Poseurs, Impostors, and Scalawags

He's a phony, a fraud, a fantasizer - or. sometimes, the victim of mistaken identity. Business executive or ranch hand, banker or felon, dean or doctor, war hero or 'gentleman of the road," cop or man of the cloth, he's one of a shadowy - often shady - band numbering in the hundreds, known to Alumni Records as the "Dartmouth Impostors." Old familiars nd one-shot newcomers alike, their names and transaressions are as carefully noted as the accomplishments of any legitimate alumnus. .

Unless he's one of the undetermined number who have been the objects of sloppy reporting or over-zealous press agentry, he wants something - and claims something he doesn't have, an affiliation with Dartmouth, as a means to it.

Close on the heels of the Dartmouth alumnus as he roams the girdl'd earth is his phony counterpart, hunting a job, impressing a girl, bouncing a check, plumping his ego - or sometimes just spinning yarns, manufacturing a past more pleasurable to recollect than his own.

For the most part his deception is modest: a Dartmouth degree, perhaps embellished with membership in fraternity, honorary society, or varsity squad, to decorate a wedding announcement or a business resume. Infrequently it takes on gargantuan proportions, like the topper of 'hem all: a Nazi spy picked up by the FBI in 1942, who claimed to be not only a Dartmouth graduate, but valedictorian of his class and recipient of an Alumni Award for "leadership, character, and achievement."

They run the gamut between, the men adopt Dartmouth credentials. There was the self-styled prodigy who impressed his friends with tales of a degree granted inabsentia after a written examination when he was nine years old. And the itinerant laborer about whom it was "common knowledge" that the College had been so pleased with his services that he was awarded an honorary A.B. when he left its employ. A young actor was reported to be much in demand for important roles "only four years after he graduated from Dartmouth." An evangelist leading revivals across the South attributed his holy calling to Dartmouth influence. An advance man for a travelling circus claimed not only Dartmouth but Philips Exeter Academy. One alumna, indisputably far ahead of her time, was an English teacher who died in 1941.

The ranks of the graduates of the mythical Dartmouth Law School are thin, but there is a goodly roster of phony medical alumni around, as well as uncounted recipients of degrees in programs undreamed of in the wildest brainstorming of the most innovative of assistant deans.

Charity demands the benefit of the doubt in many cases. Some result from faulty recollections or legitimate confusion of names, others perhaps from unreported name changes. In the case of celebrities, a press agent may long ago have assigned them fictitious affiliations which hardened into unquashable biographical ghosts. Or a relatively innocent fib by a young-man-on-the-make may linger on to embarrass the full-fledged tycoon. A volume of autobiographical reminiscences published last year by a theatrical personage, for example, erroneously described a noted leading man of the '30s as a Dartmouth graduate, a mistake easier to make than to obliterate.

But then there are the hard-core repeaters, unquestionably deliberate. They turn up again and again, using a fake Dartmouth degree to apply for a job, join a club, or bilk legitimate alumni. Among the cheekiest was reputedly a practicing psychiatrist, obviously in need of his own services, who surfaced most recently several years ago with tales of entertaining then-President Dickey on his latest West Coast tour. Most disreputable are the true impersonators who use the name of an actual alumnus, generally with larcenous intent.

The deception most frequently comes to light with a newspaper clipping, routinely received by the College, about an engagement or a marriage, the promotion of a rising young executive, or - testimony that the charade can be carried on to the end an obituary of an alleged alumnus. The next most common source of exposure is an inquiry from a prospective employer, a credit bureau, or a skeptical parent asking about the background of a would-be sonin-law.

There's real poignancy in some of the inquiries: wives seeking information about strayed husbands, children about fathers they were convinced were Dartmouth men. The most mystifying was from a man, evidently never burdened with tuition bills, who wrote to ask about a son he'd lost track of, who he thought had gone to Dartmouth. The saddest was the wife tracing every available scrap of information about her husband, returned home in a state of mental collapse after 39 months overseas in World War II, "to help him piece his life back together again."

The unwitting and the deliberate impostor can usually be distinguished by the response to polite letters of inquiry from Alumni Records. The former reply with a firm disavowal of responsibility, sometimes indignant, sometimes not, often accompanied by a proud proclamation of real affiliation. The latter are rarely heard from, although a few offer such lame excuses as having claimed only to have gone to school near Dartmouth. One tough-itout type, caught by a feature in a national magazine, wrote brazenly: "I said 'I went to Dartmouth and I studied medicine.' So I did. I have been at Dartmouth, and I did study medicine - but not at Dartmouth!"

The Dartmouth Impostor seems to be an endangered species, with fewer specimens sighted each year. Recent months have brought only an inquiry from a non-alumnus relieved to learn that the "bum" his daughter was seeing was not a Dartmouth man, another from a woman planning for a longtime "Dartmouth' employee a "This-Is-Your-Life" type surprise party that turned out to be a different kind of surprise, and a newspaper account of a Las Vegas belly dancer whose husband was purported to be a Dartmouth graduate.

The computer - or a widespread wariness of its awesome capacity for detection - probably accounts for the decline of the genus. Long gone are the days when jobs were won on the basis of a sincere tie, an Ivy-League accent, an ingratiating manner, and an unchecked list of references. Nowadays only the least sophisticated - or most flamboyant - of con-men risk exposure by the phony credential route.

The beguiling question this April Fool's season is how many others, self-elected to the Dartmouth Fellowship, are still undetected, their names not listed among some 300 in the Imposter File. So you remember old Joe from when you ate together at Thayer or Commons. But what about Jim - whom you never can quite place?

The author poses, quite successfully, asAssociate Editor of this magazine.