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A SALUTARY INFLUENCE endowment and $400,000 for repairs and new construction. It engaged a Chicago firm to conduct what was soon being called the Endowment and Expansion Campaign, which began in January and which, it was hoped, would be concluded in about four months. However, in June the treasurer told the board that "the returns have been painfully slow in coming in to us." Thus far, he had received about $250,000 in cash and subscriptions. By this time the College had made its third approach to the General Education Board, which made a preliminary promise in July 1920 of $150,000, if the College would raise an additional $300,000, the total amount to become an endowment whose income was to be used exclusively for faculty salaries.32 News of this challenge reached Gettysburg at a time when it appeared that the current fund-raising effort, as so many in the past, had run its course and stopped far short of the goal. Meeting in August 1920, the board of trustees decided to try to breathe new life into the flagging campaign by replacing the Chicago firm with a local director. The man chosen was Joseph B. Baker (1901), pastor of St. James Lutheran church in Gettysburg. Declining an appointment as vice president of the College, he secured instead a leave of absence from his parish. Entirely devoted to his alma mater, energetic, determined, and given to uttering pithy statements, Baker announced that the College was "too old and dear a mother to wear a skirt that is short and she shall not be compelled to do it." His use of the term Second Mile Campaign gave the effort over which he now presided its own identity. In January 1921 he began publishing the Gettysburg Challenger, a paper whose news of the campaign was informative of both its purpose and progress. There were separate editions for several of the geographical areas in which the campaign was concentrated. Finally, Baker and a small group of dedicated lieutenants appealed to Gettysburg's standard constituency for raising money. They visited several hundred Lutheran congregations, asking for cash contributions and subscriptions. In the issue of January 19, 1921, the editor of the Gettysburgian urged students to support the 32Reminded of what wartime and postwar inflation had done to the level of living of faculty members, whose prewar salaries were, in the opinion of many, disgracefully low, John D. Rockefeller in December 1919 gave the General Education Board $50,000,000, to be expended in an effort to alleviate the situation. Within five years 173 colleges had been awarded most of this gift in the form of conditional challenge grants. Ibid., pp. 30-32. The papers necessary to bring Gettysburg's conditional pledge into effect were not signed until the spring of 1921. For each of three years, until the board's grant was actually paid, it gave the College $7,500, which was considered interest on the principal amount of its conditional pledge. 43