The Door to Dartmouth
Vilhjalmur Einarsson (call him Willie) found himself in New York's Grand Central Terminal on his way from Iceland to Hanover. The Terminal was unlike anything he had ever seen before. There was the huge Eastman Kodak color advertisement, the busy information men who had tried to be helpful and the thousands and thousands of feet that seemed to know where they were going. Finally, after settling on his best guess, Willie turned to the person next to him and asked, "Is this the door to Dartmouth?" It was, and the person turned out to be another student headed for Hanover. He and Willie are now track teammates.
Willie came to Dartmouth last year on an Icelandic Exchange Scholarship which was arranged by Secretary of the College Sidney C. Hayward after an Icelandic fishing trip he had made with Paul Sample, artist in residence at the College. Willie now has a College scholarship and mixes a mean chocolate malt as a worker in the College Snack Bar.
Dartmouth is in no way a small college to Willie. His father is a government worker in the town of Egilstadir, population 190, which in a country of 160,000 is not so small after all. But Hanover was quite a change for Willie Einarsson; in population, it was 40 times as large as Egilstadir. "Everything was so big," he says, "I felt that I would get lost." And he did.
There was the time, for instance, when he set out to find the Dartmouth track team. When he reached the training room in the fieldhouse, the smell of liniment told him that he was in the right place. But the trainers had let their Icelandic slip and when he asked about "track" it sounded like "Tuck" and they sent him off to Tuck School on the other side of campus. Willie is an athlete and he has the build for it. A big, husky, blue-eyed blond, he looks like the perfect Scandinavian or, if you will, like Jack Armstrong, the All-American Boy.
He did find out where the track team was and in the last meet (at this writing) placed second in the broad jump and third in the shot-put, which, according to Coach Ellie Noyes contributed crucial points toward the team victory over Cornell. Ellie's advice to him is to keep under 100 kilos (a.2 lbs. per kilo) because he is now a little heavy as a broad jumper - but not too much under 100, because he is a little light as a shot-putter.
Willie has had a lot of competition. In Iceland his event is the hop, step and jump, and he now holds the Icelandic record of 49' 11½" (54' is the world's record). Athletics in Iceland are not conducted through the schools. In fact, most schoolmen frown on any connection between sports and the classroom. Willie says that he "had a hard time to realize that there was any enthusiasm for athletics in American colleges."
Icelandic athletic clubs sponsor teams and as a member of several clubs, Willie has done a bit of hop-step-and-jumping around. He has competed in Sweden, Finland and Switzerland and, by being in Hanover this year, missed out on a chance to compete in Athens. He received notice of his Dartmouth scholarship while in Switzerland, just eleven days before college was to start, and had to leave for the United States before going home. That was the trip that landed him in front of the right "door" in Grand Central.
Last year he was listed as an unclassified student. At first the problem of language was the major hurdle: "In the larger classes, I tried to sit and listen and that, in itself, was a strain." But he finished the year with a B average and now is in the Senior Class,
He looks forward to going on from his modified architecture major (half Art and half Engineering) to do graduate work in architecture in this country or in Sweden. And if all goes well, you may see "Einarsson" among the Icelandic entries in the Olympic Games later this year - you will know that it is Willie Einarsson, Dartmouth '56. And don't forget to check the results; if he has kept that weight under 100 kilos, perhaps he has hopped, stepped and jumped more than 49' 11½".
Vilhjalmur Einarsson '56
