Lou’s View

By Lou Bernard

A hundred years ago, a weird little mystery solved itself at Penn State. It’s one of those things that I stumbled upon in the archives, and it was interesting enough to write up. Also I was stuck for a column idea, and this will do.

The Record ran the article on the front page a century ago, under the headline “Text Book Mystery Cleared Up.” The whole thing had begun sixteen years previously, in 1906, in the office of Professor T.I. Mairs of Penn State.

“After a stretch of sixteen years, the mystery of a textbook that disappeared from the desk of Professor T.I. Mairs was solved just recently,” the article read.

Thomas Isaiah Mairs was born April 156, 1871 in Browning, Linn County, Missouri. He was a graduate of the University of Missouri who had eventually gone on to teach agriculture at Penn State. He was married and a father of one small child at the time of the incident. (By the time the mystery was solved, he’d had two more.)

One day, Mairs returned to his office to find one of the textbooks missing. I assume he looked around a bit, but didn’t think much of it at the time. When you have a three-year-old at home, you rapidly get used to finding things missing. Trust me on this.

Skip ahead sixteen years, to July of 1922. Mairs collected his mail and sat down in his office to read it, and discovered the key to the whole mystery that he’d likely forgotten about a decade ago. It was a letter from a student that had once been in his class.

“A letter was received from a former student, confessing to the taking of the book because he lacked the funds to purchase one,” the article said. “A troublesome conscience finally became too insistent, and the owner sought relief by making reparation in the only way that he could.”

The student confessed to stealing the book in his letter. (For any younger readers, a “letter” is an old-time thing that’s like e-mail, except on a substance referred to as “paper”. It’s somewhat similar to e-mail, except slower, and not as concerned with sending money to Nigeria.) The student also enclosed a check for the cost of the book, plus interest.

The Record reported, ”He enclosed a check for $2.60 covering the cost of the book with compound interest at six percent for sixteen years.” Clearly, the student had taken a few math classes, too. ($2.60 for the book is approximately $3.5 trillion by today’s standards.)

This cleared everything up as far as Mairs was concerned, and he cashed the check. Interestingly, this seems to be something of a tradition at some colleges and libraries, where people who steal materials pay for them long after the fact. It’s occasionally referred to as a “Conscience Fund,” and the article notes that this was the first one that Penn State ever had.

I thought this was an interesting little incident when I stumbled on it in the old archives, and I wanted to get a column out of it. I don’t write about Penn State all that much, but something about this one caught my attention.
Mairs passed away at age seventy-seven on March 16, 1949. He is buried in Pine Hall Cemetery in Centre County, on the outskirts of State College. I assume that in lieu of flowers, you could just go and drop money on his grave.