1963's 10th

Most great events have their omens. Take Ten's was New England's first significant earth tremor, which rippled through here the Thursday evening before reunion. It left its calling card in my living room ceiling and prompted fresh thoughts about the predictions of Edgar Cayce, the late psychic, that New York City and much of the Northeast would be destroyed by the end of this century.

Omen or not, I thought this an appropriate peg on which to hang a brief summary of Take Ten. We might want to make the most of those reunions left to us before Dartmouth and the entire Eastern Establishment are reduced to rubble. As it was, 140 'mates made the pilgrimage - 125 of them accompanied by women of Dartmouth. Jim Levitt came the farthest - from Hawaii - to experience on Saturday what had to be one of the coldest, nastiest, windiest June days on record in the Upper Valley. We all suffered; but spirit and spirits were in sufficient abundance to melt away the weekend gloom.

If it did nothing else positive, the raw weather reminded us why Thad Seymour once referred to Dartmouth as a "snowcapped Fiji Isle." It is no longer much of an island adrift in the wilderness. (Vermont and New Hampshire both have more real estate agents than cows.) And Thad was back, at the invitation of the Class, to reminisce about the snowcapped years. When he left the College in 1969 to become president of Wabash in Indiana, he says he went without backward .glances. But he showed in his after dinner speech Saturday night that he still thinks of his four years with the Class of '63 as his "happiest years in education."

"You taught me all I know," Thad confessed, and then recited his version of the "Great Water Fight" in the spring of 1960. His vivid account would have done credit to Lew Stillwell.

Apologizing to "those who came thinking they would learn something," Seymour proceeded to "hack around a bit." He recaptured the essence of our Dartmouth years with such recollections as the sodding of Hitchcock Hall, the milk that tasted like beer one night at Thayer Hall, and announcer Bud Palmer's televised report to the nation from Winter Carnival: "Oh, there's a nice ice statue - a couple lying down."

But Thad, like all of us, has had to go out from Dartmouth into the "real world." He doesn't look any worse for wear, however, in spite of his being sued by a female applicant who was denied admission to all-male Wabash. Wabash - which was founded by Dartmouth graduates - is just beginning to "wrestle" with coeducation, to quote Thad.

The weekend had its somber moments. The Rev. Richard Morgan led us in remembrance of the ten '63s who had died in the past ten years. A memorial shell was dedicated to Dan Watts, an outstanding crewman, who succumbed to cancer earlier this year. Donations to complete purchase of the shell may be made to the Dartmouth College Crew.

CLASS SECRETARY