The Undergraduate Chair

The guest editor of "The Chair" thismonth is Miles Donis '58 of Scranton,Pa., who is editor of Jack-o-lantern. Heis an English major and a member of theUndergraduate Council. Last year he wasa Green Key member and was on thestaff of Dart, which replaced the Jacko for several years until the 1957 revival ofthe humor magazine.

THEY may not know where Dartmouth is at Oklahoma or Michigan State, they may not know the name of our president or the library, but they all know that, wherever we are, it snows, it's cold, and in February we run the biggest, loudest, and most spectacular college weekend in the country. And Winter Carnival is just that. It's the weekend every Dartmouth man plots and plans for weeks in advance; it's the weekend every Smith girl has to go to at least once to finish her Smith education. It's the weekend Hanover merchants wait for with open pockets; it's the weekend when Tanzi sells more beer in a shorter time than any other grocery store in America.

And it's one of the few weekends that get a vacuum cleaner into a Dartmouth man's room. Thursday of Carnival the dormitories are emptied into the halls bookcases, lamps, rugs, tennis shoes, squash rackets, skis - thrown out in a frantic haste to sweep the floor, rearrange the furniture, and tear down the pin-ups before the first wave lands on Friday. It always seemed a little bit futile to me, because Friday evening it's an accepted part of living-room tactics to keep the lights as low as possible. In fact, I've known people to simply take out all the light-bulbs and replace them on Sunday morning. But by Friday night every room on campus is cleaner than it has been or will be all year. It's been dusted, swept, polished, and all for some girl from Holyoke to sigh, "Oh Charley, what a pretty room you have!"

It's amazing the lengths to which some men will go to get ready for the weekend. Men who've been drinking beer out of cans all year will suddenly buy a complete set of cocktail glasses. Oriental rugs will plop down from nowhere on floors that were covered with wicker mats. One man I knew spent hours working out a light plot in his room, trying to decide which lights gave the least light where, and finally he bought red, blue and green light-bulbs to replace the white ones. I've known others, who found it difficult to walk across the campus to a nine o'clock class, to walk out beyond the Golf Course to cart back logs for their fireplace.

I've always thought a freshman had his hard times at Carnival. Here he's brought up the best girl he knows, certainly the one he'd like to impress the most, flown her up all the way from some little town in New Jersey, spent every penny he has, and some he doesn't have, on her weekend, and yet he can't keep her in his room later than twelve on Saturday night, he can't go near a fraternity house, and he's always last in line to buy tickets.

Every Carnival everyone has the same problems, and the Carnivals themselves aren't too different, but this one seemed a little quieter than most. Of course, there was the same panic that comes every year the day or so before Carnival, about no snow and the usual cry for help on the center-of-campus statue. But somehow there didn't seem to be the same crowds milling about the Inn Corner, or the same holiday flow up and down Fraternity Row, the same packed taxis from New London or as many snapshot addicts in front of the rocket-bound Indian in the middle of the Green. And, for the first time that I can remember, Outdoor Evening was held indoors in the Davis Rink.

The whole thing disturbed one old graduate who assured me that Carnivals didn't used to be like this. This one, he insisted, was a. lot tamer than any he'd ever seen in his time. Although, I suppose college weekends mellow with age and get better every year, from the old posters and photographs I've seen, Carnivals were at least bigger in the past. We hear all kinds of wild stories about dog-sled races and toboggan slides in the stadium, wild gin and wilder women. But I doubt if the gin or the women really were any wilder than they are today. One undergraduate summed it up pretty neatly, I thought, when he remarked that Carnival just didn't seem to have the same enthusiasm it used to - that certain sparkle that made the weekend something mothers shed a tear over when they packed their daughters off to Winter Carnival.

But Carnival isn't tame yet. It's still 'he most hectic two days in the school calendar. You spend a week getting ready for it and another week getting over it. On Friday morning the railroad station at White River Junction is a wild melee that looks like registration day at Smith. There are the bewildered wide-eyed little girls who have their first look at Dartmouth on their first college weekend. And there are the veterans from Smith and Wellesley. There are the girls from Vassar who meet by accident and the girls who get sick on beer; there are those who keep their Outdoor Evening tags on their parkas all winter and those wonderful girls who don't want to go Outdoor Evening at all. There is always that same little army of lost women prowling through the fraternity houses for lost dates. There is a Carnival Ball that no one goes to, a Glee Club concert, a jazz concert, a play, a basketball game, a hockey game, and more. If a freshman can maneuver his date to all of these, he's had a real Winter Carnival and he's probably ready for Dick's House on Monday morning. The saner crowd sits out the weekend in a fraternity house with a drink.

Sometime Sunday morning, sleepy, not quite sure whether to laugh or cry, bundled in their green and white scarfs, clutching their Carnival programs, the last wave of women is packed out of White River, late, as usual. It may have been a terrible weekend for some of them, but years after they graduate from Smith or Holyoke they can tell their daughters that mother went to a Dartmouth Winter Carnival.

Carnival is about the only thing that makes the new semester bearable. It's a gigantic potpourri weekend. From the outside it only looks like ice statues, snow, beer, and Winter Carnival Queens, but you can never see it all, and even after four of them, you still can't be sure what it's all about.

Mrs. Charles Morey's center-of-campus statue had "The Space Age" for its theme.

Beta Theta Pi's winning fraternity ice statue, "Stardust," and Topliff's "Sigh," the first-place dormitory entry.

Beta Theta Pi's winning fraternity ice statue, "Stardust," and Topliff's "Sigh," the first-place dormitory entry.

"Moonglow" reposes on the Sigma Chi lawn.

Dartmouth's 1958 Queen of the Snows, the lovely Marilyn Whinnerah from Denver, a University of Colorado senior, was escorted by Kit Cowperthwaite '58, also a Denverite.

SAE's second-place ice statue, "Doggone".