The Sights

It says something about the quality of life in a small town when a crowd of noontime strollers stops to gawk at a student shoveling snow on the lawn of the C & G house or superintend the removal of a filling station sign at the corner of Main and Allen streets. However, it was just about five years ago that a local farmer was fined for spilling part of the contents of his manure wagon on a Hanover thoroughfare. That event, or rather the reaction to it, may have signaled the end of Hanover as honest-to-goodness-small-town. Perhaps

what we have now is Hanover as fas-tidious-suburb-with-gawkers.

For the benefit, then, of reunion comers and Commencement and summertime visitors, here is a stroller's guide to some new sights in Hanover's throbbing commercial district:

Banks. There now are three. To the south, almost on the outskirts of town, we find, in place of the Green Lantern, which is no more, the headquarters of the Hanover Bank & Trust. Looming nearer to the center of things, in the Maginot style, is the bulwark of the Dartmouth National Bank. The bank, the old neoGeorgian bank, is now where the Dartmouth Savings Bank rattles around all by itself.

Bookshops. There now are three. On East South Street, as one heads away from Manchester's Gulf Station, is John Michael's, purveyors of new and used volumes. (Even farther to the east on East South Street, among the pines, is the new Howe Library, a three-star edifice.) On Main Street, opposite the bank, stands the Colonial Book Shoppe, "your family reading center." A short stroll north will take the visitor to the Dartmouth Book Store, fronting on Main Street and expanding by leaps down Allen Street.

Shops and Entertainments. In half of the lobby of the new/old Nugget outlanders will discover Greydon Freeman, suppliers of office equipment. In the other half of the lobby is the lobby of the Nugget, which itself has been split in half. Taking up where the Kleen laundry left off, on Main Street, is Carroll Reed, sporty outfitters. Persistent shoppers may then forage southward back to the Nugget Arcade, adjoining the Nugget and supplanting Edith's old place and some other shops dimly recalled.

Restaurants. There now are at least ten, counting the Hanover Inn, which could be counted as three, as one. Here we leave the wanderer to his own compass, except to note that several of the ten serve strong waters, a former monopoly of the new/old landmark on the Inn corner.

There now also are two travel agencies, the better for speeding travelers to smalltown America . . . wherever it is.

Erwin Hauer, artist-in-residence winter term, sculpts his nudes "to intensify the formaland geometric aspects of the human figure" without sacrificing realism.