SURPRISES IN STORE FOR JUNE REUNERS
25th Reunion Is Recommended by One Who Has Had One
THERE WERE A succession of surprises at our 25th Reunion. All of these seem trivial, perhaps, to the person who lives within easy striking distance of Grafton County's mightiest campus, but sweet and clear to anyone from Dartmouth whose commencement visits about coincide with the periods of freedom enjoyed by a social outcast just putting in the finishing licks of a 25-year term on Devil's Island.
To go into the surprises incident to the 25th of the class of 1908, it will be necessary to slip into personalities to some extent. Hearsay through the years had pointed toward the conventional 25th as something in the way of a cap-and-bells costume of the type so easily signed for, so easily forgotten—especially if it didn't come C.O.D.— midst the hustle and bustle of getting away from Hanover. Visions of class babies, visitations from inebriates in the dead of night, what-shall-we-wear queries, efforts to appear freshly groomed in a stale outfit —all those little devils in the line of thoughts would, of course, bob up whenever something stereotyped about the "greatest and only event of its kind in the life of 1908" came through the mail. But on to a few more incidents unexpected and give That Ole' Debbil Depression its due, to wit:
One day, it may have been in March, '933' along came a communication from the redoubtable Major Ethan Allen Rotch of Milford, N. H., in the name of the Great Jehovah and the impotent Congress, to this effect: Owing to the economic slippage all along the great American'fault, certain bigwigs of the class residing within easy mailing distance in the East, had decided to work out reunion plans which would accent to the least possible degree the type of old college spirit which is good in Hollywood and generally smells pretty bad to the pot-bellied graduate who just missed getting his golf insignia in his Senior Spring 25 years previously. Accompanying the startling announcement from Major Rotch was a sort of itemization of the big idea to the effect there would be no general reunion assessment; no collection of any sort taken at any of the varied and sundry services which any reunion is bound to include.
Man of 1908, class marshal, 1907 and 1906 football captain, 1907 baseball captain and such all rolled into one, back for the reunion. And then came another surprise, even from the doughty Dartmouth captain plus of a quarter century ago. Mr. Glaze resides high up on the edge of the chasm at the bottom of which flows the Niagara river into its famed whirlpool. Well, do you know, just as all arrangements were about complete for hauling back our campus idol of the days when Johnny Bowler was a town kiddie instead of the Mary Hitchcock Memorial Staff chief that he is today, why the wind breezed uncommonly strong up the Niagara gulch and peeled the copper roof off the new Glaze fireproof residence. And, to raise that one a blue chip or two, the abrasives factory of which "Muldoon" is the commander-inchief took General Johnson's hook, line and sinker, started operations for the first time in a year and a half. So Johnny couldn't think of going back there any more. Naturally, the idea of a pay-out-of-noth-ing -in-the-way-of-income reunion, as transmitted by Major Ethan Allen Rotch of the 1908 secretariat, was right up the writer's alley. And thus it proved in the case of others, judging from the queries which began coming through the mails. Arrangements were duly completed, without much trouble, to transport none other than John "Muldoon" Glaze, the Solid
NEVERTHELESS AND notwithstanding, Charles LeMoyne DeAngelis, affectionately called "Jefi" during college days in compliment to a musical comedy actor who died a few years ago after rounding out his four score or thereabouts, hove into the reunion picture. Some surprise! "Jeff," left end on a good Dartmouth team, using the word "good" in its full connotation as applied in the case of Man O' War* hadn't seen Hanover Plain, as the registrar of upriver geography now refers to ye old (and what a) tyme campus, for five-sixths of the period occupied by the Thirty Years War. But Si Perkins 'oB's Otto Kahn, a classmate whose strange address "Greenwich and Watertown" would sound plausible if connected with a jerk railway, had, it seems, written to "Jeff" in regard to the reunion. "Jeff" is now a former district attorney of Oneida County, much in politics and society, just the type "Otto" Perkins might be expected to light upon in planning a visitation designed to make the brothers sit up and wonder why, too, they hadn't turned out to be big men in a really big way. Anyway, Perk's letter, combined with a cause to be argued before the Court of Appeals of the State of New York in Rochester, brought "Jeff" to the point of telephoning, after 8:30 p.m., the writer in re going to Hanover for the well, you know.
Yet, eventually, "Jeff" and your narrator met in Utica whenever it was the 11 a.m. train from the west drew into the Utica depot. All the way across as much of New York State as one of those Central expresses can negotiate in a morning, visions of the sugar-plum type of sleek roadster a fast-moving Utica political leader of many years standing would command, danced through the head of yours in the bonds or what have you. "Jeff" had advised the writer regarding "motoring" from Utica to Hanover—quite a trip in European history, if not in what Canadians are pleased to refer to as "the States." So you can imagine it was, when "Jeff" escorted your chronicler to a flivver, another, to put it not half strong enough, surprise.
"Jeff," though, continues to hit low and tackle hard when he has three states to get over in an afternoon in a Ford. First he sped with vigor to the vinegar works of a nationally known chewing gum concern directly along the Utica-Hanover trail, saw "Sam" and came out with as good a gallon of applejack for its ringside weight as the industrious Dry Era ever turned out. Since a former district attorney of long standing in New York State procured the alimentary dynamite with alacrity and dispatch, there was no element of surprise in the transaction, at the moment at least. But there was an element of brow-raising in
connection with the gallon which might as well be set down right here. It stood on the mantel in a certain Russell Sage study all during the reunion, free to anyone who might care to take a shot. Many took one, but the whole gang never was able to take enough to finish the contents. In fact, there was a half gallon in the bottle when the owner decided to call it a reunion, after the third day.
You know Hanover when the rain can't quite form itself into the kind of snowflakes which waft down like fairy pancakes. Well, it rained potential snow all that June Sunday of reunion. There was a business meeting in the lecture room of the new science building, Steele is the name is it not? Program, of course. The men gathered for the session, plain to be seen they were kids no longer, started the routine. Pretty much the same type of reasoning displayed in the class meetings of the days of long ago. Surprising? Well not so much as when it was learned that only twenty out of the sixty present were subscribers to the ALUMNI MAGAZINE! Today, let it be told, the class has seventy subscribers.
YES, THERE were other surprises: There was a fawn standing in the slanting sunshine on Monday evening, high up on Balch Hill near the reservoir. It was while taking a drive over a route trudged many and many a time in undergraduate days. The ice house by the bend in the road is still there There was the black water of back-country streams The piles of bark in tiny clearings, remnants of lumbering A visit with Bill Murray, French prof., Hanover political seer. .... A close-up of Alex Faulkner, Richardson Hall janitor to you, dusting off those broad-armed recitation seats in a Reed Hall classroom. Reed is no longer a dormitory with double-decker beds. .... Motion on the campus The clock in Dartmouth Hall tower Johnny Poor, God bless him Those brick houses in Norwich The amazing way in which repairs are kept above par in the college buildings The sturdiness of Hanover plumbing The mist off the river in the morning Leaves on the paths in College Park The glance over your shoulder at Baker Tower as you leave, for how long?
And, back of it all, the most vivid undergraduate scene, for one at least: Frost stars on brick-lined walls of Rollins Chapel of a Hanover winter Sunday evening. Dr. Tucker rises to speak. The choir has sung a Christmas Anthem. "Harmony" at the organ.
Those are the subtler, more lasting, possibly "surprises" is not the word, which come to one on a visit to Hanover. You find them when you go back at reunion time. Because, it may be, back of the unexpected—trivia some may class it—are even more valuable intangibles:—priceless friendships which have lived through the years.
Then, too, there's the other side. Not the thought of the lush, Hanover grass. .... The lonely homes of Etna alongside a moonlit road. Not the heat of the pine needles in the Vale. Not the gloom of Dartmouth buildings marked for early extermination. Rather, the memory of those who looked ahead, oh so enthusiastically, to reunion, who would have done so that Spring of 1933, if they were only able to make the trip to the shrine once more. There was the roommate of freshman fall; the one who stuck through freshman Spring, sophomore and junior years; the two of senior year. Four in all, three will never visit Hanover again. It is possible those missing three are at least three reasons why the surprises, intangible aspects of reunion, are recalled so easily after a year has slipped by.
Governor and President of Five Years Ago President Roosevelt and President Hopkins following the conferring of honorary degree of LL.D. on the then chief executive of New York State in 1929. Dr. Roosevelt's class of '29 holds its Fifth Reunion at Commencement, beginning June 15.
* NOTE:—Score, Dartmouth 22; Harvard o.
