Nostalgia

Imagine our surprise, upon leafing through the March issue of Hoof Beats, to come upon nearly two columns of excerpts from letters to the editor written by Dean Bill. It seems that Dartmouth's Dean of the Faculty was brought up on "the best trotting horse farm in Nova Scotia" some sixty years ago and that he can still recall at the drop of a hat the names of the sires and dams of a lot of famous harness horses. He writes reminiscently of his boyhood in Billtown, Nova Scotia, and of the fine stable owned by his father, whose hobbies were national politics and fast horses. Dean Bill writes of Lee Axworthy, "the greatest racing stallion ever foaled," of Yankee Maid, Alcyone, Rampart, Belle Medium, and his father's Ajalon, who had bad feet and therefore had to stand in his stall in wet clay.

Hereafter when we see Dean Bill gaz- ing out of his office window toward Dart- Row, with a faraway look in his eyes, we'll suspect that he isn't thinking about the postwar curriculum at all but is dreaming about his small-boy trick of crawling through Rampart's hind legs or about the little black stallion standing in wet clay. It would make a perfect ending to this story if we could tell you that the "E" in E. Gordon Bill stands for Equinus, but unfortunately it doesn't.