SOC

A freshman is a wonderful, whirling wet, winsome, wispish, wrongish sort of thing, similar only to another freshman. He is loose, lost, liable, likeable, lackable. He is all of these things. In total, he is a freshman - it is the best word - it says all there is. The season in which this specimen may be most readily identified is but a short week in September. It is his week, freshman week.

It is a week of frantic running from place to place - of thumpings on chests and thermometers in mouths — of sitting still to listen to words of oldsters and of still sitting, after hours of "marking 'X' in the proper squares" and "translating the following paragraphs."

This year Russ Leslie '58 stood calm at the center amid the whirlings of the loose and the lost. As chairman of the black-hatted, green-sweatered, 100-man Sophomore Orientation Committee, his job was to keep the class on the tracks; it takes a broad-gauge sort of fellow.

In Pittsburgh's Brentwood High School he was captain of the football team (155 lb. center) and president of the Student Council. He also played basketball and tennis and sang in the school's choral groups. The athletics pleased him most, because as a nine-year-old polio victim he was unable to move his legs. First it was a matter of sitting on the edge of his bed and painfully lifting his legs time after time and, finally, learning to walk again. It was then, working with doctors and nurses to regain the use of his legs that he first thought of being a doctor. His grandfather had been a doctor, his father is a dentist and, after Mr. Deberry's biology class at Brentwood, his mind was made up.

Following high school, Russ went to Mercersburg Academy for a year. He was elected president of his class and he played football and was catcher on the baseball team.

Russ speaks quietly, works quietly and listens well. He was elected president of his class at Dartmouth as both a freshman and a junior and this year he is vice-president. He is chairman of the Honors System Committee of the Undergraduate Council that is working toward a gradual acceptance of an honor system by the College.

His work as chairman of the Sophomore Orientation Committee started last spring shortly after he was chosen by Palaeopitus. One out of four of the sophomores who volunteered to serve on his committee were chosen. A professor describes Russ as a "bearcat for organization and detail" and it was just this talent that he put to work.

There is little of the old skull-and-crossboned vigilante in the SOC member. He considers it his mission to help the freshman make the transition from school to college and, above all, to help him understand just why he is being tested and tormented during freshman week.

This year, in order to improve his understanding, the class was divided into groups of fifteen men with two SOC men to each group. Seminar type discussions were held to hear gripes and explain and, generally, toss the brand new ball back and forth. The freshmen are informed of the ancient and honorable rights and privileges of the sophomores - furniture will be moved, rugs will be beaten. They are also informed of the nomenclature and assembly of the M-I Beanie - which is now a very respectable looking cap. Also, as part of the orientation, the spirit of the class - in terms of cheers and mass sweepings-over-the-campus and the tolling of bells at quiet hours - is encouraged. This year, the effort to keep such whirlings on the campus rather than on Main Street was successful.

Russ knows that medical school will demand his best and, as a sort of warm-up, he has accepted a fellowship with Hanover's Hitchcock Foundation to work twelve hours a week on a medical research project; this will be a busy year for him. And next year when Russ is in the midst of physiology and anatomy - when the whirling starts all over again, the sophomores will remember the quiet guy who helped them along.

Russell Leslie '58