My Roommate
ONE OF THE best all-around athletes who attended Dartmouth and there have been plenty of good ones, was Dutch Schildmiller '09. During the years he played for the Green, he won his D in football, baseball, and basketball. In his senior year, he was named All American end by Walter Camp, was captain and first baseman on the ball team, and forward on the basketball team. During his career, he was on football teams that beat both Harvard and Princeton, and that meant something in those days. It was his playing against Princeton his senior year that earned him the spot on Ail-American, and that year he started the season with a broken collar bone! Dutch was among the first of the Dartmouths to get that coveted Camp recognition.
Schildmiller was older than most of us in the class. He was working in Waterbury, Conn., his home town, when an Andover graduate saw him playing basketball on a Y. M. C. A. team and persuaded him to go to Andover. Dutch took four years at that well-known prep, and then matriculated at Cornell with big Tommy Thompson, one of his football buddies. The two of them started out at Ithaca, but Dutch didn't feel at home, so he transferred to Dartmouth, landing in Hanover right after the 1906 Christmas vacation. That's when I first met him.
Because both of us belonged to that superior society known as Psi U, I had a chance to get acquainted with him a little sooner than other men on the campus. I liked the guy from the start and I guess he liked me, for we agreed to room together starting sophomore year. Because I didn't have much surplus dough, and Dutch was working his way, we took a cheap room with a double-decker bed over in Reed Hall. That was the beginning of a friendship and a rooming combination that lasted through the rest of our college course.
That room in Reed was quite a spot. We built a three-cornered settee that afforded additional seating capacity in the meager space, but hard. Later in the year one end collapsed, and we never did bother to fix it. Like virile Dartmouth men of the times, we chewed tobacco and spit in the waste basket, much to the disgruntlement of the janitor who threatened to take the matter to higher authorities, but never did. It was a happy-go-lucky layout.
Schildmiller slept in the upper deck, and I, in the lower. There was a hole in his corn-husk mattress directly above my face, and when we'd retire, he'd move around purposely so that the filler would fall on my physiognomy. Another trick he had was to take a bag of dried prunes to bed with him and pelt me with them about the time I was dropping off to sleep. He was full of quaint little stunts.
Massachusetts Hall was completed the end of our sophomore year, and we arranged for a room on the first floor just opposite the main entrance. It cost more money, but we were optimists, and we spread ourselves with two floor-level beds that were placed foot-to-foot in a long narrow bedroom. They were second-hand jobs with weak springs. The longer we slept in them, the farther the springs sagged towards the floor. Finally, it was like sleeping in a hammock. Schildmiller didn't help my springs any by rushing into the room and landing feet first in the middle of my bed. I retaliated in kind. One day Freddie Morawski came in while Schildmiller and I were jumping up and down on each other's bed; he got to laughing so hard, he was rolling on the floor.
One season, Bob Truman, the brother of Charlie, who's been official steamfitter for the College these many years, and Joe, who was janitor of the C & G house, started a restaurant in a basement a couple of blocks below the Inn. Schildmiller and I got jobs as waiters, Reggie Bankart and Dutch Thorne, as dishwashers. That put us in a higher social class than those two menials. It was tough on the paying guests, however, for we always put aside the choice morsels and the service was none too graceful. Bob went broke in a couple of months and all of us were out of jobs. But Schildmiller managed to eat well, for he was on training tables a good share of the year.
The usual rounds of relaxation weire ours-beefs with Count Donahue, Knuck Kennedy, Dan Watson, Skinny Boyer, Rollie Hastings, Bunk Irwin, and many others who shared our companionship. No question was too involved for us to take a crack at. It's too bad we haven't extended our activities over into these complex times. World problems would be a cinch. We attended dances at the old G.A.R. hall, West Lebanon, the June, and other nearby spots. We had our heart affairs with local belles and some of the gals in the big cities. We took in peerades. We looked on the wine while it was red, on occasion. When examination times came around, we'd team up with smart guys, review courses with towels wrapped around our heads, far into the night, and we managed to get by. I must admit that we could have gotten far more out of our studies than we did. If we had it to do over, no doubt we would take our educational responsibilities more seriously. Who knows but what both of us might have made Phi Beta Kappa?
One Christmas vacation, Dutch visited me at my home in Evanston, Ill. I remember feeling quite set up over having such a great personage in our household. Perhaps I was a bit of a hero worshipper in college, and I never got over being proud and feeling a little superior that I was the one Schildmiller roomed with. His association has left a deep imprint on my college memories, and I know that without his companionship, college would have meant much less to me.
The years have managed to slide by since those care-free days when it didn't make much difference whether or not we had a couple of coins to rub together. With the exception of a short time when he happened to live in Evanston, I have not seen a great deal of my old roommate. The last I heard, he was making his home in Cincinnati and working in Hamilton, Ohio. Although our paths seem destined to travel in separate directions, I'll always remember Schildmiller with a thrill of pleasure-a great athlete and a great guy.
TOP ATHLETE, star player in the three sports of football, baseball, and basketball, Dutch Schildmiller was a great name in Dartmouth athletic circles during 1907, 1908 and 1909 and its luster has increased with the years.
A GROUP OF RED HOT SPORTS posed on the steps of Massachusetts Hall. These guys wowed 'em in the early part of this century. Left to right, Sawny Reagan, Jack Chiids, Dutch Schildmiller, Bunk Irwin, Peanut Morawski, all '09, and Gene Prentice '08. Morawski died soon after graduation and Prentice died in 1938.
