Routes of All Evil
Interstate highways, described in our May issue as bridges linking the islands of the North Country archipelago, have brought a mixed bag of good and ill to this hitherto isolated region. They make it easier for more alumni to come back oftener — to urge on the football team, to ski, to keep their intellectual fires kindled, to see the old place again. But the asphalt strips also lead larcenists, grand and petty, to the doorsteps of the College.
The boldest depredation in memory was the theft early last summer of eight ancient atlases from locked cabinets in a locked room of Baker Library, which had been locked for the night. Fast thinking by both campus and town police led in short order to the apprehension of a suspect, a rare manuscript and antique dealer from Philadelphia, who waived extradition and is currently awaiting trial in the Grafton County jail. The atlases, valued at somewhere between $50,000 and $75,000 were published from 1571 to 1776. Recovered from a locker in the New York Port Authority bus terminal, they are being as evidence. The legal proceedings in this particular case have been complicated by the fact that the Grafton Country Attorney, who ordinarily would have prosecuted the case, was being tried on obscenity charges resulting from the exhibition or Deep Throat and The Devil inMiss Jones at his family-owned movie theater in Bethlehem, New Hampshire. He has just been acquitted on six of eight counts.
Crooks invading Hanover from "away" are responsible for a recent rash of thefts from fraternity houses and other College buildings, as well as for last year's epidemic of systematic bicycle pilferage, in the opinion of College Proctor John O'Connor. Valuable pieces of antique furniture have disappeared from Dick's House; a haul of stereo equipment was taken from one fraternity the last weekend in September, when a home football game brought crowds of strangers to town; items valued at nearly $800 were stolen from another house between summer and fall terms. With access to Hanover eased by improved highways, "Why should a junkie with a $50-a-day habit risk being caught carting television sets away from buildings in the city when, with a few hours' drive to the boondocks, he can rip off unlocked fraternity houses, dormitories, and other campus buildings?" O'Connor asks.
A good many of the 66 thefts reported during August and September, however, smack more of the work of indigenous rip-off artists, particularly property stolen from campus storage rooms. Both year-round operation and student failure to mark their stored goods make prevention of unauthorized pick-up more difficult. Items are removed nowadays almost any time of year, rather than the traditional start of the fall term, and increasingly casual student attitudes toward property not their own tend to make any item not labeled with the owner's name fair game for adoption.
But then, there's always the other side of the coin: integrity so pristine as to be serendipidous. It seems a conscientious New Hampshire lady was going through some old books belonging to her late husband's family early this fall, when she came across a volume belonging to the College Library. Not sure whether her husband ('39) or his father ('12) was "the delinquent," she inquired whether the College wanted the book back. It did, and she has returned it to be re-catalogued. The book was due on Valentine's Day, 1907. It all goes to show that honesty does indeed pay: rather than an overdue fine, she received "hearty thanks for your thoughtfulness in helping this little book find its way back."
