Summer Review

The summer months in Hanover produced the usual quiet for the townspeople, except at those midnight moments when the Wilder Dam crew let go with a blast of dynamite. The cool weather was a delight to both the natives and the steady stream of tourists pouring through town by car, bus and bicycle. Vegetable gardens, enabling the penny-counting faculty to cut down on the cost of living, flourished all over town and golden bantam corn had a good season.

One respect in which the summer of 1950 gave Hanover greater pleasure than past summers was the presence of 35 vivacious, friendly, hard-working Frenchmen who were studying at Tuck School under the sponsorship of ECA and the National Management Council. One group of 14 "management consulting en gineers" who hold important positions in French industry spent two months studying American business practices, and left August 19 for a month's tour of industrial plants before returning to France. A second group of 21 younger French "productivity experts" arrived June 26 and remained in Hanover until September 15, making an intensive study of U.S. production theory preliminary to six months in the field. The Frenchmen were housed in three of the Webster Avenue fraternity houses—Beta Theta Pi, Sigma Chi and Sigma Nu—and soon learned the short cut to the Hanover Inn, where they took all their meals. The men were delighted to discover that they could dress informally, and Hanover was pleased to see some of them blossom out in Dartmouth T-shirts. On one brisk morning a French accent issued forth from a fur-lined parka which one of the fraternity men had providentially left around.

With the French group in town, it was natural that Bastille Day should get more than passing recognition. The visiting students miraculously erected a little French village on the Tuck School lawn and invited the townspeople to come to their party, which was a smash-hit. There were speeches, both serious and humorous, along with signs hailing Liberte, Egalite and Fraternite, but fun and genuine friendship gave the celebration its long-tobe-remembered character.

Also guests at the Tuck School this summer were 106 American business executives who attended the two-weeks session of the Graduate School of Credit and Financial Management, sponsored by the National Association of Credit Men and two other credit organizations. This is a project that will be continued in Hanover in succeeding summers and will bring back some of Dartmouth's new-made friends in the business world.

Less static guests of the College during the summer were thousands of tourists who passed through Hanover on their way to and from the White Mountains, and hundreds of boys and girls from summer camps in New Hampshire and Vermont. The annual statistical report by Bob Leavitt '5l, campus guide for the summer, lists over 2,000 persons taken on guided tours, thousands of Dartmouth booklets distributed, and College movies shown to 700 campers. At the information booth inaugurated by the Hanover Chamber of Commerce, in cooperation with the College, Bob Burns '50 took care of 3,858 inquiries, more than a thousand of them about Dartmouth, and also distributed thousands of maps and booklets that may get carried back to 41 different states.

A special invasion of 300 ball-playing campers took place July 25-26 for the Dartmouth College Summer' Camp Softball Tournament. Sixteen teams, participating in a two-day elimination tournament, were entertained by the College at a buffet lunch in a tent on the campus, met the football coaches, who umpired the games, and had a chance to see the College when they were not busy playing Softball. The alumni sponsoring committee which helped the College to make this event a complete success and underwrote part of the expense was headed by James D. Landauer '23.

On other Hanover fronts this summer, great holes were dug as a promise of building dreams about to come true. The excavations were for the laboratory ad- dition to the Wilder Physics Building, for a new Nugget Theater on South Main Street, opposite the Post Office, and for the huge $2,000,000 addition to the Mary Hitchcock Hospital. The new Nugget, scheduled to be ready next summer, will seat goo with no balcony. Whether its plush interior will permit the return of peanuts and popcorn, so dear to the hearts of those who remember the Nugget of yesteryear, is something that the Hanover Improvement Society is not talking about just yet.