A MEMORABLE DINNER

The football dinner in Hanover, as last year's team officially disbanded, was something always to remember. Jim Richardson was toastmaster. The President was there. A few other officials and invited guests spoke. By and large, however, it was a closed affair, with only the football squad present.

At the conclusion of the dinner, eleven of the graduating seniors which meant practically the entire varsity team, lined up in the middle of the floor and walled through for the last time in their lives as a football team, their favorite plays—the ones with which they had made eastern history for three years and Dartmouth history for all time.

Mutt Ray passed the ball to John Handrahan. Gordon Bennett, Dave Camerer, Bill Cole and Latta McCray swung back from the line for the sweeps and reverses. Whit Whitaker moved along toward that imaginary end, he wouldn't be knocking for a loop any more.

They had a quartette from the Glee Club there that night. It had previously sung that new and beautiful song, "Dartmouth Undying." If it had begun softly to sing, "Auld Lang Syne," or even "As the Backs Go Tearing By" about now, there probably wouldn't have been a dry eye in the room and a lot of them looked suspiciously moist as it was.

But leaving sentiment out of it, the wonder grew as one looked at that wholesale departure of approximate All Americas, how Dartmouth could have anything but a prayer for this year.

That wonder still held as the season began. The Green was a patched up unit of substitutes and sophomores, with one strong back in MacLeod, a junior, a good blocker and line backer in Harrington K. (Heavenly) Gates, another junior, a senior blocker and forward passer in Hollingwortli, and one veteran end, Capt. Merrill (Stinky) Davis. The rest were more or less a lot of guys named Joe—especially in the line which figured to be disastrous, for this intricate running attack, these West Pointers and Pittsburghers feature, calls for some quick wheeling and hard blocking from the gents up forward.

Well, you've seen what's happened thus far!

They walloped Bates, Amherst and Springfield, tore Brown to pieces, completely ruined the best Harvard team in 15 years, slammed Yale all over the Bowl, stopping the famed Clint Frank dead in his tracks for the third year in succession, only to be tied in the last 12 seconds of play by a last chance Yale forward pass, and now they levelled at last the dread Princeton jinx—a worse one, incidentally, than Yale's ever was—and drove a stake right through its heart with a thrashing that really was worse than the score and the score was 33-9.

As this is written, Dartmouth is one of the few undefeated teams of major class in American and theirs is a gleaming chance to hang up a better record than even last year's nonpareils. And whatever happens the rest of the year, wait until next! Most of this amazing crowd will be back including three of the backfield and the freshman team averages 204 pounds from end to end, they tell me, and 188 in the afterguard. Only Saturday, the Dartmouth freshmen walloped the Harvard yearlings 34-7, for example.

This was the year they all had their chance to catch us.

They probably won't even get close again.

This Green team is unquestionably a triumph of coaching. It was cobbled together from scraps. Its backfield is now great but it was green when it started, one of its main cogs, Bill Hutchinson, "Bombshell Bill," being a sophomore and a freshman halfback converted into a fullback. He's the lad who scored all three touchdowns against Harvard, two of them with long runs from back of midfield.

That line has absolutely nothing to recommend it on paper, but on the field it is probably the fightingest strip of wildcats to wear the Green jerkin in at least 20 years. It stopped Harvard's fullback Struck —the man who ripped Princeton to pieces —so cold he didn't gain the length of his stride all day. It had Clint Frank, Yale's great star and captain, on his All American back all afternoon and it tore Princeton's attack completely to pieces.

Blaik's bewilderment was amusing after the Harvard game. He sat in the dressing room as glum as if he'd lost the affair.

"I can't figure it out," he said, "last year we had the greatest team I ever saw. It was perfection personified. Every man was a star. Every one knew and did his job. Yet we were straining all the time to get past every opponent and wound up licked once and tied once. This crowd doesn't look like much. It does almost everything wrong. Our attack won't work and our defense is pretty spotty. Yet we're winning our ball games with ridiculous ease. Just as you're feeling sorriest for 'em, somebody busts loose and runs half the length of the field for a touchdown, and five minutes later somebody repeats the performance. We frankly don't know what to do."

The answer to that, Coach, seems to be "Just keep on doin' what you're doin'."

Take a look, for instance, at these statistics of the current Dartmouth machine versus the combined forces of Harvard, Yale and Princeton. Against the three, Dartmouth scored 62 points. Against Dartmouth, the three combined, scored 20. Dartmouth rushed the ball 716 yards against them. They rushed it 297 in toto against the Green. Dartmouth, which threw only two passes in the entire Harvard game, completing neither, earned 86 yards against them the aerial way. They, passing desperately all day—Yale fired 32 times—earned 197 yards aerially en masse. Against the trio, Dartmouth punts averaged 34 yards. Their, thanks chiefly to the phenomenally beautiful kicking of Yale's Dave Colwell, who once stood on his own five yard line and turned an almost unbelievable spiral off the field on Dartmouth's six, averaged 41.

What lies ahead, there's no way of telling, but for the present, at any rate, Dartmouth's in town, emancipated completely from the mugg days lang syne, composed of honest amateurs and coached by gracious gentlemen.

So far as the coaches are concerned, as one alumnus said, "They're not Dartmouth men, but they're the kind of men Dartmouth men ought to try to be," and of the team, as another proudly beaming '19er said in the twilight shadows at Princeton and recalling the flaming headlines preceding the Yale game the week before telling of how the Dartmouth squad had been seriously stricken en masse with what is politely known as "the summer complaint," "You may quote me, Sir, and in your largest type to the effect that this is not a Team of Dysentery; it's definitely a Team of Destiny!"

Either way it's quite a team.

All these new era Dartmouth teams are.

That's principally what I'm trying to tell you. We aren't like we used to be anymore.

"THEY RUSHED THE BALL A TOTAL OF 716 YARDS AGAINST HARVARD, YALE, AND PRINCETON" First Row: ZITRIDES, WHITE, HULL, DUCKWORTH, LYNCH, CAPT. DAVIS, DILKES, FEELEY, GIBSON, MACLEOD, CHRISTIANSEN. Second Row: HIGHMARK, MILLS, PARKS, MATTLAGE, MCELROY, TISHMAN, GATES, JACKSON, WAKELIN, SCIIILDGEN, WYMAN. Third Row: PYRTEK, CAMPBELL, MANSFIELD, NYE, COTTONE, HOWE, HAYDEN, COULSON, BROWN, HUTCHINSON, SOMMERS, KING. Fourth Row: HARRISON, NOPPER, KIEFABER, INGERSOLL, DOSTAL, KLEIN, WEAVER, WEBSTER, DUNLEVY, DAVIDSON, HOLLINGWORTH