1921

A French Avis or Hertz and urban pollution? Jamais de la vie. This is the story about country lanes around Avignon, France, and about a horse, French, with Gallic sensibilities. His English is slight, but when Caroline Steiner directed him about the way, he was goodhumored, if wayward, with his neigh-neigh. Better than she, the American Vermonter and driver of a hired wagonette with another woman to go exploring for two weeks, he knew the byroads around Avignon. Caroline Neilson Steiner loves dramatic situations. The daughter of the former president of Smith College who was also a Shakespeare scholar, she has played the bawdy-tongued nurse in that swashbuckling and star-crossed-lovers' drama, Romeo andJuliet. The stage was the Dartmouth College Bema, outdoors. Earlier indoors in Thetford, she was the lonely woman in the World War I play by J. M. Barrie, The Old Lady Shows HerMedals.

Albert, the actor and son of Em and OliveCorbin, has had a long run in Shakespearean productions at the Folger Library, and the question now is whether he is to continue there or move to the American Shakespeare theatre in Washington.

You had better believe it. Doug Storer wears out a typewriter a year. His latest book is SportsAround the World. No sense in your boasting about your hole-in-one. Doug stuns you with a golf ball that "bounced" off a lily pad to become the greatest shot in golfing history. He was recently invited to Toronto to talk with the Toronto Star about producing a television series and republishing in paperback the 17 hardcover books of Renfew of the Royal Mounted. If the deal goes through, Renfew will become again a top program for kids.

Werner Janssen still commands a favorable press. Shown a while back in New York, TheGeneral Died at Dawn (1930), with Gary Cooper, Madeline Carroll, and Akim Tamiroff, has "an interesting musical score by Werner Janssen." He also wrote the score for the recently revived The Southerner, "a masterpiece" directed by the Frenchman Renoir.

Blair Watson continues to educate Dartmouth students through the film program initiated by Ort Hicks. The summer program, "The Sexes in Cinema," looked at man-woman relations from heart-throb romances to the search for a new understanding of the competitive positions of men and women. Vocally appreciative, the undergraduates are amazingly well-behaved, largely because Blair controls them by a velvet glove with an iron inside.

In College Harry Chamberlaine as center helped the basketball team win 13 games. His most brilliant memory is Harvard, February 20, 1921. The score: Harvard 15 and Dartmouth 51, the highest of the entire season for all games and all competitors. Don't expect Harry to care much any more for elevated baskets. He is now mad about grounded nets and about soccer, for his grandson Kent Pierce, co-captain of the Dartmouth team, was largely,responsible for the overtime win, 3-2, against Princeton. To keep himself in shape scholastically, Kent has moved out of a dorm into a private apartment. "Hohum," says grandpa with a raised eyebrow.

The Class is welcoming a new wife. GordonMerriam, who some time ago lost Roberta, the sister of Ellis Briggs, is now remarried, to MaryBean Smith, a New Hampshire woman by origin, the widow of Edmund Ware Smith, an author who based his writing, mostly fiction, on the lakes and mountain country of northern Maine. She had been living in the neighborhood of Damariscotta with a widowed sister. Gordon and Mary have much in common: gardening, music, canoeing, hiking, and Lucy Briggs, whom they visited in Hanover over the Dartmouth-Cornell weekend.

Jeff and Fran Lawrence are proud of their beautiful house, "The Hearthstone," in Mount Vernon, N.H., built in 1765 by James Woodbury, grandfather of Levi Woodbury (1789-1851), lawyer, governor of New Hampshire, U.S. senator, secretary of the treasury, and associate justice of the Supreme Court (1845-51). Jeffs sense of the past is realistically heightened by the local cemetery, of which he was once a trustee. Now that others have taken over, he gives them a hand in laying graves for present trustees.

With an enviable reputation for accuracy, readability, and good taste, Dan Ruggles, "Smoker" editor, has been a Rock of Gibraltar unaffected by querulous, if not irascible, alumni currents. So he seemed also as resident of Swampscott for the past 22 years. But the rockbasis estate on which Dan and Tish have lived so long is now proving sandy. It is now being developed into single homes, each too large for the Ruggleses, whose sons have all grown up. Still North Shore, however, Dan and Tish, shifting rocks, may now be addressed at Beverly Commons, Beverly.

Box 925 Hanover, N.H. 03755