Fairy Godfathers

Toward evening, the sky turns pearl gray. The first flakes drift through the elms. The flakes get bigger. When two inches are down, there is a lull. Romantics grab their skis and head out to the golf course for a nighttime cross-country romp. By nine they are back inside, cradling hot mugs before blazing fireplaces. By two, they are snug in their beds and the ground is higher by four white inches. By half past four, things have begun to disappear under eight or ten inches.

That's when the people at the heating plant call Bernard Godfrey, Dartmouth's grounds foreman. Godfrey rounds up his crew of 13, and they gather in the basement of Hallgarten Hall and start revving things up. The 35-horse tractor gets a V-blade and leads off, breaking things out. The cab blowers and the hand blowers come behind, redistributing the landscape and lowering the sidewalks.

Four or five hours later, it's time for handwork. Machines are traded for shovels, scrapers, and chippers, and the crew fans out. One covers Mass Row from College Hall to Silsby, another heads for Baker Library, one tackles Murdough Center, one unlucky soul draws the Medical School complex, and so it goes. Leverone, Thompson Arena, Kiewit, the Choates, the apartment houses owned by the College they've all got their assigned fairy godfathers, who work feverishly through the early hours to get the campus open before students and staff hit the walks and pack the snow into backbreaking sheets of ice.

Sanding comes next. Off the tractor comes the blade and on goes the three-foot Epoch sander. An operator takes the rig around back to a heated equipment shed where the sand is kept warm so it doesn't freeze onto the sander and gum up the works. The Epoch deposits little diamondshaped patches of gray sand along the plowed and blown walks. Before it gets traveled over, a freshly sanded walk looks like nothing so much as the spore of a lowslung bulldog on its way home from an ashpit caper. Close to buildings and on big step areas, sanding has to be done by hand from buckets filled from 30-gallon drums set up in each building for the winter.

"Only thing is," says Godfrey, "you put on a lot of sand, you have to clean it up in the springtime." It's part of Godfrey's job to think year round, and, in fact, he says that his winter headaches are comparatively few: "Come back in the spring," he told us, "if you really want an article."

His main goal in the winter is getting the sidewalks as bare as possible. (Really big areas, drives and parking lots, are not Godfrey's bailiwick. They are handled out of the labor department, which contracts a few of the biggest out to Trumbull-Nelson's mammoth plows.) But the sidewalks are only part of the grounds crew's winter work. After every snowstorm, four workers spend half a day on the fire escapes, pounding the metal with the back ends of little hatchets. "It breaks the ice off," explained Godfrey. "Kind of an odd way of doing it, perhaps, but it works." There's also falling roof ice to contend with:"The chapel is a really bad spot for that. On both sides, ice slides off, drops right in front of an exit door. It builds up there, tons and tons of it. No man can shovel it out, so we have to go down with the tractor and buck it out."

Eave drip calls for salt (though Godfrey hastened to add that salting compound is used only sparingly on campus), and patios and flat roofs must be shoveled from time to time. Not to mention maintenance and repair work.

Godfrey and his crew take particular pride in their management of the president's house: 'We try to use the blowers there all we can. We don't like to tear up the lawn with the blades. Up until this year, we couldn't get in there much before eight or nine. But the new president likes to get up early, so we can go any time and get it cleaned up so he doesn't have to walk in the snow when he goes from his place to Parkhurst." ("He's an early bird," Godfrey emphasized, with perhaps a little pride of kinship. "He gets in there by seven o'clock, and his house is first on the agenda this year.")

Godfrey also spoke of the days before there were any machines. "I've heard Joe Cloud he was here before I was, 43 years tell about how most of the guys just took off with shovels on their backs. I've heard Joe tell about going across campus, you know, making a path, just shoveling as he went, opening paths to the buildings." Then he added, only a little defensively, "Of course, I don't think they had so many paths then as we do now"'

A declining folk art: clearing a pathin front of Baker Library 15 years ago.