Hanover in the Dark.

The Dartmouth community took the East Coast power blackout pretty much in stride although, as might be expected, there were some unusual happenings. The Dartmouth Film Society, for instance, was showing a vintage Alfred Hitchcock thriller that concerned an attempt to sabotage the electric power supply for London. In an upset in the making, the faculty volleyball team had just taken a commanding lead over a shocked fraternity sextet. Sabotage was first suspected here too.

The resourcefulness of the community was best demonstrated at the Hopkins Center where the Players' cast of Pirandello's Six Characters in Search of anAuthor performed the first of five wonderful presentations of that drama in circumstances that should have given Assistant Professor Stephen Coy, in his debut as a dramatics director at the College, a short circuit of his own. Although lights were on in most of Haaover when the first-night curtain went up, the Hopkins Center side of campus was still having problems. The power was on, the power was off. And that's the way it went. But in the best traditions of academic showbiz, the play continued with the actors finding each other during the dark stretches with flashlights. Because Pirandello wrote some dialogue that has actors occasionally calling for more lights, there were some very funny laugh lines for that one performance.

There was an un-funny side to the Hanover blackout too. An oil lamp being ignited in the Balch Hill-side home of Medical School Prof, and Dr. Arthur Naitove '46 exploded and resulted in a serious fire that gutted a good portion of the Naitove home.