A NEW USE FOR FALL WEEK ENDS
WHILE THE REST of the student body has been trekking off to football games on week ends this fall, a small band of Dartmouth undergraduates has been heading out of town on a different sort of party. With lunches packed for them by wives of the faculty, these students have been spending Saturday chopping wood, mending fences, and repairing barns and buildings on run-down farms in the vicinity of the college.
This role of the good, north country neighbor has not been undertaken just for the exercise, but has been instigated by the Dartmouth Social Service Commission which has rallied the students to the aid of farmers badly in need of assistance. Jobs too big for the Commission's regular afternoon muster are saved up for the week ends.
One of the beneficiaries of the "farming parties" this fall has been a widow on a run-down farm near Goose Pond, just the other side of Moose Mountain, whose only son old enough to help her is laid up in the hospital. The Commission also rallied helpers for two young farmers whose sugar maple "cash crop" that would have enabled them to hire the necessary assistants for mending fences and harvesting, had been hurricane razed. Still another of the self-appointed Dartmouth farmers' projects was a winter-high wood pile for a pair of old ladies alone on a distant farm, while for an old farmer near Norwich, Vt., who is hospitalized in Hanover, they harvested ensilage and sugar beets and augmented his wood supply in anticipation of New England's winter.
The Dartmouth Social Service Commission was formed two months ago, although its conception probably grew out of the student help given to farmer neighbors of the College in last year's hurricane emergency. The local Red Cross, the hospital, and even knowing Hanover individuals call cases of labor-distressed farmers to the attention of the Commission. The student organization has a directorate of seven men —Scott A. Rogers '4O, of St. Clair, Mich.; John A. Bonter '4O, of San Mateo, Calif.; Harrison Butterworth '4l, of JVest Hartford, Conn.; Robert O. Blood '42, of Concord, N. H.; Irenee duPont '42, of Granogue, Del.; and Robert Cook '42, of Newark, N. J.
Students pay no dues to the Commission but they do furnish the gas for their own transportation to the farms and pay for nails or small supplies needed on the projects. In the eight weeks since Dartmouth opened this fall, farm volunteers have been mustered to the rescue of four farmers, and the Commission plans to send men out three afternoons a week as long as there are projects to keep them busy.
