In Thornton Wilder's play "Our Town", the stage manager mentions the gravestone of Joe Crowell, whom he describes as "awful bright – graduated from high school here, head of his class. So he got a scholarship to Massachusetts Tech. Graduated head of his class there, too. It was all wrote up in the Boston paper at the time. Goin’ to be a great engineer, Joe was. But the war broke out and he died in France. – All that education for nothing."