LETTERS TO THE EDITOR
From Bill Cunningham
Dear Sir Something's wrong with either your bookkeeping department or mine. I thought one of my usually efficient secretaries had paid the ALUMNI MAGAZINE subscription long since. But anyhow here's $10, for which you may send me the book this year and two more.
Credit the other subscription to: George Daniel Flynn Jr., 41 Cook Street, Providence, Rhode Island.
There may be a note for the MAGAZINE in Flynn. He's Harvard '19-a scholar of Phi Beta Kappa rank, a veteran of the crew, the football team and the track team. He was likewise intercollegiate heavyweight boxing champion, majored in English and is the only man I ever knew who could and can read the New Testament in the original Sanskrit. With Eddie Casey, Swede Nelson, and the rest of that original Harvard delegation (undergraduate) he came to Hanover upon the invitation of Freddie Ives '19 and myself to the Winter Carnival of '19. They were our guests at the C & G House and I really think as much out of that get-together as anything else the present pleasant relations between Harvard and Dartmouth got away to a happy start.
But back to Flynn—one taste of Hanover and he became so sold that he's now a better Dartmouth man than many of our own alumni. When we went to Seattle the next year (1920) to dedicate the University of Washington Stadium, Flynn went along paying his own expenses. He served us as water boy, assistant rubber, and betweenhalves cleat cleaner. Imagine that from a young Harvard millionaire, who stood 6 ft. 2, weighed a beautiful 200 stripped and feared neither God, man nor Jack Dempsey. the next year, he again accompanied the Dartmouth team to Atlanta where Jim Robertson and Eddie Lynch showed the southern boys how to forward pass, then came cross country to Texas to spend a week with my bride and me. Flynn was my best man when I got married and I was likewise for him.
But the main idea is that Fiynn is really a connoisseur of writing and format. It's his hobby, his business being the brokerino of mill machinery. He saw a copy of the DARTMOUTH ALUMNI MAGAZINE in my office the other day and was so struck with its beauty and brightness that he said he'd like to subscribe. I told him the College wouldn't want any dirty Harvard money, so I'd do it for him. I forgot to say that Flynn went to Hanover on his honeymoon and that every fall sees him quietly parked in the stands at some early game to get a line on "our team."
Don't think from any of this that he's sacrificed any of his loyalty to Harvard. He's a great friend of Nat Ayer's (President of the Harvard Club) and the rest. It's just that he's taken himself on an extra college and it chances to be ours.
Everybody back around our time knew "Major Flynn" and most of us still do. Today he's considered one of the brightest young men in the harassed textile industry.
May 14, 1935,48 Charles Street,Boston, Massachusetts.
Dear Sir: I noted with interest the pictures of the burning of Dartmouth Hall on page 14 of the May Alumni Magazine and I wonder if it would be possible to obtain copies of the originals to file with the report on the fire. I would particularly like the one captioned "Tragedy at dawn" if for no other reason than pure sentiment.
I think to many of us who knew Hanover in the period from 1914 to 1917 this was indeed a tragedy at dawn. Our life at Dartmouth centered around old Dartmouth Hall and to see it partly destroyed means the destruction of someting very real to us. I trust it will be rebuilt in exactly the same form as it stood before the fire.
Boston, Mass.May 7, 1935.
[Photos of Dartmouth Hall fire, taken atdawn, can be secured from Ralph W.Brown or Dartmouth Photo Agency, Hanover.—ED.]
