Further Mention

Even better known as Arctic detective than as Dartmouth Professor of English, Chauncey C. Loomis Jr. became the focus of attention of countless TV viewers at a prime time – Monday, June 4, 8 o'clock when his book Weird andTragic Shores served as the basis of the documentary special of the week. A 1972 production of the Canadian Broadcasting Company, with narration by Raymond Massey, it was a dramatization of two arctic explorations, Sir John Franklin's 1845 search for the Northwest Passage and Charles Francis Hall's 1871 expedition to the North Pole. With no commercials, it lasted an hour and a half.

Though concentrating on ships in Polar regions and arctic blizzards, icebergs and rocky straits, dogs and sleds, and Eskimos and igloos, the film also showed pictures of the Dartmouth College campus, Professor Loomis at work, and the Baker Library and alluded to the Stefansson Collection invaluable to him and to scholars specializing on arctic conditions and history. The late Vilhjalmur Stefansson, the arctic explorer, author, and Dartmouth professor, was a motivating force in the Loomis project.

Loomis's originality, determination, and skills enabled him to uncover the Hall grave embedded in arctic ice, open it, and with a doctor's help take laboratory samples from the corpse, still in excellent condition, to establish the fact that Charles Francis Hall died from massive doses of arsenic, almost certainly murdered by the ship's doctor, a German, who hated him. The film made clear the role of the computer and that of the most advanced laboratory tests on hair, skin, and organs to prove the cause of death in 1871, 102 years ago.

It is a poetry magazine with a strong international flavor. One finds translations from Japanese, Chinese, Arabic, Russian, Spanish, French, German, and Swedish. Contributors live abroad and in many parts of the United States. Granite continues to flourish under the leadership of Anselm A. Parlatore, M.D., Resident in Psychiatry of the Hanover Mental Health Center; George M. Young, Assistant Professor of the Russian Language and Literature; and Dorothy Beck, business woman, freelance poet, and critic. It now receives financial support from the National Endowment of the Arts, the Coordinating Council of Literary Magazines, the New Hampshire State Commission of the Arts, and Dartmouth College.

Number Four, Autumn 1972-1973 contains 120 pages of poetry and prose, and Number Five, Spring 1973 has increased to 174. Published twice yearly at $2 an issue and $5 for three issues, the magazine may be obtained by writing to Granite, Box 774, Hanover, N.H., 03755 and is on sale at the Dartmouth Book Store.

Interest in Native Americans continues keen on the Dartmouth campus, and away. The leading piece in Number Five is a 12-page extract from Apalache by Paul Metcalf of Chester, Mass. It extols the courage, stoicism, patience, hardship, sufferings, and deaths among American Indians on migratory dangers as they cope with rapids, swamps, mosquitoes and black flies, snows and frosts, starvation and ensuing cannibalism. And it extols even more the courage of missionaries tortured until nothing was left except courage. Those not killed finally learned the Huron language and the rituals of primeval customs. Among the 37 contributors in Number Five are the following connected with Dartmouth College; Professor Young who teaches a poetry workshop; Robert Graham, a senior from Oklahoma City; Robert Siegel, a member of the English Department whose forthcoming book of poems, Beasts &Elders, is being published by the University Press of New England; and Richard Macht, Assistant Professor of German, who teaches a seminar on Bertolt Brecht's relevance as 20th-century dramatist.

The richness of Corey Ford '21 is given rich treatment by Mildred C. Tunis in "The Corey Ford Collection," Dartmouth College Bulletin, April 1973. Baker Library inherited his papers at his death in 1969. Rich is the word to be repeated. During most of his 67 years he filed with scrupulous care all papers crossing his overworked desk. Some 80 boxes include manuscripts and correspondence, memorabilia, photographs, scrapbooks, his library, films, business records, genealogical data, early scribblings, and souvenirs of childhood and adolescence. Photographs abound of his friends and homes. Films document his service in the U.S. Air Force. Scrapbooks contain items of personal interest, reviews of publications, and news items of his writing career including work for both Broadway and Hollywood. His library includes books about the Revolutionary period, New York and Long Island, and maps and notes on library research.

Ford's success as a writer is attested by the sale of 500 articles and stories and 30 books. Baker now has the two full-length novels of the 1920's never published. A student of writing could well profit by the mass of manuscript material in all stages of development, and a student of the humorous visual arts by the productions of Ford's illustrators: Robert Candy, Miguel Covarrubias, Lois Darling, Whitney Darrow Jr., Robert Day, Walter Dower, Eric Gurney, and Gluyas Williams.

Two boxes bear on the Hanover-Dartmouth years and include many letters to townspeople college officials and faculty, students, and alumni The names of two Hanover sportsmen are writ large: the Honorable Ellis O. Briggs '21 and Sidney C. Hayward '26. Out-of-town correspondents vary enormously in backgrounds literary, military, boxing, Hollywood and Broadway, restaurant, night club, aviation college and university. Omissions may perhaps be hardly less striking than names mentioned here: Frank Crowninshield and David Cort (VanityFair), Harold Ober and Dorothy Olding (literary agents), Harold Ross (The New Yorker), Robert Sherwood (Life), George Palmer Putnam (publisher), "Hap" Arnold (Air Force General) Percy Crosby (cartoonist, Skippy), Norman and "Bunny" McLeod (Hollywood), Parker Merrow '25 (Editor, Carroll County Independent), Tom Wenning (Columbia), Everett Wood '38 (bon viveur, sportsman, and international aviator), Frank Sullivan (humorist), Franklin Adams (columnist), and Dorothy Parker (poet). Among theatre personalities are George S. Kaufman, Howard Dietz, Joe Cook, Dave Chasen, Russel Crouse, and Lee Shubert.

To non-Dartmouth men, Corey Ford may be the humorist, satirist, and parodist: the sportsman who made Field and Stream so fascinating with accounts of fishing in Canada, Alaska, and Ireland and hunting in New Hampshire, the Carolinas, and Georgia with his bird dogs Cider and Tober; the traveler and adventurer in Dutch Borneo, Alaska, and the Arctic; the military historian (A Peculiar Service and Donovan of theO.S.S.). But to many generations of Dartmouth men, Corey Ford, who worked for the College without pay, looms large in their memories as boxing and rugby coach, ardent supporter of Delta Kappa Epsilon, adviser on student publications, North Balch Street host ("a home away from home") to so many hundreds who read his books, listened to his talk, trained and showered in his gymnasium, and refreshed themselves from his well-stocked ice chest and from his mind so protean, humorous, and creative.