Worlds Together

Something special

The most overworked word in the Dartmouth lexicon is, of course, "unique." It is a booster's word, but the boosters tend to forget things in the rush of superlatives. Bowdoin happens to be in the woods, too. Beloit operates year-round. Brown has a pretty classy library. William and Mary is beautiful. Princeton has Nassau Hall. Ohio State has larger football players and more microscopes. Sophie Newcomb and Yale have more women. Harvard has more.

So what is unique about Dartmouth? The pictures on these and the following four pages depict a kind of dichotomy - lumberjacks (male and female) on the one hand and artists and actors and dancers (male and female) on the other - that represents something special about this place. Possibly (extreme caution here) even unique.

The axe throwers, sawyers, and log. rollers were active on the Green in late April during the 31st annual intercollegiate woodsmen's weekend. The late Ross McKenney, woodcraft adviser to the D.O.C., started the tournament in 1947 to teach outdoor skills through competition. As recorded by photographers Nancy Wasserman and Jim Lundell, woodsmen's weekend is a time of sweat and muscle and finesse. Finesse comes in handy with doublebitted axes. The Dartmouth men came in second (to Maine), the women came in second (to Colby College of Maine).

The woodsmen-cum-women tell a lot about Dartmouth: brawn, the outdoor life, granite of New Hampshire in their muscles and their brains. But in Hopkins Center, as elsewhere on the campus, there co-exists another state of mind, sometimes quietly reflective, sometimes as intense, as competitive, as sweaty as the world of the chubber. Taken three years ago, John Perry's photographs of Hopkins Center tell a lot about another side of Dartmouth.

Yet the worlds pictured here tend to be complementary - not a real dichotomy - and that is why the linebacker takes ballet, why the sculptor goes fly-fishing. Is this what sets Dartmouth apart?