HOLIDAY MAKES ALL THINGS RIGHT
But things were right for the College temporarily when a Thanksgiving recess dragged undergraduates home and let Hanover sleep beneath an early snowfall.
December was a short month, lasting from the fifth until the twentieth. It was a month of snow, mental lethargy and little brain stimulant to alter the situation. Class elections were held and a columnist on The Dartmouth offered a new candidate for the post of vice-president of the junior class. His man was Homer U. Feep, running under the double slogan of "Every X is a vote for Feep" and "His prep-school record makes him the logical choice." Several members of the junior class must have been pleased with his prep-school record because the mythical, two-dimensional character whose purpose was to represent some of the evils that a class officer might easily slip into, garnered quite a few votes.
Then it was back home to Suburbia for the Christmas holidays.
Of all the months, the one which packs the most lethal power, which is the greatest depressor and is the undergraduates' most deadly enemy, is January—thirty days of blue Monday. A vacation is over; a semester's work is to be reviewed, outlined and probably memorized—then it must all be pushed into two hours of fast and hard writing at the Gym. Then the two hours of writing are followed by two weeks of waiting for symbols on a piece of cardboard representing a semester gained or a semester lost. For the first time this year, Dartmouth had a week's vacation between the last exam and the day after Carnival. And already we are in February; January was easy to treat lightly —it was so important.
Carnival was as big as everyone expected, but no one knew how to avoid it. There were moments when the Dartmouth week-end took on the color of a commercial program for a well-known brand of cigarettes, particularly when its radio personality played a write-in part in the Carnival play, when he led a parade to the golf-course in an auto while the rest of the parade walked, when he broadcast from the center of the campus, when he fired a gun which started one of the skating races, and when the girl who sings with him entered the downhill ski race. But it was nice to write home to the folks that Fred Waring and Donna Dae were around for the week-end.
If there was any one thing which characterized the campus during February, it was the fund-raising epidemic. A "Fighting Funds for Finland" Committee was organized and professors pointed out its advantages from the fronts of their classes. There were some who agreed with the drive, but there were others who doubted its value, not because they were opposed to taking money from their pockets but because they felt it would plug only one hole in a leaking sieve. Finland, many thought, could not possibly hold out much longer than a month or two. Meanwhile, America's sending money abroad might endanger its neutrality. The viewpoint was not one of smugness—it was a careful evaluation between aiding a losing cause and possibly hastening our entry into something we did not care to join, or not contributing and possibly curbing a too-enthusiastic interest in the war.
The fighting fund was followed by a move toward a drive which has met with approval in most quarters, that of building up the Community Chest idea, devoting funds to answer some of the needs of the have-nots and the have-very-littles in and around Hanover. It looks today as though the Community Chest will go over the top and become an annual drive.
The month ended on a high note, one appealing to everyone in Hanover—the Interfraternity Play Contest. No one is ever sure what to expect on the program except that even the most serious of plays will have a healthy laugh in it somewhere. A line forgotten, a line twisted, an actor who slips, a dead one who moves, scenery which shakes, or a prop door which won't open to let the hero in—those are the things that the audience loves. Sigma Chi won the contest and all the brothers agreed that the judges' decision was just. But every other house which had a play on the boards felt that its production was among the best. Arguments beginning with the respective merits of actors from each house became as heated as a close umpire's decision in a baseball game.
With March there was the Phi Beta Kappa election; then there was the performance of Gilbert and Sullivan's H.M.S.Pinafore which sailed across the stage of Webster Hall and picked Dean Neidlinger up from behind his roll-top desk, shoved a paint brush in his hand, and set him to work painting the sets with Paul Sample, Artist in Residence. Those who know Gilbert and Sullivan as well as their own names claim that there was never a better performance given anywhere at anytime. And in the same month, customarily noted for its slow and sluggish movement, Dartmouth was thrilled by the far from slow track performances of the negro speed triumvirate of Borican, Woodruff and Herbert, who broke eight indoor records, aided in part by the N.Y.U. relay team which took its share of the laurels. Just as in the past two years, the annual invitation track meet was preceded and followed by complaints from metropolitan sports writers that there was certainly something fishy about Dartmouth's board track—it couldn't be that fast. But it was.
FINAL STAGE FOR THE AEGISRichard F. Babcock '40, editor, shown making a last check of page proofs for the 1940yearbook, which expects to set a record for early appearance in May. Babcock, a SeniorFellow, was recently named to deliver the valedictory of the graduating class in June.
