75 and Counting

We're celebrating our 75th Anniversary this month, and of all the alumni magazines still in business at American colleges and universities, that puts us among the ten oldest. Just how old some of the others are is a bit tougher to determine than one might suspect. At the University of Pennsylvania, for example, under the masthead of its alumni magazine, ThePennsylvania Gazette, appears the following: "Published by Benjamin Franklin from 1729 to 1748." Now wait a while! They must have picked that one up from the old Saturday Evening Post, which along with life insurance, bi-focals, and the Franklin Stove, gentle Ben seems to have had a hand in. Yet if memory serves me well, Penn, founded 29 years before Eleazar established his outpost on the eastern bank of the Connecticut, was an academy long before it became a full-fledged university complete with alumni body. And furthermore, I'm sure that Dr. Franklin wasn't contemplating class notes and football scores as regular fare for his periodical.

This quibble notwithstanding, we're in good company as one of the nation's oldest alumni periodicals with the likes of Harvard, Princeton, and Brown. In the course of its 75-year history, the DARTMOUTH ALUMNI MAGAZINE has had but eight editors, the first of whom was Ernest Martin Hopkins, a man who, like Franklin, had enough sense to get out of the publishing racket while he was still a fairly young man. After all, deadlines and disgruntled advertisers have a way of causing prematurely gray hair and ulcers.

Hoppy's magazine, originally called TheDartmouth Bi-Monthly, was from its beginnings in 1905 a very substantial publication "Printed for the Alumni, at Hanover, N.H." (It didn't become the DARTMOUTH ALUMNI MAGAZINE until 1908.) The frontispiece of Vol. 1, No. 1 of the Bi-Monthly featured a black and white photograph of the College's brand new dorm, Wheeler Hall, articles on "Sanitation at Dartmouth," "Japan and Korea," a profile of Prof. Charles Augustus Young, and a letter from President William Jewett Tucker outlining in scant detail the magazine's purpose: to "present the opinion of graduates in reference to College affairs, and also afford the means of setting forth informally . . . the policy of the Administration of the College." In its 50 pages was a notice of the 11th Dartmouth Night celebration, a summary of the football team's exploits (for the record, the 1905 Big Green eleven fared considerably better against Holy Cross than this year's entry), and brief notes from several alumni clubs. Most conspicuously absent from the predecessor of today's MAGAZINE was an extensive Class Notes section. It took a long time for them to evolve into what they are today (hats off to our tireless Class Secretaries), but even by the second issue of the Bi-Monthly, Alumni Notes had become an integral part of that magazine.

In honor of the MAGAZINE'S 75th, President McLaughlin hosted a dinner at the Inn, the staff arranged historical exhibitions in the Hopkins Center and the History Room at Baker Library, and the MAGAZINE threw its own cocktail party at the DOC House. And, as the following pages reveal, for this special issue, we tapped the resources of a number of former ALUMNI MAGAZINE staffers for contributions. What ho! On to 100.