Can I Get In?

Not As An Undergraduate But In Advanced Status of Full-Blown Alumnus Is the Question

CAN I ENROLL as a Dartmouth graduate? No; I mean it. I'd like to be able to feel that I'm part of the Dartmouth setup. I'd like to be able to say, when I meet someone else from Hanover: "You Dartmouth, too? Well, I'll be damned," shaking his hand, "I'm a sort of alumnus myself "

I'd be willing to start right in at the beginning, and enroll as a freshman, but I'm afraid it's a little late for that now. I'd look pretty silly running around in a little green cap, with my trousers rolled up to my knees. People would be apt to look at each other a trifle oddly, and inquire in a low voice: "That one over there, no, the one in the green sweater with the 1944 numerals and the slight pot-belly, is he exactly .... I mean, do you think ....?"

Besides, I'm not at all sure I could get by these present-day entrance requirements of the Selective Process. I might do all right on English, which I learned to speak fluently while in Hollywood, and I think I could pass my mathematics (though I'm hot entirely sure whether the binomial theorem is that one about a body displacing its own weight in water, or whether it has to do with the determination of sex in mice). But when it comes to Romance Languages, all I can remember now is a few phrases I picked up on the Rue Blondell, and I don't believe they'd do at all. I'm afraid my papers would be thrown out, closely followed by me.

No: I guess the only way I can get into Dartmouth is as a graduate; but I'd like to get in that way, if I could. And I don't see why the fact that I went to another college should have anything to do with it. I wouldn't be going back on my own college, just because I were an alumnus of Dartmouth, too. You can be loyal to two places, can't you? I think a lot of the school I went to, and I'd do anything for it; but I also happen to think a lot of Dartmouth. I happen to like the things that Dartmouth stands for. I don't feel I'm letting my own school down when I say that Dartmouth has something that my college—and, for that matter, every other college in the countrylacks. Something you can't quite defineMcDowell came nearest to putting it into words—something that has to do with the long winters, perhaps, the bare elms and the snow and the silent New Hampshire hills. Something that adds up, over four years, to a sum total of sanity and health and humor—a sort of balance between enthusiasm and a decent skepticism—that marks the average Dartmouth man you meet.

You see, I've admired the place for a number of years; but lately I've come to know it just a little better. For one thing, I'm a neighbor now. M"y home here in New Hampshire is only ninety-odd miles from Hanover as the crow (provided Parker Merrow isn't around with his Magnum 10) flies. I've had a chance to drive over now and then with Parker in the fall, or in winter at Carnival time, or in the spring; and I've acquired a genuine respect for the civilized and friendly community of Hanover, its urbanity, its whole way of life. I'd like to know it better still. I'd like to belong to it myself.

To be sure, I don't know just how you go about enrolling as an alumnus of a college. Sid Hayward doesn't seem to have much data on the subject. I'm not even sure what class I'd be an alumnus of. I've got friends in a lot of different classes: Parker Merrow and Ted Geisel in '25, for instance, Rod Hatcher and Bob Ryan in '32, Dan Holland '36, Everett Wood '38, and Dave Camerer '37, and others. I can't belong to all those classes. Look at the dues for one thing. I'm no fool.

Maybe it would be better if I weren't any particular year. Maybe I could be just a sort of roving alumnus, and play the field. There's a certain advantage in being in a class of your own. For example, my dues would always be paid up in full, par. ticularly if I were class treasurer. I'd always get credit for perfect attendance at every reunion I went to. My monthly letter to the ALUMNI MAGAZINE, if I were my whole class, might sound a little monotonous; but I'd do the best I could:

19—* Secretary-Chairman, COREY FORD Freedom, N. H.

Well, news are scarce, but ye scribe will try to relate a few items about our class which he picked up while hanging around the local saloon and Night Courts last month. Seems our alumni dinner at Ellis Island set a new record for attendance, when no one showed up at all. "Doc" Ford, who was scheduled to be the principal speaker, was arrested for rape that morning, and everyone else who was not there declared that it was one of the most enjoyable dinners they had missed in years.

Ran into "Dink" Ford on the street, he claims he is happily married, but if his wife hears about that blonde he was with, it won't last long, ha ha, there, "Dink." He tells ye scribe that "Happy" Ford is on the stuff again. Marajuana this time Several of our classmates made the headlines recently when it was revealed that the gang which held up the First National Bank included "Butch" Ford, "Lefty" Ford and "Corey the Blood." Nice going, boys.

Glancing down into a sewer the other day, who should we see but old "Stinky" Ford, who has just accepted a position with the W.P.A. We asked him if he were keeping busy, and he said he was right up to his ears He tells us that "Beans" Ford has three sons now, two of them half-wits and one a monster Ye scribe wants to report a change of address: "Ratsy" Ford is no longer at State Penitentiary. His new address is Alcatraz. Nice going, "Ratsy."

See you all at reunion.

Fund Contributions for 1940 Contributions: 1 (100% of graduates). Total Gifts (missing) (100% of objective). FORD, COREY.

Of course, if I enroll as an alumnus, I suppose I'd be required to fill out one of those blanks of Dean Bob Strong's. Lets see. Name and address? Easy. Age? Skip it. Qualifications.... That's a tough one. That's where I'd fall down. Probably, if I'm nest. I'd have to list my liabilities first. That way, I'd have at least three strikes on me, right at the start:

One: I wrote the story about Dartmouth Carnival in the Saturday Evening Post, which gave Hollywood the idea (honest, I had nothing else to do with it) for That picture.

Two: Once, years ago, Ted Geisel and I selected a Queen of the Snows, thereby incurring the enmity not only of every undergraduate that year whose girl we didn't pick, but also of the poor abandoned escort whose girl we did pick.

Three: I don't ski.

Assets? Only one; and I'll let Parker Merrow vouch for that. (Parker's my sponsor, you see: he's standing up for me tonight as I kneel here before the shrine and take the sacred vow of brotherhood.) My sole qualification—look out, boys, he's getting serious now—is the fact that I think I have a genuine feeling for Dartmouth, a regard for what it stands for, a sincere desire to serve it in any way I can. I think it has the most inspiring location of any college in the country. I think its songs are beyond doubt the greatest college songs—which is probably no coincidence, but a tribute to the beauty of that campus. I think it has for its leader a man whose wisdom, and constant vitality, and intimate interest in both undergraduates and alumni, mark him as the outstanding college president of our generation; and I mean that profoundly. I think its graduates represent, by and large, as fine a group of men as I have ever met.

If I were an alumnus, I would come over very frequently for reunions. Not every five years, or ten, or twenty. Not merely every June. I'd hold little reunions of my own at odd times through the year. In the fall, for example, when the New Hampshire hills are in full color, and you hear the clump of football cleats on the hard ground, and smell the woodsmoke at dusk in the thin frosty air. I'd be over to loaf in the sun and watch a game on a Saturday afternoon, or sit around a highball at night with Don Bartlett or Ralph Miller, or bnng my bird-dog and get Bob McKennan to take me out some afternoon and show me the alder-swamp where he keeps those fast-flying woodcock Dan Holland was. telling me about.

or I'd be over in the winter for Carnival, joining the crowd up Rope Ferry Road, hearing the familiar crunch and squeak of heavy soles on snow, seeing the lighted white slopes, the swoop of skis own through a lane of torches, the final reworks bursting redundantly against a star-studded sky.

or Id be over in the spring, when the bare elms are first sifted with green, and the are first getting started on the campus, and the first woodchucks are poking their snouts over the edge of a knoll and asking for a .22, and the first trout are stirring in the streams; and I'd try to get some fellow-angler in Hanover to show me some of his favorite holes, in exchange for a few choice fishing-spots I know myself

I'd be over to browse at any time in that magnificent library.

I'll be a very enthusiastic alumnus, I warn you: a kind of pest. I don't mean I'll put a little green pennant in the rear window of my car, or start fistfights in bars because Dar'mouth's bes' li'l ol' schoolinawurll. But I'll be hanging around quite a lot. I'll have to, to make up for lost time. I've got a lot of memories to accumulate in a hurry. The rest of you are many thousand sunsets ahead of me; but I'd like to try to catch up. I'd like to feel that those drifting dreaming walls are starting to build, miraculously, in my own heart. Can I get in?

CRAVES ADMISSION Corey Ford of Freedom, N. H., correspondent for Collier's, Saturday Evening Post, and this magazine. He is shown on theDartmouth campus during a visit surveyingthe availability of special privileges.

* 100% subscriber to the ALUMNI MAGAZINE, on class group plan.