Not So Long Ago
NOT SO LONG AGO—but plenty long enough, it begins to seem. In some ways changes come slowly; the gift of the Baker Library announced, the plans drawn; the building itself gradually takes shape. Orozco begins his murals; aborigines and gods and demons appear on the walls; so slow is the pace of human accomplishment that the College and the alumni body boil with controversy before the work is half done. But Dartmouth Hall burns in a night and time leaps ahead. Great change has come to pass without giving us a chance to realize or resist it.
It must be that Dartmouth Hall was important—and will be so again—as a symbol. Unconsciously perhaps you think of it as possessing the qualities which are most characteristic of Dartmouth: ruggedness and endurance and stark simplicity. White as a Hanover winter, it belonged where it was, dominating the campus.
A tie with the past is broken, and the years before 1920 seem fairly long ago, after all. Remember how returning classes looked to us as we sized them up through undergraduate eyes at Commencement. The three-year group: aggressive, ambitious, sophisticated, definitely "on the make." Five years out: still young, stili going places, but beginning to acquire here and there the settleddown look of comfort and security. The ten-year class—didn't we think of them as definitely middle-aged? Beyond that limit, so it seemed, if you merely succeeded in sustaining life, you were doing your part very nicely.
Fortunately we have to try hard to remember how we thought and felt fifteen or twenty years ago. Ernest Martin Hopkins probably seems younger to us now than he did on that fall day in 1916 when he assumed the duties and responsibilities of his office. How else could he meet the new problem of every incoming class, of every rapid change in the educational scene? Probably he alone is as much at home in the Dartmouth of today as he was when he took command of the situation nineteen years ago. Under him the College has grown and flourished and adapted itself to those changing social needs which we only recognized dimly, because we were battling against them from year to year and trying to make some sense out of them. He keeps the College ours by making clear every new phase through which it passes. And in the serenity of his outlook, the dignity and sincerity of his presence, he seems himself unchanging.
But what has happened to us between "not so long ago" and now? Do we look the same to each other fifteen years after? Johnny Moore, once the terror of the Ad Building, is a model of sterling respectability. Lanky Jim Frost has taken on girth as a superintendent of schools. Sherry Baketel has lost more hair and acquired new philosophy, piling up a mountain of life insurance policies. Could Jim Robertson still send a drop kick between the goal posts from fifty yards back, as he did one day at the Polo Grounds? Or Cuddy Murphy shut out Harvard without a hit? Or Tommy Thomson step over a line of hurdles without even appearing to notice they were there?
If we can remember what those things were like, we aren't doing badly. Perhaps that is what Commencements are for. The boys who accept their diplomas in the center of such solemn surroundings know that the world is theirs and that they can make of it what they please. Those who come back to watch them, put on crazy uniforms and cavort around the campus, and tell themselves that it really isn't hard at all to begin all over again.
