The Dinan Decade

The issue of October 1973, the first after Charlie Widmayer's retirement as editor, carried at the end of the "College" section a modest disclaimer: "The new kid usually comes into town with flamboyant plans for change. So, being the new kid, we thought it wise to look over the ALUMNI MAGAZINE for 1943 - Charlie Widmayer's first year as editor only to discover that most of those grandiose schemes had already been tried and, in some cases, discarded as old hat. So, feeling somewhat daunted, we changed the type on the cover."

The new kid was Dennis Allen Dinan '61, and the changes, if subtle, were more extensive than he made out. His first cover a stark photograph of an army helmet wearing a mortarboard signalled a new editorial stance for a new era. The lead story in that issue was a piece on the controversy over R.O.T.C. at Dartmouth, and as such it heralded for the College a decade of difficult and often polarizing issues, among them coeducation, the Indian symbol, blacks at Dartmouth, and the conservative student press. Dinan chose to meet head-on the journalistic challenges of covering them, and he was never to flinch from what he saw as that important responsibility.

The look of that first issue was new, too. The Dinan magazine was to be designed with a striking simplicity that often rose to elegance. The traditional format of the Magazine was retained, but the graphics were altered: type faces were changed, titles got larger, photographs were blown up, and generous pools of white space appeared in the Magazine. Something had to give, of course, and Dinan describes what he dropped as "the trivia from the administrative boiler-plate the endless recapitulation of administrative appointments at all levels."

Despite six years' experience as a writer and editor for American Heritage in New York City, Dinan found his first months at the Magazine unsettling. He had taken the editorship, he remembers, "because Charlie had made it such an appealing job. If Charlie had put out a dopey magazine, I wouldn't have wanted it." But the baton was not so much passed as it was gracefully abandoned: "Charlie Widmayer took me to lunch at the Inn and then quietly slipped away," explains Dinan. "The class notes editor and the associate editor held my hand for a while and told me what to do. In six months, the panic became manageable."

His goal, Dinan says, was always "to put out a readable magazine, something people could trust and enjoy." As to whether he found the work fulfilling, Dinan hesitates. "Half the time, it was anxiety-ridden, nervewracking, scary, frustrating, and awful. The rest of the time it was fun." He smiles. "I remember the goddamn dogs running in and out of the Office in old Crosby, and the student writers coming in to talk for hours on end, and finding them both asleep on my office couch. The students were a great satisfaction for us all. They were all such good, enjoyable people, so bright so stuffy when they wrote the 'Undergraduate Chair,' and so unstuffy in person."

The good things, recalls Dinan, were "the unexpected things, the surprises the superb piece that came in unsolicited from some amateur writer, or the things from the staff that turned out perfectly. One of the most enjoyable parts of the job was that my time saw the rise of all of those subversive ideas women, Indians, blacks, year-round operation, Bakke, Watergate. It wasn't always fun, but it was interesting to grapple with those events and ideas and to have them grappled with in the Magazine."

Dinan describes his editorial perspecfive with the candor that characterizes both his writing and his editing: "Most editors will admit that they edit their magazines for themselves. And if their tastes are universal enough, the magazines will be appealing to a lot of people. That does not necessarily mean that an editor likes everything that goes in. I certainly didn't like everything that went into the DARTMOUTH ALUMNI MAGAZINE when I was editor."

It was important, he explains, to understand how the Dartmouth magazine differed from the other Ivy League magazines. "Dartmouth's magazine has always emphasized class notes vastly more than the others have; and every boy editor who comes to the Magazine says to himself, 'The first thing I'll do is cut out all this class notes garbage.' But, with maturity, he comes to realize that it is just that that makes the Magazine different. It's its strength, and he comes to see that there is no reason you can't do both class notes and serious feature articles and do them both well."

Thinking about the other Ivy League magazines leads Dinan to comment that although the DARTMOUTH ALUMNI MAGAZINE was often accused during his tenure of being radical, "we were, in fact, the stodgiest of the lot." He confesses that to some extent he consciously held back in designing the Magazine and that others in the league were "more vibrant graphically.' Recalling, too, the time that the Pennsylvania Gazette ran an article featuring photographs of nudes, he points out with a chuckle that if the DARTMOUTH ALUMNI MAGAZINE had ever done anything like that, the letters would still be coming in. "And we never wrote the true story about the medical school's finances, either," he says. "We were always strongly self-disciplined, in spite of what some of our colleagues thought. There's a difference between editing a magazine for a big urban university and editing one for this tight little island' up here, and you have to respect it."

Summing up the experience of a decade as editor of the DARTMOUTH ALUMNI MAGAZINE, Dinan measures his performance against his ideals: "Was I happy with the magazine I put out? No. That's part of putting out a magazine. You're never happy with it because it's never as good as you want it to be. It's like designing a new car every month there is always too little time to get it right, and you tinker a lot." He broods a bit. "And half the time the tinkering makes it worse." Then his face brightens and he cites one quality that clearly sets the Dartmouth Magazine apart from all others: "The DARTMOUTH ALUMNI MAGAZINE in Charlie Widmayer's time and for the last ten years as well has been the only alumni magazine in the country to make a profit."