member of the South Church, and a devoted leader of religious life and activity in the Academy. But it was as a teacher that he had a formative power on my life.
As I look back on those classes in "Beginning Greek," and in Cicero, I recognize his painstaking thoroughness. The fundamentals were clear to him, and it was his work to make them clear, definite, and lasting in the minds of his pupils. If he made a mistake it was in his conscientious care that no dull or backward or thoughtless pupil should fail to have these fundamentals of the subject drilled into his mind. How many hundreds of pupils owe their sense of accurate and clear thought to his persistent efforts day in and day out, I have no idea. He was primarily a great teacher because he never relaxed his effort to make every pupil know the essentials of the subject he taught.
But he was more than a drillmaster, fundamental as that is. He was not without a sense of humor. I remember once he came to the door of a room in South Hall where, one Saturday afternoon, some boys were not very quiet in their recreation. Some one answered his knock by asking, "Who's there?" When the answer came, "It's me, Mr. Putney," the boy said, "No, Mr. Putney would have said, 'It is I'"; and I can almost hear his quiet chuckle as he went away.