ALBERT INSKIP DICKERSON: SELECTED WRITINGS
Carroll W. Brewster,Katharine B. Brock, and Charles E. Widmayer'30, eds. Tribute by John Sloan Dickey'29. Hanover: University Press of New England,1974. 232 pp. 24 Illustrations. $5.00
A great many people who had any connection with Dartmouth from roughly the Class of 1880 to the Class of 1975 were fortunate enough to have had some contact with Al Dickerson. For those fortunate many (and the less fortunate others), here is a book either to renew that acquaintance or to repair, vicariously, that omission.
For it is a very, very good book, insofar as any book is good that tries to compress any man between its covers, and particularly so for one that tries to compress so varied and so complex a man as Dartmouth's late administrative jack-of-all-trades.
The editors - and bless you, Charlie Widmayer, Carroll Brewster, and Kay Brock! - have done a skillful winnowing job out of what must have been a staggering harvest of 40-plus years of truly artful writing. They have wisely compartmentalized the Dickerson output into seven categories, ranging from his undergraduate whimsy (how much more deft than usual undergraduate w.) through admissions and freshman deaning to miscellany.
This categorizing is not only helpful for reminding us how truly multiple-threat were Al Dickerson's talents as an administrator, but it is also instructive (and chastening) in showing us how wonderfully he could write at many different levels of intensity and seriousness, and in many different genres.
There is the aforementioned whimsy and the very professional imitations of don marquis (no caps, please!) and Frank Sullivan. There is an admirably lucid bit of exposition of a very complex subject, admissions policies, written for a 1947 issue of this magazine, which stands up with remarkable clarity after more than a quarter of a century. And there are three absolutely brilliant pieces of reportage, written for his very personal Bulletin, on the impact on Hanover of the 1938 hurricane, of the Cornell Fifth Down football game, and of Pearl Harbor Day.
Through it all, by the editors' judgment and, of course, by the deceptively effortless Dickersonian legerdemain, there is the warmth, the wit, and the cool, unflappable sense that was the strength and attractiveness of Al Dickerson.
He said it best himself - as he so often and unerringly did - in a tribute to another longtime colleague and worker in Parkhurst's precincts, the late Sid Hayward, Secretary of the College.
"Who can match these years in dedication to Dartmouth, or in warmth, or in resourcefulness, or in vigor, or in imagination, or in humor ... and, along with all these things, in numbers, too?"
Who, indeed?
Mr. Farley is Assistant Director of InformationServices. Dartmouth College.
