Man of a Thousand Hats (more or less)
A lot of people wear several hats at Dartmouth, but there are few who can claim to have worn as many as Hutch.
The man who drives the shiny new Zamboni machine in Thompson Arena has worn women's hats, Mickey Mouse hats, African bush hats, ski hats, firemen's hats, and painters' hats, and like society dames of the last century, he hardly ever wears them more than once.
Each time the big white arena doors swing open and the Zamboni HDB model begins its ten-minute ice cleaning ritual between periods, the hockey crowd watches Hutch's hat change. "Hutch is part of the hockey scene here and his hat-changing routine is a part of going to a hockey game at Dartmouth," says assistant hockey coach Jeff Kosak '71.
The hat trick started several years ago when Nick Pelton, who still works on the DCAC grounds crew, drove the Zamboni. The students in the crowd started to take his hat off and put a new one on as he motored around the boards of Davis Rink. "Now," Hutch says, "it's become a nightly thing."
Hutch is a showman, and he works the crowd as well as a Judy Garland. He made his rounds in a tuxedo one Winter Carnival and wore a big floppy hat for the opening of Thompson Arena early this winter. And despite the number of times his hat changes each evening, he's never failed to drive the Zamboni off the ice without his own hat, a "big apple" fedora.
"The students used to hand me beers as I went around, and once I got a cocktail," Hutch says. But navigating a Zamboni, which has four-wheel drive and a Volkswagen engine, isn't easy, and Hutch doesn't have time to down a beer or sip a vodka gimlet as he glides around the arena. "You've got to worry about lots of things like how much water to put on and how much ice to take off. And you have to worry about running into walls." Hutch hasn't had an accident (yet). He's also managed to avoid traffic tickets.
When he's not driving the Zamboni and modeling hats, Hutch is the DCAC grounds supervisor, responsible for cleaning and maintaining all of Dartmouth's athletic facilities. He's a fixture at Alumni Gymnasium, and you might say he was midwife to Thompson Arena, where he now makes the ice, paints the lines, supervises the cleaning and repairs, sharpens skates, and oversees the arena's conversion from hockey rink to basketball court.
Hutch's dedication runs deep. He wouldn't let anyone talk him out of working from 7:30 one morning to 4:00 in the afternoon the next day before the arena first opened. "I got hell from everybody," he says. "They kept asking me, 'When the hell are you gonna get outta here?' And I said, 'When we get the ice finished.' Nobody told me I had to do it. I just wanted to make sure it got done."
By his own assessment he spends most of his day "running around like a madman," and those who know him and the crew that works with him wouldn't disagree. That's the fun of the job, he says. "I like my job, and I like the people I work with and the students. But I'm fussy and the crew I work with does a real good job."
Hutch is also impressed with the student work force responsible for the Thompson Arena conversion before basketball games. It takes the 20 students about two hours to complete the conversion, about an hour less than at Boston Garden. "Our fastest time is an hour and three-quarters, and that's a credit to the guys on the crew," he says.
When Hutch left the Navy in the late '50s, he went to work at Tanzi's, the Main Street landmark owned by Charles Tanzi, Hutch's brother-in-law. The legend is that Tanzi's was for some time the East's largest beer distributor; Hutch thus had much contact with Dartmouth students in his years there. He signed on with the DCAC when Tanzi's closed.
"The students were always in Tanzi's and I liked being around them," he recalls. "I like it now. It's a good life. I like sports and I like the things that happen around the College."
A former forward on the Hanover High School hockey team, Hutch is impressed with this year's Dartmouth team, a young squad that's had a surprising amount of success this winter. "This team's got a really good attitude, and one reason is Thompson Arena. They've got beautiful locker rooms and things are shiny."
There's one more thing. Mister Zamboni Man, with his plaid pants, a pocketful of ball point pens and somewhat incongruous metal frame glasses, has a real name. It's Richard W. Hutchins and, as Jeff Kosak says, "There isn't a handful of people in the whole College who know his full name the guy who writes out his check, his wife (who works at WDCR), and maybe two or three others."
No matter. No one ever referred to them as Orenthal James or Yelberton Abraham either.
