Not So Long Ago
IT USED TO turn very cold in Hanover about this time of year. Perhaps it still does, or perhaps those years between '16 and '20 turned out a crop of old-fashioned winters, such as most of us talk about and few really believe. Meteorologically speaking, they furnished conversational material for a lifetime. Watching the Inn thermometer creep toward 40 below was a thrill to be remembered and to be set casually before shivering weaklings in after years. More than likely the arctic apparel that went with that kind of weather is stored away now in the attics of hundreds of Dart
mouth men. Hanover was the place where most of us first saw galoshes—the all-rubber kind with flapping buckles that finally tore each other loose from their moorings. Hats, of course, were "out" in any weather, unless you were on the way home or to Hamp. Jackets of a certain shape and purpose were required equipment; you could bury your ears and your whole face in the collar and leave nothing but the top of your head exposed. "Sheepskin" sticks as the technical name for them, although some had no trace of wool to remember them by. Some were canvas, fleecelined, others corduroy lined with wool, and still others on the Beau Brummel order, reversible affairs of corduroy and leather.
Probably the "Cold Coast" of one fraternity house was a sample that many of the others could duplicate. This was a rectangular cubbyhole, just barely holding four hard cots, so that the latecomer on the far side had to negotiate passage over three prone figures. The meek had not yet inherited the earth at Dartmouth, and it was the mild and submissive ones who fell heir to this type of torture-chamber. Among them, nevertheless, would invariably be a zealous soul bent on acquiring hardihood. Retiring early, as a part of his physical culture program, he would fling wide the row of windows and welcome the blasts raging eastward from the Connecticut. The rest of us immolated ourselves beneath a bone-crushing weight of blankets. Often in the morning we stepped from bed into drifted snow, and such were the relative temperatures of feet and snow that neither had any effect, one on the other. Sometimes the same snow remained in the room a week, without even a feeble pretense of melting.
Memory is an unreliable thing—too highly colored by the personal at the expense of the general. From the time the Outing Club was started it must have been the whole o£ life in winter for a certain number of Dartmouth men; for others it was no more than a symbol, important because it attracted the most beautiful girls in the East to Hanover in February. Curt Tripp, Sumner Emerson, Sherm Adams and Johnny Carleton are some whose names come back at the thought of mountain trails and exploits on skis. Sherm Adams and Ellis Briggs set out one frosty night just to see how far they could hike in 24 hours, and came back with mangled, swollen feet and a record of more than 80 miles. That was a concrete feat that even a novice could appreciate; but much of the college still confined its skiing to the hardly hazardous slopes below the Cosmos Club and its hiking to near-by points that offered comfortable open fires.
Many of us recall with gratitude the cheerful hospitality of the "Candle Glow" at the south end of Main Street in Norwich. Fighting one's way up the slippery, curving slope across the river and then beating across the Norwich plain in the teeth of the windthat built up resistance to the law of diminishing returns, as it may be supposed to apply to hot, crisp waffles and real Vermont maple syrup. And the "Candle Glow" would keep them coming as long as you would take them. Waffles and syrup may not be a part of the Richard Hovey tradition, but they belong to anybody's college education.
John Carleton '22 and Dick Bowler '22
