Dial M for Mogul

DIAL 646-4492, let the phone ring once, and listen: "Hi. This is Torrey Brooks speaking. I'm not in right now but I'd be happy to return your call."

Torrey Brooks '76 is probably the only Dartmouth student with a telephone answering machine. He needs one. Just because he's in an economics class or has taken a few hours in the library, he doesn't want to miss a sale of stereo components,, an order for a plane ticket to Brussels, or a reservation on a bus he's chartered for the Harvard game.

Brooks, Dartmouth's answer to the corporate conglomerate, has combined remarkable energy and ingenuity and has earned several thousand dollars with his various business ventures. While many students spend their idle hours playing frisbee, fashioning kayaks, drinking beer or sleeping, Brooks spends his making money.

"I'm not in it just for the money," he insists. "I'm in it because there's a positive reward." Unlike academics, where, he says, "you can work like an S.O.B. on a paper and still get your basic B-minus," business rewards him for his hard work. He uses his businesses to "demonstrate my competence to myself."

He first tried his hand in the business world while a senior at Deerfield. He and two classmates, with some financial help from his father, Babert Brooks '47, bought a 1954 General Motors 39-seat bus for $6,700. In four and a half months, Brooks and his friends converted it into a camper that's now for sale for $30,000. "It's a good deal at that price," according to Brooks. "You could pay $150,000. . . ."

Brooks figures he spent $20,000 (including labor and parts) in his bus conversion scheme. -The seats were stripped out, a plywood floor added, and then came heating, lights, large generator, a kitchen, a refrigerator, two bathrooms, a shower, and overhead cabinets.

The bus, with Brooks at the wheel, has been up and down the East Coast. He drove the bus to Cambridge for the Harvard game in 1973, and he and eight friends stayed in it overnight, parked, appropriately enough, in the Harvard Business School lot.

Brooks is probably best known around campus for his stereo company, Audio/Acoustics. He sells more than 100 brands of stereo components at cut-rate prices, and his signs, nearly permanent fixtures on the College's bulletin boards, boast: "Lowest prices due to low overhead. Manager, owner, clerk, accountant, salesman, secretary, and expert are one: me!"

The manager-expert, who says, "I've always been interested in stereos because I love good sound," contacted stereo wholesalers through a friend in the business to get the dealership started. That was in the beginning of his sophomore year. Now, a senior, Brooks has sold $35,000 worth of stereo equipment, has cleared more than $3,000 profit, and has become close friends with the United Parcel Service and Postal Service employees who handle his inventory.

Students either call or visit Brooks in his South Topliff Hall business quarters, where, unlike the stereo distributors on Main Street, he pays no rent, heat, light, or labor costs beyond his dormitory rent.

Brooks, Randy White '76, and Chery1 Newman '76 also formed Reduce Evening Study Tension (REST) last year and contacted parents of undergraduates, offering to deliver CARE packages including a gift certificate to a Main Street pub, a can of soda pop, an apple, an orange, some homemade cookies, Life Savers, and peanut butter cups to students during the final examination period. College officials declined to provide the RESTers with students' addresses, so they typed the necessary details from The FreshmanBook into the College computer, which (at no cost) printed address labels. The CARE packages were offered at $5 apiece - "a lot cheaper," Brooks says, "than it would cost someone to go out and buy the stuff and then pay to send it out" - and each of the partners earned nearly $100.

Educational Flights of New Hampshire is Brooks' latest venture. He went to Europe last spring on a flight arranged through Educational Flights of New York and decided to begin a similar operation at Dartmouth, where hundreds of students travel to Europe for vacations and on various foreign study programs.

Educational Flights of New Hampshire arranges to fly students to Europe at (what else?) "very substantial discounts." The New York-to-Brussels round-trip ticket, if purchased through Brooks, goes for $310 - cheaper than ordinary fares and competitive with the popular student practice of leaving for Europe on youth fares from Montreal or Toronto.

"Someone will tell me he wants to fly to Europe," Brooks explains. "Well, the airlines don't want to send empty seats to Europe on their flights. So they call up Educational Flights of New York and tell them how many seats there are available. We fill them from here."

So fat, however, Brooks has only sold three tickets to Europe. But he already has ideas about expanding "to hit Harvard and Yale and Colby-Sawyer and Skidmore" because he thinks "there's a great market out there. All I need is time to get at it." Time is his most precious resource. Besides making strides toward being the Croesus of his class. Brooks is in the Glee Club and on the squash team.

Brooks hopes to attend business school and would like to run his own business(es). "There's a lot more freedom and flexibility that way," he thinks. "If you can do lots of neat things, you don't get bored."

For the time being, however, Brooks will continue to attend classes, sell stereo components and airplane tickets, and hope he might be able to find someone who recognizes that a bus that's been converted into a camper is a real steal at $30,000.