NORTH COUNTRY FAIR
The campus had scarcely had time to settle back into college routine when the North Country Fair opened for a one day run on April 13. Offering to present undergraduates the strangest mixture of exhibits and entertainments within memory, the Fair, following an extensive publicity build-up, opened the doors of the Alumni Gymnasium to admit a mixed crowd of Hanover professors, visitors from sixteen surrounding towns and villages, farmers from innerlying districts, and Dartmouth undergraduates to colorful exhibits of local merchants, a Grafton County fish and game display, a 1934 auto show, and games of chance that offered prizes for everything from smashing crockery to hitting a charcoal-smeared freshman with pitched baseballs. The Fair was not a fair, but neither was it a carnival nor a wild-west show. It was a mixture of all of these with additional attractions thrown in. The evening program, which drew 3000 visitors (no one yet knows where they all came from), began with men and women fashion displays, and romped riotously through two humorous skits ably written by local professors and students; after which couples from Hanover, White River, Lebanon, Thetford, etc. moved en masse onto the upstairs gymnasium floor to dance to the music of the undergraduate Green Serenaders while a formidable Dartmouth stag line pushed in from the sidelines.
A Grand March of several hundred guests in brilliant and unique costumes interrupted the dancing about ten, and following this some five score square dancers tripped to the music of the Royal Aces of Orford, N. H., and the bellowing intones of caller George Bedell of Hartford, Vt., to put on a real square dance exhibition that one would find few places in the country today. A committee of judges headed by President Hopkins picked prize-winning costumes and square dancers.
The Fair, considering the crowds it drew and the mixed enjoyment and amusement it offered, was certainly a success. It was ably directed by Mrs. Ernest Martin Hopkins, and all proceeds were turned over to the good cause of Mary Hitchcock Hospital.
