Zero As An Answer
Dartmouth does a thorough job of keeping tabs on the family: Only about 2,000 of the College's 40,000 alumni have lost themselves so completely that the Alumni Records Office has lost track of them. As far back as anyone can remember, in fact, only two students John J. Dailey '53 and William B. Friedman '58 have vanished completely and permanently from the campus. They both disappeared in 1954 and their fates and whereabouts are still a mystery.
Friedman, the son of a Longmeadow, Mass., lawyer, had been an honor student at Classical High School where he had played varsity basketball, golf, and tennis. As a freshman he lived alone in 209 Gile Hall. Although his family said he was happy at Dartmouth, something must have gone wrong. By the middle of his first term he was in danger of failing three subjects. He started spending long hours often an entire day reading in the Tower Room of Baker Library. Noticing that he had apparently stopped attending classes, one of the librarians shared her concern with the dean of freshmen, Stearns Morse, who in turn wrote to Friedman requesting that he come in for a conference. After ten days went by without a response from Friedman, Morse wrote a second, more urgent letter. It wasn't until a couple of days later, when the campus police were sent to check Friedman's room, that anyone knew he was gone. A pile of mail, including the two letters from the dean, was found unopened on the floor.
That was the same day that Friedman's parents, who had been trying to reach him for several days by telephone, notified the local police. Their son had disappeared on November 7 or November 9 the newspaper accounts differ. His sister, a junior at Smith, had been up for a weekend visit to Hanover and had last seen him on the seventh. (He had looked tired, she said later.) That same evening he kept a date with the daughter of a faculty member. Whenever he left, he took no extra clothing and no money from his checking account. No one noticed he was missing for almost two weeks.
An intensive search was immediately launched. Members of the Outing Club and the Hanover police searched the woods around the campus while members of the Civil Air Patrol flew up and down the river looking for a body. Soon the search was extended to the entire Northeast, descriptions were sent out to towns across the country, the F.8.1, was called in, and Friedman's name and picture were put on a national missing-persons list. There wasn't a clue until 1956 when a Massachusetts man claimed to have seen Friedman in a Boston bar. That lead came to nothing; police determined the incident was a case of mistaken identity. That same year Friedman's parents supposedly received a postcard from their son, postmarked in Italy. Their trip to find him was totally unsuccessful. The last entry in Friedman's file in the Alumni Records Office is a short newspaper clipping, dated 1966, noting that his mother, who reportedly had not heard from him in the ten years since his disappearance, had disinherited him in her will.
While Friedman's file is full of newspaper clippings about his disappearance, his parents' efforts to find him, and about their charges that the College had been negligent in looking after him, the file of John J. Dailey '53, who disappeared January 8, 1954, is sadly thin. Dailey, then a Dartmouth Medical School student, came to Dartmouth from Baltimore in 1949 on an Ernest Martin Hopkins scholarship for sons of alumni who had died in the service during the war. His father. Col. Michael Andrews Dailey 'O4, was an Army surgeon. There is a picture in the December 1949 ALUMNI MAGAZINE of John Dailey as a toddler, taken at his father's class reunion in 1934.
In his application for admission, Dailey wrote about his admiration for his late father land his desire to begin a career in medicine. He listed amateur radio as his only extracurricular interest or activity. As a medical student, Dailey lived in the North Park Street home of Dr. John Schleicher. After he was noticed missing, his wallet, identification cards, labels torn from his clothing, a small amount of cash, a $450 check made out to his mother, and a note offering his ham radio equipment to another student were fpund in his room. According to one report, Dailey had been depressed, unhappy at medical school, and allegedly committed suicide by hanging himself in a remote forest area where his body was discovered a couple of years later. There is no official record, however, that the body was ever found. A former Hanover policeman, who helped investigate the disappearances of both young men, recently confirmed the fact that neither case was ever solved.
A classmate of Dailey's, Jim Wheaton, wrote a long letter to the '53 newsletter shortly after the class's 25th reunion in 1978. He mentioned how his friend Dailey had been somewhat of a loner, recollected some of the good times the two had shared, and speculated about whether Dailey was laboring unhappily under a sense of duty to his father in trying to become a doctor. Wheaton quoted a letter from Dailey, written a couple of years before he disappeared, that concluded, "Pardon me for being so philosophic but tomorrow I will have been in the world for 21 years. I have been trying to figure out its effect on me and mine on it and have come to zero as an answer in both cases."
"Perhaps the hand of friendship, extended unsolicited to the Jack Dailey's of any class," Wheaton suggested, "may make the difference between a useful life and tragic, wasteful death."
