Repository: UIHistories Project: Booklet - Alumni Fund for the Alma Mater Statue [PAGE 5]

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characters. Nothing to proclaim to the visitors that University loyalty of which we sing so lustily. Nothing which we, the great body of former students, have helped to create. Lorado Taft was of the Class of '79 and is now sixtyseven years old. He is rounding out a life of great activity and achievement, and although he is still in his prime, his three score and ten will probably mark the close of the period of his greatest creative ability. Lorado recognizes this and prays for health and strength to permit him to complete the great works he now has in progress, and to which his remaining years are mortgaged. Orders for work and demands upon his time pour in from everywhere, nearly all of which must be declined. The limitations imposed by time and human strength have closed his order book, and not even a commission from the University or from its Alumni for a major piece of work, to be designed and modeled, could now be accepted. And does that forever end our opportunity to have a Lorado Taft creation erected on our campus ? It does not, although it wouldVere it not that for years the sculptor has had a burning desire to see upon the campus a piece in heroic mold, typifying his beloved Alma Mater with outstretched arms, welcoming her children back home. He has dreamed about it in his spare time, and when a sculptor dreams he is creating.1 Bit by bit and at various times these dreams were reproduced in clay and then in plaster, and exhibited at the University. Taft himself said it was crude and incomplete, but

at that it showed he had a real vision of a great theme, which needed only to be worked out; and although another year's study may be necessary to give the piece its final form, enough work has been done to warrant its being classified as "a major work in progress." And now comes the Alumni Fund Board, a creation of the University Alumni Association, to take ovefr this long discussed project of a tribute to the University and a memorial to Lorado Taft and to put the project in definite form and on its way to being realized. It is a comparatively small thing for the Illini, after the memorable stadium achievement, and yet it is a man's job, as $40,000 will be required to carry the project to completion and present the University with the Taft Alma Mater group in heroic size, cast in bronze and placed on a suitable foundation. This should be done by Homecoming of 1928 but more probably by Commencement 1929. This is the task to which we have put our hands, relying on the support of the Illini to carry it through, and the quicker it is done the less it will cost.

W. L. ABBOTT, '84 President Alumni Fund Board