Dartmouth's First Lady

November 1,1965 is a 20th anniversaryalso for Christina Dickey, who presidesgraciously over the President's House

To anyone who knows her it isn't surprising that Mrs. Dickey's horrified response to the idea that something about her should appear in this issue of the ALUMNI MAGAZINE was a quick "It's ridiculous! I haven't done anything!"

Neither was her acceptance surprising when it was pointed out that the story of John Dickey's twenty years as President of Dartmouth College could hardly be complete without a word about his wife and partner. If her multi-faceted job as president's wife now calls for the publicity she has quietly avoided for two decades, she gracefully accepts this demand, too, as she has accepted so many others.

We make no pretense in Hanover to be objective about Christina Gillespie Dickey. We like her too much for that. We know her, of course, as the gracious hostess of 1 Tuck Drive, thoughtful for the comfort of the continuing cycle of guests who are entertained in the President's House. But we also meet her shopping on Main Street or pushing a market cart in the Co-op Food Store, wishing like so many of us that some genius would invent a new kind of meat. We work with her in community organizations where her voice is quiet but wise, where she is no "honorary" member but active to the limits of her time. Like us she has brought up children from measles to matrimony in the heady environment of a college town. Though she has presence to grace her official position as Dartmouth's first lady, her dignity is salted with humor and she is a comfortable person to be with.

She is New England by breeding but not by her birth in Cleveland where her father taught classics at the University School, later moving to New Hampshire as a Latin master at Phillips Exeter Academy. Young Christina graduated from Robinson Seminary in Exeter and then from Wellesley College. From Wellesley she went on to Simmons for a degree in library science and met John Dickey the following year when she was working in Dartmouth's new Baker Library. At the time of her marriage she was librarian of the Exeter Public Library.

"We were married November 26, 1932, just two months before the banks closed," she remembers. The young Dickeys lived in a small apartment in Cambridge with John, freshly graduated from the Harvard Law School and a brand new member of the Massachusetts Bar, commuting to his office with Gaston, Snow, Saltonstall and Hunt, ironically located above the Shawmut Bank "where our modest account was locked up."

Almost at once John Dickey was involved i n state and national affairs, first as Assistant Commissioner of the Massachusetts Department of Correction and from 1934 to 1936 as an assistant to Francis B. Sayre, Assistant Secretary of State, when the Trade Agreements Acts were being formulated.

After two busy years in Washington the Dickeys returned to Massachusetts with their very young family, Sylvia Alexander (Sukie), born in 1935, and Christina Louise (Tina), born in 1936. John went back to his law office, commuting now from Winchester to Boston and on continual call to Washington. "Whenever anything came up about Trade Agreements they called John and there I was, left in Winchester with the little girls. I'm afraid I behaved very badly about it," Mrs. Dickey says reminiscently.

In 1940 the family moved back to Washington where John served as special assistant to Secretary of State Cordell Hull and to the Coordinator of Inter-American Affairs. These were the years when Washington was the nerve center of a world at war and of a world looking beyond war to a new hope, "a thrilling city to live in when you were part of it all!"

When, in the fall of 1945, the Dickeys left the excitement of Washington for Hanover and the challenges of a liberal arts college in the postwar world, Christina Dickey was probably better fitted by experience than any president's wife before her to meet the demands of her new job. Only John Wheelock's wife Maria, "schooled abroad and knowing the life of a European Court," brought to the President's House as broad a background of the world beyond the College Green.

With minimum fuss Mrs. Dickey at once set about to make a home where her husband could relax from the problems of his new duties; in which their three children (John Jr. had been born in 1941) might grow up happily and which would be a center of personal hospitality where the College and the public might meet.

"Really, the purpose of the President's House is to 'front' for Dartmouth," she observes, "and the job of the President's wife is to be hostess for the College. Now and then someone who doesn't know much about it says how lovely it must be to entertain the faculty and really get to know them. I wish we could—I miss this! This is what I would like to do and once thought we could do. I dreamed of having all the faculty and their wives come in for little dinners each year, in small groups of not more than four couples so we could really talk. But we have so many faculty that we ended up with as many as fourteen couples at a time and that just didn't work, at least not for me. Sometimes I'm afraid people may not realize how much 'outside' entertaining we have to do. There isn't much time left for any other kind, and there seems less and less time each year."

Trustees and their wives, honored guests of the college, recipients of honorary degrees, freshman advisers, special visitors to Dartmouth, all are entertained at the President's House. Seniors, their families, and the faculty are guests at a garden reception during Commencement week. There is the annual ritual of the Christmas Party which brings faculty and administration together at the start of the holidays. And though much of her entertaining is predictable on the calendar Mrs. Dickey must also always be ready for the frequent unexpected guest.

Two Commencements are particularly vivid memories: the "Eisenhower Commencement" in 1953 and June 1958, when West German President Theodor Heuss received an honorary degree and the two Dickey daughters graduated from college, Sukie from Wheelock and Tina from Smith. The Wheelock exercises fell a week earlier than Dartmouth's but Tina and President Heuss received their degrees the same Sunday morning, with her parents honoring President Heuss. "It was an awfully hard decision for me to make and I remember that Commencement with very mixed feelings," Tina's mother says.

The possibility of President Eisenhower's coming to Hanover was Very Top Secret for months and had not been decided when the Dickeys left for Mexico i n 1953. Tina, still in Hanover High School, was trusted with the secret and warned that the FBI might turn up during her parents' absence. "As soon as we heard the decision had been made I began to worry. We had a splendid Latvian couple who had worked for us for a year and a half. I kept wondering if the FBI objected to Latvians and what on earth I would do if they did." Once the Eisenhower visit was confirmed "we had FBI and the Secret Service everywhere. Woodbury had to be cleared out completely because they thought it was too near our house, and our whole second floor was cleared. President Eisenhower slept in my bedroom and his valet in Sukie's and all the Dickeys moved up to the third floor. The night before Comencement Jack Bowler, Sherman Adams and Mr. Eisenhower spent the evening talking with John and later John and Mr. Eisenhower went on talking well into the night in John's study. I discreetly sat out in the morning room to be out of the way. And then the President sent his military aide to fetch me in to join them for an hour. It was very thrilling!

'We could hear the Secret Service men all the night before, rustling in the shrubbery around the house. I went into the garden early Commencement morning to pick a few fresh flowers and there they were, under every bush! When Tina took Rusty (their golden retriever) out for a quick run one of them said, 'My God, was he there all night?' I don't know if he thought Rusty was a threat to the President."

"I don't think you can really call us great travelers," she said. "We went to Europe for the first time in 1956 on a grant from the Carnegie Fund which they give to rejuvenate tired college presidents after they've served ten years - a lovely idea!" Since then the Dickeys have been to Japan and, this year, on a trip around the world "really to see young John in New Zealand." John Jr. graduated from Dartmouth in 1963 and spent eighteen months at the University of Otago on a Fulbright Fellowship to study geology. He and his wife, a former Swarthmore undergraduate, are now living in New Jersey while he pursues a doctorate at Princeton. Tina, married to Stewart Stearns '54, this May presented her parents with a granddaughter, Christina Louise III. The Stearns family live in Gansevoort, N. Y., with Stewart teaching in the Junior High School in Glens Falls. Sukie, too, is a teacher, of fourth grade youngsters in Wellesley, Mass.

In the midst of her myriad busynesses Mrs. Dickey still manages to preserve a little time for her own pursuits. A gardener born of a gardening family, she has long been a member of the Hanover Garden Club. She belongs to the Woman's Association of the Church of Christ at Dartmouth College and the local League of Women Voters. While her daughters were Girl Scouts she served on the Hanover Council and is now an active board member of the state-wide Swift Water Council. She has been a trustee of St. Mary's in the Mountains, the school her elder daughter attended. Always interested in books, she works with the Women's Colleges Book Sale held each spring in Hanover and she is an informed and useful trustee of the Howe Library. She even finds time to snowshoe, her special winter sport begun in her girlhood and taken up again ten years ago "as a constructive way to walk a new puppy." Dogs, incidentally, have always lived in the Dickeys' house. The present incumbent is a huge, amiable tan creature called Rudy.

Needlepoint has been an avocation since Mrs. Dickey saw the handwork in Ross Cathedral in 1956. Over the years she is completing a unique gift to the President's House, needlepoint seats for its dining room chairs commemorating each of Dartmouth's presidents. John Scotford's designs, based on Mrs. Dickey's research in the College archives, wittily point up the major events in each administration. So far chairs have been completed for Eleazar and John Wheelock, Francis Brown, Nathan Lord, and Dr. Tucker. Executed in impeccable grosand-petitpoint, the backgrounds are Dartmouth green with the designs in soft grays, tans, golds and black, each inconspicuously signed by the maker and the artist for the historical record.

And how does she find time to do this? She "just fits it in," she says, "and there are the summers at Swanton," that Dickey haven on the shores of Lake Champlain where the demands of the President's House can be forgotten. For the rest, "My mother always took a nap. I do needlepoint."

Shortly after the Dickeys had moved into the President's House, while they were still under the microscope of curious eyes, one of Dartmouth's most New England professors made his considered pronouncement on Christina Dickey: "Seems a sensible woman." After twenty years, she still does, and the North Country has no higher praise for those it values.

President and Mrs. Dickey receivingguests during Commencement weekend.