Discreet Charm of the Conferee

Russian ice researchers, high-school pom-pom girls, Japanese businessmen, mushroom hunters, pan-American economists, engineers fluid and garden- variety, educators of every stripe. Since June they've been coming in overlapping waves, all to tend to their serious business amongst the undeniable charms of a Hanover summer.

It was the cheerleaders, 60 of them in town in July for a regional clinic, that took hands-down the competition for attention from undergraduates - and rated the only in-depth interview from The Dartmouth. The spanking new make-up cases that replaced six-packs on Gile Hall window- sills and the pep yells that reverberated off ivy-covered walls in the stead of the familiar din of high-decibel stereo were as foreign to the campus as the multi-lingual shop talk drifting away from the ice researchers' coffee breaks under the elms in front of Silsby.

The campus police got quite a start from reports of a prowler skulking amongst the shrubbery under the cheerleaders' windows, but the alleged Peeping Tom turned out to be the hapless clinic director trying to trap the culprit who kept unlocking the dormitory doors he scrupulously secured each night at ten. No parietals there.

The mycologists, 300 strong from every cranny of the continent, arrived for Labor Day Weekend, armed with camera, handbook, and magnifying glass to scour the woods and streambeds for rare mushroom specimens, whether their basic interest was botanical or gustatory. They used college laboratories to analyze their fungi and Hopkins Center to display them at an off-beat art show.

Small groups pondered and played midst the opulence of the Minary Center at Squam Lake; large organizations occupied dormitories and took their meals at Thayer; some elected the air-conditioned comfort of the Hanover Inn. Most meetings, particularly of those technically or financially inclined, were held at the Murdough Center, handy to both Tuck and Thayer Schools, but there was hardly anywhere some group earnestly engaged in discussions of varying profundity could not be found.

The hardiest perennial, the National Association of Credit and Financial Management, met at the College for the 25th time in as many years, drawing 250 credit managers from all over the country. Over 100 distinguished scientists from about a dozen northern countries around the globe gathered, under the sponsorship of the U. S. Cold Regions Research and Engineering Laboratory, to consider common problems of ice jams and navigation, sea ice and its effect on marine life.

High-echelon corporate executives assembled for the month-long refresher course in the liberal arts that is the Dartmouth Institute. For two fine August weeks 263 adults attending Alumni College examined "The Twentieth Century" from several angles, while their offspring frolicked at "Camp Dartmouth."

And the beat goes on, to the tune of more than 2,500 migratory conferees each year. While the numbers recede with summer days, organizations of all persuasions are finding fall foliage and winter snows increasingly attractive backdrops for working sessions. Understandably, the Dartmouth Conference Bureau vacancy sign is most prominently displayed at mud- time - as any alumnus well recalls, the ebb tide of outdoor distractions.