Letters to the Editor Negro Impostor

To the Editor: Tonight a tall, good-looking negro phoned me, asking to see me as a Dartmouth man. He came to my house, named himself "Herbert Ricks" and said that he had been at Dartmouth one year in the class of 1938.

He seemed to know the college and to know the names of certain members of the faculty.

He claimed that he lived in Providence and that his parents are dead. He said that he expected to find an aunt here with whom he could live until he found a job and that the aunt had gone to Florida.

He explained that he stopped last night with a friend and came to ask me if I could help find a job since he wanted to earn enough to go back to Dartmouth.

I could not give him a job but asked him if he needed money for present needs until he found work. I offered him ten dollars and would bet another ten that he was speaking the truth. Very modestly he said, "If that is a gift, I refuse it, but if it is a loan I am glad to get it."

So, I ask you, is he just another fraud or is it true? I was taken in some years ago by a white youth who victimized Vic Safford at Boston and several others as well as myself. He was one who developed quite a fine system of fraud. How about this one? If he is a fraud, I suggest that you put it in the DARTMOUTH ALUMNI MAGAZINE to warn others.

Baldwin Bird Research Laboratory,

Gates Mills, Ohio,

February 3, 1937.

["Herbert Ricks" is not listed as a present or former Dartmouth student. It isdollars to doughnuts that Dr. Baldwinmade a gift, not a loan.—ED.]

First Ski Shop

To the Editor; I read with much interest the article about the Dartmouth Ski Museum by Rotch '37. Would like to add my two cents' worth as to beginning of skiing at Dartmouth.

When I was a freshman in winter of 1895 there were only two pairs of skis in Hanover, owned respectively by "Bum" Morrill and "Pa" Rollins of class of 1897. They roomed on top floor of the old Rood House—now the site of Webster Hall. I had a room on same floor paying large sum of $18.00 a year rent and paying for same by taking care of kerosene lamps in the halls and sweeping out when fancy took me.

Most of us thought Rollins and Morrill were good sports but a bit "teeched" in the head to go rolling around in the snow on sets of glorified barrell staves. How or where they obtained the skis deponent sayeth not.

The next winter John Ash made a set of skis for my roommate "Ras" Wilder '99 who loaned them to me once in a while. Wilder used a broom handle for a ski stick but I went him one better by using part of the broom on the stick.

I was a partner in the Dartmouth Coop Store and saw possibilities in skis so I took Wilder's skis to our college carpenter who had a small shop in back of the old gym and got him to copy the Ash model but used ash instead of spruce.

During the winter season of 1896 I sold about a dozen pairs of skis. And in 1897 sold so many we had to import them from the Boston firm of Horace Partridge & Co.

I hear the sales are still increasing. Wilder and I roomed in Dartmouth Hail in what was known as the bell room. We paid our room rent by ringing the bell for chapel exercises—or rather Wilder had the job and I did the ringing as my share of the cut. The ringing consisted of a long series of alternating single and double strokes of the bell.

The students used to time their leisurely progress across the campus from the more or less distant eating clubs toward the chapel—knowing to a tee just how much time they had by the strokes of the bell. Their aim was to arrive at the chapel door just as the bell clanged the final double stroke.

One snowy winter morn I near lost my chance of life, liberty, and happiness by cutting off thirty seconds of single strokes so that when the final sound of double strokes began there were the grandest foot races through that snowy campus that Dartmouth had seen up to that particular date. I kept to myself for some time afterward to avoid personal injury and probable bloodshed.

144 Audubon Avenue,

New York City,

February 4, 1937.