The Undergraduate Chair
DURING THE FIRST two weeks of November fraternity inquisitors worked overtime planning Hell Night missions for an influx of 393 new pledges.
More than ever this year, the monogrammed paddles fashioned in Virgil Poling's college workshop were used only for decorating room walls. Swatting initiates with the product of their own handiwork, an ironic fate for many Dartmouth students of yore, is now past history in Hanover. Instead of beatings, pledges are burdened with tougher tasks, such as visits to Exotic Cities and quests for pictures of themselves shaking hands with Boston's Mayor Curley or a tugboat captain in New York harbor.
Road work and scavenger hunts, the new initiation technique has proved a great improvement over cold showers, beatings and acute psychological torture. Road work began as long walks home on cold nights for shivering pledges until brothers decided the victims should return with some token of the night's wandering. Hidden golf balls, automobile transmissions and farm animals were initial props for the scheme.
Old grads may feel that Dartmouth with her calmer approach to initiations lacks a flair for creative hell raising. It's true that no dormitory cornices have been blown off with a cannon for many years and cows on the Inn porte cochere are rare. But on all festive evenings, that is Friday and Saturday nights, a detonation expert leaves all ears ringing with a campus wide fusillade of giant firecrackers. And the cows are back this fall, maybe not prime U. S. Government inspected beef, but good noisy cows being towed across campus, along with goats, pigs, and fowl. Where else but at Dartmouth do fraternity pledges lecture in mid-campus on the love life of the giraffe.
With imaginations like these pried loose from studies and focused on hazing, the initiations could be nothing but a big success.
Bob Moore and Duke Windsor, Sigma Phi Epsilon pledges, journeyed down to the Boston Commons, masqueraded as Indians and pitched a tepee on the green. Then they went after 500 signatures for a petition to return the Commons hunting rights to the tribe. Evidently the pride of the Boston police force sanctioned the tepee and the braves came home on schedule.
Two Theta Chis lectured between acts of the Junior Play at Wellesley, on why Harvard should change its school color from Crimson to Pink.
Atmosphere-laden Montreal played host to a Dartmouth-inspired pageant when two men rigged like angels and wearing halos toured the city in a jeep, followed by fifty co-eds from McGill University. Frenchmen lined the streets waving handkerchiefs and shouting, "Vive la Universite."
All this plus Kappa Sig men in tuxedos playing bridge all night in Grand Central station glamorized November for a book surfeited and hour-exam-plagued group of college men.
"Let's hear it gang." Jim Vail and his peppery cheerleading cohorts, sometimes clad in breezy loincloths and tan greasepaint, inspired real noise this fall from the Dartmouth stands. "The greasepaint makes us feel dressed," Jim says. In more relaxed moments when Jim, a Washington, D. C. boy, wasn't facing thousands of Dartmouth rooters, he visited around dorm rooms scouting up props for use in the comic skits staged during half-time.
"By any chance do you have a racoon coat?" he was wondering a week before the Princeton game.
"That skit never came off but we had a swell time cheering for those 33 points."
Right now in Hanover Jim needs that racoon coat just for crossing from his room in North Mass to Dartmouth Row and keeping warm. But despite the snow blanket on Memorial Field, Jim and his cohorts are hot after cheering plans for a year hence.
In addition to the sandy-haired and diminutive head man, Bill Sapers '50, a veteran, and three '51 newcomers, J err)' McMahon of New Rochelle, N. Y., Casey McKibben from Denver, Colo., and Fred Swanson from Milwaukee, bolster the squad.
"Jerry McMahon is fearless," he says, "we give him most of the lead parts in the skits and he carries off the honors.
"Every one of the skits begins in a bull session. We try to work out some original symbol for the opponents. Like a toothbrush for Colgate or Eisenhower for Columbia. Then four times a week we play to empty stands at the field to get some polish.
"This year we started with rallies for the freshmen and they really turned out to learn the cheers. We found it a lot harder to get them up for early morning sendoffs, even though we toured campus honking an auto horn.
"Journeying off to out-of-town games is a normad's life. The College pays our way but most of the time we stay with buddies at the other school, and often sleep on the floor.
"Our loin cloths have made Dartmouth cheerleaders a novelty. You notice that we always come out with the team. That's partly because of souvenir hunters who might covet one of our Indians garments. At Harvard we run from the fieldhouse to the Stadium along with the incoming traffic. You can imagine how drivers react when a half-naked Indian trots by.
"We're picking up some good boys from the group of seven that are heeling for us now. We look for a lot of energy and timing.
"Keep it under your hat but we're already working on a natural for next year's Yale game. That Bowl is a great place to cheer." Jim looked away for a minute anl added, "A job like this never ends until you graduate, but we all get a kick out of it."
"The love life of the giraffe..."
DARTMOUTH CHEERLEADER, 1948 STYLE
