4 minute read
The Governor
ROBERT A. HURLEY, CLASS OF 1915
Just months after taking office as the Governor of Connecticut in 1941, alumnus Robert A. Hurley began raising funds to replace Horton Hall, Cheshire Academy’s largest building at the time. The building was destroyed by fire in January of that year. With the substantial weight of his political and personal reputation behind him, Hurley announced the goal of raising nearly a million dollars within two years.
The donation campaign was organized through the Cheshire Academy Sesquicentennial Committee, chaired by Hurley with support from members of the Academy’s Board of Trustees. The committee included two former governors and James R. Angell, former president of Yale University; William Lyon Phelps, professor emeritus of Yale; Dr. Albert N. Jorgenson, president of the University of Connecticut; and Horace Taft, the headmaster emeritus of the Taft School. Hurley told the Hartford Times his chairmanship of the committee was “influenced not only by his loyalty to the Academy … but even more because of his conviction that Cheshire Academy is an outstanding asset of the state and of the nation.”
Headmaster Arthur N. Sheriff announced in 1942 that the new two-story edifice being built behind Bowden Hall would be named Gov. Hurley Hall. A $60,000 donation paid for the building which would offer a dormitory and cafeteria. The governor attended the hall’s dedication as well as the commencement exercises held the same day in May 8, 1942.
A color guard platoon from the historical First Company of the Governor’s Foot Guard accompanied Hurley to the event attired in their colonial-era uniforms. Seabury Hall, now a part of the Watch Factory Shoppes, was also dedicated that day.
A native of Bridgeport, Connecticut, Hurley was a senior when he arrived on campus in 1914. He attended the Academy for just one year, but in that time he achieved academic and athletic success and quickly took a leadership role. He was elected to the student council and chosen as the orator for commencement.
On the athletic fields, Hurley was a stand-out three-sport player. He was the halfback on the winning 1914 football team. Athletic records in the early 1900s were kept by total points received for the season, rather than wins and losses for each game, and his team had a total score for the season of 76 compared to 70 for the opponents.
In basketball, Hurley played guard and helped his team again have a winning season with a combined score of 311 with the opposing 12 teams scoring just 202 total points. Opponents included the public high schools in Meriden, Waterbury, and New Haven. Hurley’s pitching prowess in baseball also brought accolades. He helped notch a victory against The Choate School, now Choate Rosemary Hall, the first time the Academy had bested their rival in the sport.
A biography written in 2012 by Ji Woo Lee ’17 and former Academy History Teacher Ann Marie Svogun states Hurley attended Lehigh University in Pennsylvania for a short time before enlisting in the U.S. Navy in 1917. As World War I entered its third year, he was assigned to radio operations aboard submarines which patrolled international waters. Hurley was also a crew member on the warships the U.S.S. Pennsylvania and the U.S.S. Chicago.
By the time World War II was underway, Hurley had risen from an administrator of the state’s Works Progress Administration program to a commissioner for the Connecticut Department of Public Works. His inauguration as governor came just weeks after the United States declared war on Japan.
A year later, as a 47th birthday present, a 122-page book containing a collection of Hurley’s selected papers and addresses was published. The preface states the project was “made possible by the cooperation of a group of the governor’s friends... [to honor] this record of his leadership to the people of Connecticut.” The foreword was written by Sheriff.
1915 BASKETBALL TEAM; HURLEY PICTURED FRONT ROW FAR LEFT
(L-R) HEADMASTER ARTHUR SHERIFF AND GOVERNOR ROBERT HURLEY
- ARTHUR SHERIFF
Sheriff wrote, “In days of cataclysmic change, people turn toward the man on the platform and ask: What can we do? ... They seek a voice, unequivocal and forthright, an understanding keen and broad. They crave the comfort and inspiration of social vision that is at once practical and prophetic. Gov. Hurley has given Connecticut that kind of leadership.”
As head of the state government during World War II, Hurley was considered a “War Governor,” and as such, he ramped up manufacturing to help supply the military effort. One of his projects, according to the Connecticut State Library, was “Connecticut’s Compact for Victory.” The document called for full production of manufacturing plants with “all of the industrial might and resources of Connecticut … the skills and energies of our workers.”
Hurley sought to be re-elected for a second term, but he lost by less than 200 votes. He ran again in 1944, but lost by a large margin. Hurley then retired from politics. In 1946 he became the executive director of the Council of Lingerie Associations and Manufacturers Inc., at a salary of $42,000, which is estimated to be equivalent to more than $500,000 today. In his position, according to the “New York Times,” Hurley oversaw “a group of unaffiliated manufacturers in a trade-wide program of selfregulation to prevent abuses and unethical practices.”
Approaching semi-retirement, Hurley returned to his background in engineering, which he had begun to study at Lehigh University before enlisting to serve in WWI. He operated an engineering consulting firm in West Hartford.
The New York Times carried Hurley’s obituary in 1968. He died at the age of 72 in West Hartford, where he had lived for 30 years.
