Dartmouth in Mew York
BIGGEST DARTMOUTH NEWS of the month from the Metropolitan area is, of course, the new Dartmouth Club, which Manager Joe Weitzell says will be ready for occupancy before the end of October. The old Club, as any of you who have recently dropped by 24 East 38th Street know, has hardly kept up the most immaculate of fronts, what with an elevator that hasn't run since last spring, and broken ping-pong paddles barely worth their weight in firewood. With a change of location definitely decided upon some months ago, the officers and management have directed their efforts towards investigating Mid-Town real estate offerings, and now we have word from President John Knibbs Jr. '05 that a new ten-year lease has been taken.
The new Dartmouth Club will be at 30 East 37th Street, in the block just south of the present location. It is between Park and Madison Avenues, with the stately Union League Club on the east and the town house of J. P. Morgan on the west. Nearby are also the Pennsylvania Club and the National Democratic Club. The building obtained for the coming ten-year period is not a new one, but it has ample space, and, says Joe Weitzell, will be much more adaptable for club facilities than the building now being used. It is five stories high, and has a long, forty-foot frontage. Formerly, it housed the Harvard Law Club, and long before that, Joe relates, it was the private home of old J. P. Morgan, Sr., himself. The Morgan interests, in fact, own most of this block, and it was with them that the lease negotiations were made.
ALL THE COMFORTS
The new quarters will be equipped with a bar and grill room, a dining room with the club's own dining facilities, card and lounge rooms, a library, and the usual back issues of Daily Dartmouths and ALUMNI MAGAZINES. Just what's going to be done with the little individual lockers in which members used to keep their stores of Chinese Rice Wine and Amer Picon during Prohibition, Joe's not sure. They're a little small for overcoats or squash rackets, or anything else for that matter, but Manager Weitzell thinks things are pretty unpredictable down in Washington these days, and he says he'll keep them around, just in case. There will be no squash courts in the new clubhouse, but the same cooperative arrangement will be maintained with Walter Kinsella's Squash Club around the corner at the Midston House, where Dartmouth squash players will continue to gather after business hours in the late afternoon. Everything, says Joe Weitzell, is going to be in shipshape condition when the Club opens its doors; perhaps, he adds, one will even be able to sit and have a ham sandwich and glass of beer in the same chair into which old J. P. Sr. used to lower his portly limbs.
AFTER THE SUMMER
Like all New Yorkers, Dartmouth men who live in the city seem to have spent as much time as possible away from it during this past summer. At the present writing, however, they are emerging from summer watering-places and again running into each other at the Club bar and other haunts about Manhattan Island. Along with the new Club, prospects of the 1937 football team are the main topics of mutual interest. Special trains from New York will be run to both the Yale and Princeton games, and tickets for these contests, as well as for the Columbia game here, will be on sale at the Club. This department, for one, would like to see better train accommodations for the Princeton game this fall. A few additional cars would at least make the journey a little less like a subway rush-hour jam on the Bronx Express. And something besides those fiftycent lunch-boxes of four slices of bread and an apple could be offered in the way of eating facilities. The Brown, Harvard, and Cornell games will, if they are not carried over the radio, be brought to the Club by direct wire.
Only one Dartmouth man appears to be directly involved in the present mad political scramble over New York's mayorship. He is Don Marcus '32, who has been a special investigator for the City's Commissioner of Accounts under the LaGuardia regime. Don is now busy hustling about the city trying to unearth Tammany scandal, and on election day he expects to be patrolling the polls with the Fusioneers, a strong-armed group of the Mayor's personal followers. During the summer, Don, Mitch Syrek '3l, and Dick Holt '36 rented a cottage out in Port Washington, Long Island, and spent most of their week-ends taking visiting Dartmouths sailing from the swanky Manhasset Bay Yacht Club. Syrek is now in charge of the Herald Tribune's college circulation, while Holt, who is getting married this month, is working with the American Tel. & Tel.
One place in the city where there was an even chance of bumping into a Dartmouth man during the torrid summer spells just past was Jack Bleeck's Artists and Writers' Club, the West 40th Street spirits' dispensing emporium frequented by newspaper men, Lucius Beebe, and Mrs. S. Stanwood Menken. Recently seen eating, or playing the match game at Bleeck's have been Jim Austin '22, who is with McGraw Hill; Johnny Harkins '23, drama editor of the Sunday American; Clifford Orr '22 and Joe Liebling '24, both of TheNew Yorker; Tom Lane '35, press representative for WOR; Harry Casler '3O and Bill Rich '3O, both of the Herald Tribuneand Bob Sellmer '35, who's been vacation ing in New York since last April and is now planning a winter voyage to Norway.
Without checking with the records, it would seem safe to state that the advertising business draws more Dartmouth men in New York than any other field, with insurance and Macy's Department Store following closely behind. The show business also seems to attract a number of Hanover graduates. Tom McKnight '23, who has been writing radio script for Beatrice Lillie and other stars, is now working on the forthcoming Ziegfeld Follies. Bob "Bobo" Williams '26, who had a part in "Excursion," is now reported touring with one of the "Room Service" companies. Henry Sullivan '23 has recently returned from England, where he did the score for two new musical shows. Life magazine, several issues back, carried a picture of Actor Al Hewitt '34 snuggling up against Actress Frances Farmer; during the summer A1 has been playing with summer shows in Mt. Kisco, N. Y., and Westport, Conn.
Dartmouth candidates for young-menabout-town fame seem to rest, for the moment, upon the well-groomed shoulders of Collier Young '3O and Bill Okie '2B, who are chalking up the best Green records for premiere attendance and night club excursions. Young and Okie have received frequent recognition from such chi-chi experts as Lucius Beebe and Jerome Zerbe, and both made the New York Woman's list of the ten most eligible bachelors in town. Okie, who oversaw the installation of the first invisible glass window in New York, is gaining a reputation as the foremost show-window artist on Fifth Avenue. He showed up at the Stork Club some time ago (in case you haven't heard the story already) basking behind the brilliance of a huge $lO,OOO diamond-studded gardenia hung upon his coat lapel. The display of so much jewelry so dismayed Sherman Billingsley, the usually unperturbed owner of the Stork Club, that, to protect both Okie and the Stork Club, he surrounded Okie's table with a cordon of detectives for the rest of the evening.
Dartmouth made the metropolitan sport pages several weeks earlier than usual this fall, mainly because of the activities of Dave Camerer '37 and John Handrahan '37 in the September 15th Giant-All Star football classic. Most Dartmouth men in town went up to the Polo Grounds for the game, and saw both Camerer and Handrahan get into the line-up. Camerer, who is starting work with the World-Telegram sports' department, arrived back from Europe just a few days before the All Star game. He returned about the same time Larry Kelly did, but, fortunately, didn't duplicate the latter's feat of frightening women reporters with a summer's growth of brush-whiskers.
News from last year's graduating class indicates that someone hundred '37 men will descend upon New York to start jobs this fall. Most of them, it seems, have spent the summer in Europe. Some sort of an upward trend in Dartmouth affluence should be noted here, as compared with two years ago, when that army of '3sers thumbed their way down from White River to take cots at the Mill's Hotel before starting to look for work.
Hank Whitaker, last year's quarterback, says he's one of the few members of '37 who has been around all summer. Hank is now doing something with women's fashions at Marshall Field—not in Chicago, but at their office and factory here in New York. He had an offer to join the All Stars, but had just begun work, and couldn't take the time off. The main reason for his close application to career founding is, no doubt, due to home ties. For, giving credence to rumors started last spring at the Alpha Delt house, Hank just last month announced that he had been married in Florida during Easter vacation to Florence Allen, the 1937 Carnival Queen.
