You're a V.I.P.* To the A.R.O.
The Alumni Records Office Keeps an Eye on 23,000 Dartmouth Men and Has Fun as Well as Headaches.
A nd the granite of New Hampshire A keeps a record of their fame" well, not granite perhaps, but tucked under the eaves of the Administration Building, the Alumni Records Office "keeps a record of their fame" the fame of more than 38,000 alumni, graduate and non-graduate, who since 1769 have attended Dartmouth.
Surrounded by filing cabinets 44 of them the process goes on. Today, we start the files for the Class of 1952. Tomorrow, perhaps, we may have occasion to refer to Elias Weld, 1809, "who studied medicine, but soon became hallucinated, and suddenly vanished from Hanover, and has never been heard of since, having doubtless lost his life at the time of his elopement." Or, John Rolfe, 1780, who "studied divinity and was ordained, but, as he was ultimately deposed from the ministry, we are led to infer some defect of character." Or, Alphonso Stuart, 1809 who fell in the first and last duel ever fought in Illinois. These records and those of the doctors, lawyers, merchants and ministers, "men of genius as well as goodness," make up the colorful history of the classes back of 1876, the earliest class now having living members.
What is in all those filing cabinets? The complete history, in so far as it is possible to gather it, of every man who ever attended Dartmouth. The day after a freshman matriculates his file is started with his matriculation card. All during his undergraduate career we add to his file any material we can secure about him pictures, clippings from The Dartmouth and from his home-town paper, and the papers he filled out when applying for admission. After he graduates the process goes on endlessly. Everything to, from, and about him goes into his file clippings from the class notes in the ALUMNI MAGAZINE and from class newsletters, articles secured from our clipping bureau (or from kind friends, like our favorite alumnus whom we call our Yankee Clipper), magazine articles, questionnaires, war records, and address changes. We recently summarized the career of an alumnus, from his file, and after seeing it he wrote us, "My, what a guy I am!"
Why does Dartmouth do it? Every man is proud to keep in touch with his family, his children and grandchildren, to display their pictures and boast of their prowess. The alumni are the Dartmouth family and the College has as much interest in its sons as any family would have.
The prime reason for being for an alumni records office is, of course, to maintain an up-to-date alumni mailing list. Sounds easy, doesn't it? But Dartmouth men, proud to be called Indians, seem to have the nomadic characteristics common to the aborigines! It sometimes seems that their chief occupation is moving at night and concealing all trace of their whereabouts. We change between 7,000 and 8,000 addresses a year, and only a small percentage of these come to us unsolicited. (If an Ophelia should be found, floating on Occom Pond, chanting "Moved, left no address" just return her to the Alumni Records Office, you couldn't be wrong.)
Day m and day out, the process of trying to keep our mailing list up-to-date goes on. We read and check everything we can lay our hands on, about alumni the ALUMNI MAGAZINE, newsletters, newspapers, trade papers, etc. Last year we addressed from our addressograph machines 668,717 pieces of material. A man whose mail is returned, undeliverable, comes out of the addressograph file today and goes back in next week, or next month (no later, we hope!) when we have found his new address. And how do we "find" him?
An alumnus whom we had stalked across the country once wrote us, "So sure as your sins shall find you out, so will Dartmouth College". We get out his file and write to all old addresses which we think might reach him; we write to classmates or fraternity brothers in the same city; to his local club secretary; to business associates or town clerks, or, we may find him in a telephone book (a rabbit trick is nothing to what we can do with a telephone book).
Each year it would seem that the alumni get more wily and our job of stalking them becomes more difficult. They go into concealment during the Alumni Fund campaign. September 1 is groundhog day for them. If they come out and see the shadow of a class agent they duck in again. If they see a ticket on the 50-yard line of the Yale Bowl they come right out in the open and we catch them before they crawl in again, next February!
We really want to know where our alumni are so they can "keep in touch" and receive their football applications, the ALUMNI MAGAZINE, class news, reunion notices and news of meetings of the local Dartmouth clubs (the secretary of the local alumni association usually doesn't know you have moved to town unless we tell him). Each time an alumnus moves we notify about six persons his class officers, the secretary of the local club he has left, and the secretary of the local club in the town to which he has just moved, both the city and the suburban club in most cases.
Although we consider a "lost" man a black mark against us we really do (believe it or not) respect a man's privacy. If we pursue a man to the point where we feel he does not want to be found, we retire, and come back a few years later. In the lives of 33,000 men human tragedy and frustration are bound to be found. When we stumble on these we only murmur "Sorry" and withdraw.
There is pathos and humor in our mail. For many years the alumni recorder kept a mother advised that her estranged son was well and often sent her bits of news about him. When he died suddenly and was buried with no word sent to his mother, it was a difficult assignment to compose a letter to her.
Some mail which we had addressed to an alumnus was recently returned to us, with this note scribbled on it: "John Jones does not live at this address any more. His wife lives here but she does not want his mail, nor him!"
We had some interesting correspondence with an alumnus in a Western state who wrote us about his daughter, who was the wife of J. Edgar Hoover. Knowing that Mr. Hoover was Washington's most eli- gible bachelor, the alumni recorder was a bit startled. When, soon after, the alumnus disappeared, a letter to the county mental hospital found him there, happy and well!
Once, a letter we had written, trying to locate an alumnus, was returned to us marked "You are not on our accredited list of correspondents" and the letter was from a state penitentiary!
Richard Hovey was certainly prophetic when he wrote "around the girdled earth they roam." Dartmouth alumni can be found in every corner of the globe. Some time ago we tried to secure some information about a man who had graduated from the Medical School in 1873 and had always lived in Liberia. A letter to the postmaster of the small Liberian village was answered by the man's daughter, who informed us that her father, now dead, was a native Liberian and gave us his tribe. She went on to say that she was happy to send one of his 16 grandchildren to the alumni recorder to educate. For weeks she expected to find a little Liberian on her doorstep, any day.
When the war broke out our alumni were scattered all over the world. From 1939 the long check on our Dartmouth DPs began. We followed closely all trips of the Gripsholm and anxiously kept in touch with families and business firms, to receive word of the men who were interned in Europe and in the Far East.
With our entry into the war we felt that the word "snafu" had been coined just for us. This being the first war we had run, we had to improvise from day to day. As the number of alumni in service ran up 8,000, 9,000, 10,000 the problem of getting their mail to them became more difficult. With the College determined to keep in close touch with all these men, we had to establish almost an individual system for getting mail to the men in the service. That it worked, reasonably well, was borne out by the fact that one young alumnus, stationed in the South Pacific, wrote us that a friend out there said wistfully, "You get more mail from Dartmouth than I get from my girl."
In closing our war records the final tally was 11,091 men who had served in the war, of whom 302 had died in the service. For these 302, who will always have a special place in Dartmouth hearts and memories, our files are full, of courageous letters from wives, mothers and fathers, proud photographs in uniform, and tributes, from privates to generals.
One of our continuing responsibilities is maintaining up-to-the-minute statistics on our alumni how many graduates and non-graduates are living in each class (as of this minute, 15,833 graduates and 6,688 non-graduates), how many are "lost" (30 graduates and 183 non-graduates), not interested, etc. These figures are used by various offices and are the base used by the Alumni Fund in preparing statistics during fund campaigns.
Some of our more murderous class agents may even try to kill off some of their "lost" men, but, having been several times embarrassed by having supposedly dead alumni write in to us (usually to apply for football tickets) quoting Mark Twain's "the report of my death is greatly exaggerated," we require more proof than an insurance company that an alumnus really is dead.
The alumni recorder had a long standing argument with the officers of one class who insisted that one of their graduates was dead. From exhaustive research on the man in question we were sure that he would come to life some day, when he felt like it. After twenty years of being "lost" he strolled in one day to look over the new plant of the Thayer School from which he had graduated, and then promptly disappeared again. When he dropped dead on a city street, some time later, and we had a city registrar's certificate to prove it, we were at peace with the officers of the class.
Dartmouth must be a wonderful college; so many men wish they had gone there. Non-college men seem to have no idea how carefully colleges keep records of former students. We maintain a voluminous file of 'spurious" alumni men who, far enough away from Hanover, feel quite safe in calling themselves Dartmouth men. In applying for jobs, in wooing their brides, in joining clubs, it seems to enhance their value to claim Dartmouth for an alma mater. When we hear of this (and we usually do) we politely but firmly disenfranchise them.
It would be nice to be omniscient (as most alumni think we are), but we aren't. Life would be fine indeed if every alumnus would develop the habit of telling us when he moves, of sending us clippings and announcements about exciting things which happen to him or to his friends. Best of all, "Come up and see us, some time!"
MISS FORD AT HER ALUMNI RECORDS OFFICE DESK
THE ADDRESSOGRAPH ROOM, where thousands of address stencils are made, filed and off each year; 668,717 pieces were addressed last year. This busy annex is ably run b and Mrs. Bertha Cofran (right), wife of Clarence W. Cofran '17, whose address plate is never wrong.
TWO-THIRDS OF THE FULL-TIME STAFF OF SIX, not counting the visiting student, shown in the main records office on the top floor of Parkhurst Hall. Left to right: Miss Helen Robes, Miss JoAnn Moore, Mrs. Barbara Root, and Miss Ford. Around the periphery are all the filing cases Miss Ford writes about.
ALUMNI RECORDER
* VERY IMPORTANT PERSON.
