Dart-myth

MY FAVORITE scene in the movie Winter Carnival takes place at the Hanover-Norwich train station. The setting is a lot like the train stop at Anatevka in Fiddler on the Roof until the Dartmouth Carnival Special rolls in and spews out hundreds of Vassar women and Philadelphia debs dressed in silver fox jackets and carrying Mark Cross luggage. One young thing emerges out of the crowd of anxious Carnival dates and awkwardly polite Dartmouth students, looks across the fields of snow and sleighs and sighs, "So this is Dartmouth."

No, that's not Dartmouth, and neither are all the other notions sufficient to produce a mythology rivaling Bulfinch. I've told Europeans that Dartmouth's not only a small coastal town in Devonshire, England, and I've told Canadians that Dartmouth's not necessarily a shipbuilding town in Nova Scotia. I've meekly told a freshman's father that Dartmouth doesn't rhyme with "hearth myth" and for years I've wanted to tell a government professor it doesn't rhyme with "south" either.

Nonetheless, Dartmouth seems destined to be fodder for the myth-mongers. It's the college Playboy disqualified from its national ranking of beer drinking schools (too professional, the editors said), it's the place O. J. Simpson really wanted to go after City College of San Francisco, and it's the seat of learning that once admitted 100 high school football captains in a class of 800 - or so the stories go.

But myths are usually more pleasant than reality and often will serve for reality. It's no longer worth the trouble to try to convince a friend at Syracuse University that Dartmouth isn't a monastery, and I've got better things to do than argue with a Harvard friend that the College is indeed more than a year-round camp for men over six feet tall and women with charge plates at L. L. Bean's. I've told the story about the burning of Dartmouth Hall so often and with so many variations that even I'm not sure it really happened and, if it did, in what century the great conflagration occurred. I've heard three variations on how President Hopkins persuaded George F. Baker to donate the money for Dartmouth's Georgian library.

I first became aware of the proliferation of Dartmouth myths when I invited a girl from Montreal to Winter Carnival. She didn't spend "the nation's most famous college weekend" in Hanover because herparents wouldn't let her. (Yes, of course, that is what mothers and fathers are for.) I told the story to Dean Ralph Manuel and assured him that my intended date wasn't a stripling of 15 but a worldly junior from McGill. The dean smiled with the look of someone who had heard that kind of story before - probably in 1955, when he was a Dartmouth freshman.

"There are two simple explanations," said the dean. "Either her father went to Dartmouth and wouldn't ever let a daughter of his come to Carnival or her mother once spent a weekend here."

There are so many stories and myths that circulate around and about Dartmouth that anyone who tries to strike a serious note seems as ridiculous as, say, a bunch of alumni opting for Constant Comment the recent comments of William Loeb, publisher of the Manchester UnionLeader, were the funniest things to come up Route 89 since the circus.

On the front page of his alleged newspaper, which caters more to the spleen than to the mind, Loeb blasted the "closed contaminated minds at Dartmouth" and charged that the reception afforded Presidential candidate Ronald Reagan in early February "vividly illustrated the IGNORANCE, STUPIDITY, and PAROCHIALISM of Dartmouth students." It seems that Loeb thought the "stupid, bigoted little pampered Ivy League products" and the "brainwashed little white nincompoops" themselves preferred the myths about life in South Africa to the realities.

Whether Loeb is right that South African blacks in his words, "HATE THE GUTS OF EVERY WHITE," doesn't concern me here. Nor is it important whether Loeb is right that Dartmouth students are "pious little hypocrites." Even if Loeb did stumble into the trap that's caught many a newspaperman before - not letting a fact stand in the way of a good story - he's now become part of the Dart- mouth folklore, as much as the story about Bartlett Tower and the looting of boxcars full of beer one spring in Fairlee, Vermont.

Dean Carroll Brewster used to say that Dartmouth was a college of beautiful songs. There's no question he's right, but I'd like to suggest a new sobriquet for Dartmouth - it is a College of stories, stories about the days of Webster and Rockefeller, stories about the time the students put cows in the basement of Dartmouth Hall, stories about students being fined for attending dancing school, and stories about the Senior Fence and the men who used to sit there.

I've heard so many myths about Dartmouth and about her sons that I myself have been playing with a story I recently overheard. Dartmouth, you see, isn't really a private college, and it wasn't founded in 1769 by Eleazar Wheelock or by anyone else. It's a large community college that was built in 1966 with old bricks and in a town that was moved from a back lot of Hollywood. And a bunch of the sharpest Madison Avenue public relations minds all Ivy League graduates, of course assembled and made up stories for the students to tell.

I can hear them now: "Do you suppose," asks one, "anyone would ever believe something about a Supreme Court case?" Another nods tentatively and replies, "I suppose so - if we call the place Hearth Myth College."

"... indeed more than a year-round camp formen over six feet tall and women with chargeplates at L. L. Bean's..."