Noel Perrin Professor of English 2 pigs on a single form

Sixteen years ago a young man from the New York suburbs drove up to New Hampshire to be interviewed for a job teaching English at Dartmouth. He wasn't sure he would take the job, if offered. Dartmouth seemed awfully far from the City Center Ballet and life's other amenities.

Even before he got to Hanover, he had fallen in love with the Vermont-New Hampshire countryside. One day in Sanborn House made him realize that here were colleagues hard to match anywhere. Finch, Vance, Morse, and Schultz stood out especially.

He was offered the job, and he took it. Still wondering a little if a sane man would trade the 10,000 restaurants of New York City for Lou's and the Midget Diner.

A few months later he bought a barn and 140 acres of land in a little nothing of a Vermont town called Thetford. It was a bargain he had been steered to by the janitor in Sanborn House. The day after the papers were signed, he began to learn how to repair barns. Two days after that, he fell through the barn floor and broke his arm.

This was the beginning of what has been an extraordinarily happy life as a teacher in New Hampshire and a farmer in Vermont. Today I have 225 acres - 205 acres of woodlot, mostly at 30-degree angles, and 20 acres of good pasture. I have personally fenced the whole 20 acres, mostly in the intervals of grading papers on American literature. (Between freshman themes, I usually go cut firewood.)

From someone who couldn't even fix a barn floor without falling through it, I have become a pretty fair carpenter. A few years ago, Willis Wood '7O and I built a sugarhouse from scratch. Later, chiefly because I envied Professor Ray Nash the two clapboard houses he built on his 640 acres in Royalton, I built a cabin halfway up a mountain in Rice's Mills, Vt., and finished it off with the world's cheapest clapboards. (It is currently inhabited by a graduate student in biology, who is determined to winter there. No electricity, indoor plumbing, or any heat but a wood stove. The previous tenant was a girl now in the freshman class and her two-year-old daughter. Dartmouth students have not become effete.)

Normal farm produce: annually, 10 to 12 cords of wood, 20 to 40 gallons of maple syrup. Every couple of years: two pigs worth of pork, one rural book.

Best part of the operation: sugaring - and visiting the sugar rigs of such friends as Pete Geer '43 in Fairlee, Will Wood in Weathersfield, and Don Lacey, Med School '73, in Norwich. (Though Alice Lacey actually does most of the work.)

Ambition: To make five per cent of my living off the place. Books not counted.