1942
If you haven't already guessed it, this small college (but there are those of us) has fashioned itself a pretty decent football machine. By the time this reaches you, of course, the season will have concluded and Cornell and Princeton will likely be added to the victory string which now totals five. I realize it's a pretty brash thing to do nowadays, this predicting, but even with the badly decomposing statements of the election pundits still in my nostrils I'll try the football crystal gazing.
This is being written, belatedly, right after the Dartmouths outlasted Columbia in as heady a contest as I've ever seen on the Alumni Field, including the agonizing fifth down game. As you could easily have found out if you had ten cents for the Sunday papers of November 7, Dartmouth coasted out to a 26-7 lead and then sat down on its collective fundament. Which was a serious error in judgment, since Columbia has a couple of guys named Rossides and Kusserow, to say nothing of Nork and Olson and an old Dutch patroon named Van Bellingham. With exactly one quarter, fifteen minutes of football, remaining, the above named made a fair stab at being Frank Merriwells. Rabid was the word for Rossides; he like to have taken the shirts off the Dartmouths. When it was all over, the Indians were just barely in one piece, the score was 26-21 and Rossides was prone on the 28-yard Dart- mouth line clutching a ball he was about ready to throw for the winning touchdown.
This is all by way of saying that Tuss Mc- Laughry is as good a coach as they come. It took only a little intangible called material to disabuse a small but vocal group of experts who thought the name Blaik should be listed right up next to that of the Archangel Michael. Or perhaps a tiny bit ahead of it.
In seeing three of Dartmouth's victories, I have also managed to see quite a few members of the sovereign class of 1942. Take the Harvard game, which we did. Dick and BarbaraLevy threw their usual magnificent pre-game party, with certainly no more than 200 or 300 people in attendance. Since I spent a good bit of time bobbing for non-existent apples in champagne cocktails, I probably didn't see every one there. I did, however, see Peter andSkeeter Geisler, John and Evie Callihan, Boband Bobby Meyers, Ad Winship, George Clark,Ed McLaughlin, Ollie Quayle and 40 or 50 others whose names I can't remember. Pete is in advertising, Bob the same for an insurance company and Cal, ever the affluent banker.
After the game came a party at Ann and JoePalamountain's plush Beacon Street menage, with the same cast, but different lines.
This past weekend, the Columbia one, 1 saw Coach Gordon McKernan of the still-undefeated Pinkerton Academy team (Derry, N. H.). Asked him after the game if it was a thriller for him and he said,"Doesn't compare to the blood pressure I get up when my boys are in a close one."
Nearby, in the stands, were Proc Page, the Burlington printing man, and Will Perry, who by now should be the Rev. Will Perry, I guess. He was far enough away so that I was unable to engage him in conversation. And sitting right next to me was the peer of all football experts, Matt Rapf, who modestly admits he knows "everything there is to know" about the game. When I arrived a play or two late, though, I confronted him with a really tough question, which, I might add, he was unable to answer. It was "Who carried the ball on that long run?"
For those of you who might possibly forget about my startling sureness with predictions, I would like to point out that David Heald, the large operator of the Hanover Inn, has indeed left for fairer fields. He will be managing director of New Hampshire's new $375,000 ski development at Mount Sunapee, chair lift and all. His duties with the Inn conclude December 1 and he expects to have the lift in operation on December 15, if summer is gone by then. He and Jane and David and Stony will be at home in a house they bought in Newport, N. H.
Another '42 whose fortunes have or will be affected by the Sunapee development is Dexter Richards. He has forsaken die National Carbon Co., both parting with the highest regard for one another I'm sure, and will no longer haggle with Hindus. The new Richards vocation is that of innkeeper. He bought a fairly famous farm in the Newport area, the Old Stagecoach Road Farm, and will be glad to see skiers and vacationists at any time. The farm was formerly owned by Samuel Crowther, onetime Saturday Evening Post writer. It marks something of a complete cycle for Dex, since Newport is the town in which his father and grandfather were born and raised.
Another man who is in the schuss business is hen Woods. I caught a fleeting glimpse of him in the Hanover Inn Coffee Shop a few weeks back. A recent issue of the new, slick Norwich-published periodical, Ski News, tells me that Len recently was married and that the handsome girl I saw him with was his new wife, Anina Hilken Paepcke. Len is chief of the ski patrol at Aspen, Colo., one of the nation's best ski centers, if I am to believe experts on the subject. In a manner of speaking, Anina is the boss's daughter, so Aspen had and has more than one attraction for Len.
It any of you were subjected to the long diatribe the Chicago Tribune, a mid-western newspaper I'm told, printed day after raging day about Dartmouth, the Great Issues course, the New Deal and maybe even King George, I would like it to be put on the record that one of our number had something to do with the Colonel's popping arteries.
Briefly, the whole thing started like this. The Trib sent a reporter to find evidence of liberal thought in our liberal arts college. On his arrival and* tour through the library he saw an exhibit of what not to do in journalism. Prime whipping boy of the exhibit was the Chicago Trib. Naturally he was irked, and the Colonel in turn slipped into a long-distance, high voltage irk.
Well, the man that put together most of the exhibit and a good one it was, too, was none other than Alex Fanelli. Unfortunately, he was home abed with a cold when the reporter was on the prowl in Hanover, so he didn't get the Tribune accolade he so richly deserved. Among Babe's other recent accomplishments is the siring of a second offspring, Miss Katherine Ann Fanelli, born November 4 at the Mary Hitchcock Memorial Hospital, weight seven pounds, two-and-one-half ounces. Betty, who also had something to do with it, is doing very nicely, Alex says.
A letter from the whirlwind promoter, Dick Lippman, arrived in these hands too late for inclusion in the November notes. It was largely concerned with a '42 dinner he and Warren Kreter were going to hold for the New York area crowd sometime during November. At any rate, he said that anyone around the big city who wants to be put on the Lipper's list for notification of such shindigs, can be so catalogued by dropping him a card at 219 West 80th Street, N.Y.C. 24. By standing on the corner of sth Avenue and 42nd Street, a logical place I must say, Dick met Ted Schoonbeck, who was in Manhattan from Grand Rapids for an annual visit. TedLapres, lawyer, and Chuck Gibbons, engineer, are living at the Dartmouth Club; Jack Corwith is in Venezuela with Standard Oil doing labor relations; Mike de Sherbinin still at the University of Geneva, Switzerland, and will be for another year; and Dick sees Matt Bride,Bob Encherman, Milt Williams and CharleyWeinberg regularly.
That wraps it up except to say that I am now working in Lebanon, N. H., for the Claremont Eagle and residing in Hanover once again.
BACK ON HANOVER PLAIN: It. Comdr. Frank Malavasic '42 returned to Dartmouth this fall as Instructor in Naval Science on the NROTC staff.
Secretary, Howe Library, Hanover, N. H. Treasurer, . 710 Linden Ave., Los Altos, Calif.
