From the Alumni Bulletin, October 1913, Vol 1.1:
(From "The Burr.")
Coming back and finding Jim Myers gone is almost like discovering the Chapel or Packer Hall vanished from the Campus. It will be many a day before the boys in college stop looking for him at the Chapel door, and many a day more before Alumni adjust themselves to a re-union visit that does not include a chat with Jim about early days. Among all Lehigh men the feeling is that an integral part of the old place is no more.
The joke was perennial about the Freshmen who, upon arrival, addressed him as Professor. The actual defense of one youngster last year was that, in bearing and dignity, Jim would have graced any chair, and that he "looked more professorial than most of the professors." But there was one important point of difference between the man whom a way-back Epitome called the "messenger of the gods" and the gods themselves. Jim thought well of all of us — which can hardly be said of the faculty.
That this was true entitles none of us to individual credit. The fact of our being brilliant or stupid, wealthy or poor, was inconsequential — Jim liked us all because we were sons of Lehigh.
Of absolute devotion to an institution, there was never a finer example. Jim was with the University at its birth in 1866. When Dr. Coppee, the first President, conducted the earliest exercises and lessons in Christmas Hall, it was Myers who rang the hand bell that called the students to class. A friend of Judge Packer, he was intimately acquainted with the founder's plans and dreams for this school. He saw them, as the decades slipped by, rise toward realization in the administrations of Dr. Leavitt, Dr. Lamberton, and Dr. Drown. He passed through the lean years and he lived, to his great joy, to witness the splendid flowering of the University under the leadership of Dr. Drinker.
Fulfillment of one hope, alas, was denied him. During the recurring illnesses of the past year, his undaunted courage brought him back each time to the tower room of Packer Hall in a way that amazed his physician. Last June, as he wrapped the diplomas of the graduating class, he told how he had done that service for every student graduated from the University and of his great ambition to do it three times more, to round out a full half century at Lehigh's jubilee in 1916.
James Myers is dead. "In his life he was lowly and a peacemaker and a servant of God." In his death he has the rare distinction of having his name pass into a Lehigh tradition.
R. W. W., '07.
