Warm Welcome
Every summer on the day after commencement, Buildings and Grounds sends a crew and a cherry picker over to the Hanover sewerage treatment plant to pick up the information booth, a white octagonal gazebo with a pointed roof. They dust it off and truck it over to the east side of the Green, where it sits for 14 weeks, at the end of which (just after Freshman Week), the Hanover Chamber of Commerce sends a truck over to take it back to storage at the sewer plant.
Those 14 weeks are busy ones for Everett Wood '38, who lives in the little white building from nine to five six days a week. (On the seventh, a student assistant takes his place.) This year, for instance, 4,446 cars brought 8,780 visitors to the campus, and Ev Wood greeted them all and answered questions for most of them.
Wood is the second tenant of the booth, which began as a joint College-Chamber of Commerce venture in the early fifties. Bud Weymouth '2O, who spent 22 years answering questions on the Green, was the original Mr. Information. Wood, a recently retired Pan American pilot, signed on last year. He finds the work "exhausting" at times but a lot of fun as well.
In addition to Wood, his thermos, a chair, and a telephone, the booth houses a gold mine of information on the Upper Valley pamphlets for hikers, dining guides, real estate listings, steam train schedules, inn price lists, town maps, and so on. But Wood's Weymouth-trained brain probably contains the greatest amount of useful information in the place. (Shortly after he took the job, says Wood, Weymouth dropped by to check out his pupil. "How high is Baker Tower?" he asked. "A hundred and ninety feet," answered Wood. "Nope," said Weymouth. "A hundred eighty-seven and a half.")
Ninety per cent of the information he is called upon to dispense is routine, says Wood how to find Silsby Hall, where the Medical School is, when the College was founded. He calls the other ten per cent "widely scattered," which is putting it mildly. He has been asked to advise about the best place to train a bird dog, to cite the New Hampshire divorce laws over the telephone to a very angry husband, and to give a weather forecast for the following three days in Ottawa. ("Jeez," said Wood, "a pilot only gets a one-day forecast.") Someone occasionally wants to know where North Wheelock Street is, and it's not unusual for Wood to be asked, "What should I do today?" One of the biggest problems visitors have and pass on to Wood is what to do with the children for the next two hours. Wood admitted that he doesn't have a whole lot of answers for that one."I usually suggest Bartlett Tower," he explained. "It has 88 steps."
Wood is genial and outgoing, and he feels that enthusiasm is an important part of his job: "The big thing is to give people the warmest welcome you can." His genuine interest in people often leads him out of the way to help those who stop at the booth. If a first telephone call doesn't turn up a motel room in the required price range, Wood is apt to invite the whole family into the booth to chat while he sees what else he can dig up. People appreciate it, too: The day we called on him, he offered us a tasty bit of homemade baklava that a Dartmouth parent of Turkish descent had just dropped off in gratitude for Wood's help in locating a room on a crowded football weekend.
While we were licking our honey-sodden fingers, a young man came by and asked where he could find the comptroller. "The comptroller?" asked Wood, quickly sizing up the situation. "Or the bursar? Do you want to pay a bill, perhaps?" "Yes, that's it," said the student. Wood smiled, told him how to get to the bursar, and waved him warmly on his way with assurances that he would be most welcome there. He bid us an even warmer farewell: He insisted that we take the entire pan of baklava home to save us the trouble of making dessert for dinner. That's the kind of welcome you get at the Hanover information booth on the Green.
Everett Wood '38: gold mine of information.
