FOR THE DARTMOUTH OUTING CLUB
1229 South 58th Street, Philadelphia, Pa. May 14, 1921.
To the Secretary of the Dartmouth Outing Club, Hanover, New Hampshire.
My dear Mr. Secretary:
Quite recently one of the Faculty members of the Council of the Outing Club wrote me, at your suggestion, calling my attention to a much needed increase in the endowment of the club.
It seems to me that the want is a very real one, and I am moved to write you at some length on the subject, as you will see.
The last annual report of the treasurer of Dartmouth College gives the appraised value of the assets of "The Harrison Memorial Fund" (not all of them now productive) as $55,985. This does not include the hotel property and 800 acres of bare rock on the top of Mt. Moosilauke.
The membership of the club is now about 900, or nearly half of the undergraduate body. The admission fee is one dollar, and it is to be hoped that it will never be any more. We want to keep this club as near the ground as possible.
The absolutely necessary expense of conducting so large a club with so widely scattered and so perishable a plant is considerable, although no salaries are or ever can be paid out of "The Harrison Memorial Fund." A large part of the present income of the club is restricted in its application to specific objects. The Midwinter Carnival, which crowds the village and the surrounding neighborhood for three days and nights, can easily absorb one thousand dollars. The upkeep of the large and increasing number of camps and their occasional grubstaking, especially over the Thanksgiving season when so many of the students from the West and South are marooned in Hanover, calls for at least five hundred dollars more. Add the expense of sending competing delegations to Carnivals elsewhere, a necessary return of civilities, the rent of three rooms in Robinson Hall, the cost of a large amount of printing, the entertainment of representatives of the press and other guests at Hanover, the repairs on ski-jumping grounds and toboggan slides; and you have a grand total that may easily reach four thousand dollars. Is this a large sum to pay for the annual maintenance of an organization that means so much for the well-being of Dartmouth College, and which has spread its fame all over the land and to several foreign countries as the Dartmouth Outing Club has? Do not the circumstances warrant the increase of the Endowment Fund of this club to one hundred thousand dollars?
Four per cent long time bonds can now be bought for less than seventy per cent of their face value, at which they would naturally be reckoned for this purpose.
There are good reasons why ten thousand dollars of such an endowment should be allocated for the support of the Tip Top House on Mt. Moosilauke, the club's most recent and, on some accounts, its most useful acquisition. A! special committee might be charged with raising this particular ten thousand dollars.
For the remaining thirty thousand dollars we would need to go to the friends of the College and the philanthropic public in general.
It may have been observed that a very large percentage of the notable sums that have been raised lately in college drives was given by men who were not college graduates. Dartmouth stands high in the estimation of "self-made men" all over the continent, from Portland, Maine, to Portland, Oregon; from Hudson Bay to the Gulf of Mexico. The academic groves and woods everywhere are swarming with imitations of The Dartmouth Outing Club, and summer hotels, far and near, are advertising trails and camps "a la Dartmouth College" to attract summer guests; and everywhere in the mountains extra inducements are being held out to Dartmouth students who are versed in the outing life by hotel and summer boarding-housekeepers to "come across" the hills- and help them entertain their guests.
We may not always be able to define "The Dartmouth Spirit" but we know what the spirit of The Dartmouth Outing Club is. It is the spirit of the Manitou—The "Great Spirit" of the Red Men for whom Dartmouth College was originally founded, the spirit of the Outdoor God. It is the spirit of the Old Man of the Mountains himself.
There are said to be already a thousand applicants for admission to the next freshman class at Hanover, fully one-half of whom are attracted by the Outing Club.
Has there ever been quite so remarkable an academic "embaras de luxe"? Shall the Outing Club fail to contribute its share towards meeting this flattering overture?
If not, then I will venture to make the following proposition to the Club: Reckoning ten thousand dollars off as the share of those who are specially interested in the Tip Top House property, there remains only thirty thousand dollars to be raised by those who are responsible for the Outing Club in general. I think I begin to see what looks wonderfully like the bottom of my barrel, but I will try and "cough up" five one thousand dollar bonds for a starter. This leaves twenty-five more to raise.
Raise it! Raise it! "Men of Dartmouth with a rouse," in the name of our first martyr, Richard Hall, raise it, and the trick is done.
Now are we going to "lie down" on this proposition?
If so, then blaze a trail over into the old cemetery at Hanover and drag the club over there and leave it there.
But I never heard of an Outing Club man who ever laid down on a trail and I don't believe the whole club is going to lie down on this one. I believe that it is going to "get up and git" on it.
Where then, you say, shall we begin?
Why! begin at the beginning. Take a pointer here from the Jews to whom Voltaire said we are indebted for two things: "Bills of exchange and the Christian Religion."
When the Jews came to start the Christian Religion they started it in Jerusalem. They began at home. Let us begin there. Start this thing in Hanover. Raise what you can there—among the natives—and then "go for the Heathen."
Yours sincerely,
