Product of Yale, Harvard, Shroder is Dominant Personality at Parley

One of the dominating personalities at the recent national conference of social workers here was William Jacob Shroder of Cincinnati. Tall, carefully groomed, leisurely of speech and manner, he moved through the luncheons, round table discussions and dinner meetings of the convention with an effortless grace and savoir faire that would be the envy of a diplomat.

If Bill Shroder wore spats, a walking stick and a boutonniere, he’d probably be picked by those who make hobby of guessing a man’s profession from his appearance as some nation’s ambassador. With the added exception, however, that Bill has nothing of the ponderous pomposity usually connected with government plenipotentiaries.

Shroder’s nonchalance comes to him, perhaps, through having received his education at two of the nation’s greatest universities, Yale and Harvard. Yale gave him his bachelor’s degree in 1898 and three years later Harvard presented him with his LL.B.

Either institution is usually enough to give a man that distinctive something that sets him apart from the common garden variety of university graduate. Both together and the result is—well, it’s W. J. Shroder, attorney who retired from practice in 1921 in order to devote himself exclusively to his main hobby in life, social welfare and civic work.

The facts of his retirement to concentrate on welfare work— without compensation—had to be dug out of Who’s Who in America, which devotes about one-third of a column to his biography. Shroder himself was reticent about what might be called the bare facts of his life.

IS SPANISH WAR VET

In Who’s Who, also, those who care to dip into it will discover that the retired attorney is married, has three children. He was born in Cincinnati in 1876, which makes him fifty-eight years old. The Spanish-American War broke out the year he was graduated from Yale and he saw service with the Yale Private Battery. There are other biographical details to be found in the Who’s Who account, including a long list of organizations of which he is president or member. At the present time he is president of the National Council of Jewish Federations and Welfare Funds, which sponsored the conference that brought him to New York. He has held many elective offices in Cincinnati.

But what Who’s Who doesn’t mention is that Bill likes to fish. Next to welfare work, baiting a hook and casting into a turbulent stream or a billowy ocean is his favorite hobby. He has fished in Canada, off the Pacific Coast, in northern Michigan and northern Wisconsin and even in Russia.

HE COOKS HIS OWN

And when Shroder goes on a fishing trip he likes to do his own cooking. Here’s his favorite recipe and our woman’s page editor could do worse than take it down and recommend it to her readers:

It’s called skinned bass. He skins and filets the fish. Next he rolls it in a mixture of cornmeal and salt and then he fries it in hot butter.

His interest in social welfare work, he confessed, was probably inherited from his mother who devoted a good deal of her life to activities in that field. While at Harvard Law School he conducted a boys’ club and became interested in the “big brother” movement.

Today, after many years of unselfish devotion to the cause of charity, he believes that the most important advice he can pass on is that Jews exercise a broad, tolerant attitude towards each other’s viewpoints.

“They don’t have to agree with each other,” he is careful to point out. “The greatest need for the development of Jewish life in America, as an integral part of American life, is the development of tolerance on the part of Jews toward each other’s viewpoint.”