THE HANOVER SCENE
WE had the privilege not long ago of witnessing the "Ground Clearing Ceremony" for the new social center. The performance was slightly Madison Avenue, though nowhere near as lyrical as the initial inspiration of shooting a ball from an 1812 cannon through the front door of Bissell Hall. It consisted of pulling off the carefully sawed-through back end of a dwelling known as 2-4. College Street - leaving only four more structures to be razed before the builders have a completely clear field. Two houses still remain on Lebanon Street (plus the old Gymnasium-Thayer School-Geography Department-Student Workshop-ROTC building, the ski hut, the Inn lawn, a parking lot, and a couple of aging elms) as an impediment to our new dimension.
The brief preliminaries were pleasant enough, through a lowering noontime, before a group of visiting alumni, trustees, townies, and the few students who had not already left for the Harvard game. Several short and graceful speeches were made, and then President-Emeritus Hopkins took secondary control of a shiny yellow "Cat 57" bulldozer with a price tag on the radiator and a gilded blade on which was inscribed Initium Rapi-dissimum in Tertium Saeculum Dartmuthiense - which an irreverent faculty member translated as "Dig Deep."
This was by no means the first hand that Mr. Hopkins had had in the destruction of the old to clear the ground for better things, lest one good custom should corrupt the world. Freshman picture, troughing, compulsory chapel, first-year rushing, and the ban on Sunday golf, among other outmoded ways, had fallen under his firm fist. Nevertheless, as he climbed into the driver's seat wearing a crash helmet, he must have felt a little like J. P. Morgan being photographed with a midget sitting on his lap. The tractor came to life, hitched onto cables around the tail-end of the house, and a moderate crash was accomplished as the College Band played Jericho.
What we saw, however, was not the semi-spectacular demolition of an old obstructive building, but the disintegration of a back door through which we had escaped on an average of three times a month just ahead of a butcher knife as we were fired periodically from: the stewardship of an eating club. Of course, we always came back to work the next morning with no questions asked, and carved the lamb, and added cooking sherry to the hard sauce, and collected $4.00 a week for board from those who could afford it - and nothing from those who couldn't - picking up meanwhile a more comprehensive vocabulary in the kitchen than we ever derived from any English course. Many a tycoon on Wall Street owes some of. his. present girth to the days when, smart enough to get into college but not smart enough to eschew playing guard or center, he was willing to wash his own dishes, and eat free at the back porch table.
The "Eating Club" went out with the construction of more adequate College dining facilities and with the beginning of World War II. The Roberts Club, the Gary Club, the Rood Club, the Bagley Club (sliced bananas on your shredded; wheat), and the Smalley Club all closed, their doors. They were symbols of a; gustatorial age that has passed, when: baked potatoes were fished out of waiters' pockets and slammed on customers' plates. But we would hereby pay tribute to the devotion of the motherly souls who operated these establishments, and especially to Mary Smalley, who, out of the greatness of her heart and in no collusion with the athletic powers, gave more free meals to Dartmouth men than most of them have subsequently realized on their fat expense accounts.
