Chronicling the DOC

History project nears completion

The history of the Dartmouth Outing Club, 75 years old this December, has seen scores of adventures which seemed crazy at first but became ultimately fulfilling. One such odyssey is coming to an end this month. If all goes as planned, January should see a completed rough draft of a full size DOC history, begun the summer of 1983.

The last time that anyone completed a full-blown history of the DOC was in 1937 when Bill Rotch '37 wrote his English thesis on the subject. Since then there have been a number of attempts George Kain III '73 told the poignant tale of how he had attempted to write a history of the DOC for an English 20 paper, of how this was reduced to a mere history of the Cabin and Trail division of the Club, and how this was cut back ultimately to "Cabin and Trail: The First 10 Years" and was still a monster for all that. In 1979 Mark Winkler '79 suggested the idea of a history of the Club for the 75th Anniversary. However, he moved away from Hanover and was unable to continue to support the idea. So the project languished through a succes sion of DOC student historians, who were unable to make much headway on the project, given the usual student time constraints, the mountains of material available, and no clear picture of what the book should be.

However, Sarah Strauss '84, who championed the 75th Anniversary idea during most of 1983, made a request in many alumni newsletters for historical recollections of former DOC members. One response to this was from Arthur H. Lord 'l0, who wrote: . . In The College on the Hill by Ralph Nading Hill, he says on page 280, 'lt is said that the only skis in Hanover in 1911, eight and a half feet long and five and a half inches wide, . . . belonged to Fred Harris.' I can't imagine why he said such a statement which is obviously wrong. I grew up in Hanover and I well remember that about 1900, my brother Fred, D. (1898), and 'Rastus' Wilder had skis about that size and made in Hanover and I think they were some of the very earliest skiers in the town. Two or three years later I inherited my brother's skis and began to learn to use them in our back yard, then on the hills of the Dewey pasture to the west of Potash Hill Road, and on the golf links ....

"I kept a diary in college days and looking back at it to see what happened, I find these entries. Feb. 26, Sat., 1910. Winter meet this p.m., very successful, big crowd out. Good jumping by [A.T.]Cobb and Harris. 100 and 220 yd. races on skis and snowshoes were funny. I got 3rd in 220. Cobb got Ist in everything. . . Harris' knee was sprained. [The Class of] 1912 won snowshoe relay race. In Cross country, Cobb did it in 23 minutes, I was third in 28. It was hard running and slow. We had a great time . . .

Though this letter raised a fair amount of interest at the time, it was soon evident that a few letters do not a DOC history make, and this letter was destined to sit with sev- eral others in a folder for nearly a year. It was at that point that Berrtie Waugh '74 took interest in the project and was able to persuade the DOC that a full-time internship was going to be needed if this project was ever going to be finished. In short, I was hired as intern with funds from the Friends of DOC; Bernie has continued as supervisor.

The history will be a large collection of stories and other memorabilia, tied together with a narrative line. This format presents two types of problems first, how to make sure that the work is well-enough organized so that no important events or people are left out, and second, how to collect the material. The first problem meant a significant amount of crank and grind research. A mesmerising prospect. There are something like 72 shelf feet of DOC archives in the library and I had a constant struggle to avoid being sucked into reading this often fascinating stuff without taking notes or keeping the final product clearly in mind. Fortunately I was able to avoid much of the temptation by using the various DOC periodicals that have come and gone over the years bulletins, Dartmouth Out O Dodrs, Trail Blazer, Outdoorsman, Woodsmoke, and annual reports. The best source turned out to be, of all things, The Aegis. Almost every year until the mid-70s, The Aegis had several written pages devoted to the events of the Outing Club of the past year. For making this material available to me, I must thank Bob Averill '72. He photocopied every Aegis page concerning the Outing Club since the founding, making a four volume bound set of some 750 pages.

Getting anecdotal materials the other half of the equation was a lot more fun. An initial letter was sent by Bernie to the Friends of the DOC asking for their stories or other memories. I sent letters to everyone who responded to this initial plea, and the response to those letters has been close to 85 percent. The yield has been 30 interviews and well over 150 letters and documents of other kinds. As may be imagined, cataloging that material was no simple proposition. Alumni X's typical dissertation on his undergraduate career usually ranged all over the DOC, from Moosilauke to canoe trips to skiing or what have you. So a complex system had to be devised to separate all the topics in the documents, and a fair amount of time went into that effort. The catalog now has well over 300 subject headings.

The real gems of DOC lore came out in my personal interviews with prominent Outing Club members. Nearly all of the interviews were taped and many of those have since been transcribed, forming a great permanent record of this enterprise. There was high enthusiasm about the whole project, stories that had yearned to be told for years. Bearing in mind the Ross

McKenney comment, "The best stories you have to sweat to get/' I was unsure how much people would loosen up in an interview. I need not have worried. Will Brown '37's Great Canoe Smuggling fiasco, John Rand '38's story of the club in the '38 Hurricane, and the history of Al Merrill and the Moosilauke Ravine Lodge are among the many that came out on tape. There were other interviews that simply led to lists of "connections." There was one with Dr. Ed Wells '39 which resulted in a list of some 50 names and other references some of which I still haven't followed up!

Some of the personalities came out too Sherm Adams '20 was probably the most memorable. I arrived at Loon Mountain Ski area, where Sherm is still one of the top men, on one of the lousiest days of the fall. A raging snowstorm on the drive over was turning to pouring rain mixed with sleet it was classic hypothermia weather. His office is a corner room in the main building with a commanding view of the mountain and the parking lot, and his chair was situated so that he could see all the traffic coming and going. He said that he was waiting for his mail to arrive and that I should excuse him when it came but in light of the four secretaries I passed on my way in, I guessed his involvement with the mail would be minimal. Thus I was rather surprised when, in the middle of a very interesting discus

sion, he glanced out the window and said, "There's my mail," and got up, put on his big Hudson Bay jacket, and walked out past all those secretaries through that slop weather to the mail truck, got the mail, brought it back in, dropped it on the desk and began sorting it. A secretary did come bustling in and began taking notes but she seemed rather forlornly unnecessary in that room. Finally realizing there was nothing unusual about this, I launched back into the discussion, which proved to be one of the most fruitful I had in the whole course of the project.

There was also the interview with John McCrillis '19, who paused in the middle of oar talk to take me to the kitchen to show me his college skis. They were Northlands, of course, with Huitfeld bindings and leather boots all apparently still functional. On the wall was a picture of Sherm Adams, skiing with him on the occasion of Adams' 80th birthday.

The project has brought people together who had in many cases not seen each other for years. Farmer Kirkham '33 and Warren Braley '33 corresponded extensively to recollect the construction of Jobildunc Cabin in the upper Ravine and the building of Hell's Highway ski trail, both on Moosilauke. They also collaborated on the description of a memorable trip to Colorado and Mexico in the summer of 1932. The best moment for this sort of historical reunion had to be the 75th Anniversary Barbecue and Banquet in May. I sigh when I think about it though, because if I had had some device to record the whole conversational hubbub and separate all those conversations later the story-gathering phase of this work would have been over, then and there.

Writing began this past summer. To date I have a large "Trips and Expeditions" chapter complete in very rough form and am working on a chapter entitled "The DOC in Service," which will cover some of the club's emergency service record rescues, firefighting, and a wide range of other efforts in which the club gained respect through its dependability when the going got bad. Thus this chapter .will be in large part about the club's top safety advocate and unsung hero of forty years, John Rand '38.

When finally completed, the book will have 9 chapters and will span the entire club, from skiing to birdwatching, from Moosilauke and the Grant to Vermont via cabins and trails, from Fred Harris to Brian Kunz, the new Coordinator of Outdoor Education.

Bernie's help with this project has been critical. Not only did he get it off the ground in the first place; he has remained a constant pressure for forward motion. Anyone who has ever finished a large research effort knows what a blessing that is! This and certain key suggestions, not to mention endless good will all donated free of charge were the essential ingredients in this vast brew.

I have suffered many good natured jibes from my friends about the longevity of this undertaking. Only three months into the project, I started regularly getting the "Still working on the history project?" and "How long are you planning to drag this out for?" questions. Particularly galling are the "living history" questions the idea being that if I spin this out long enough, so much history will have occurred in the interim that it, too, will have to be written, a process which could go on ad infinitum. But they have a point, of sorts. As a result of my procrastination, the Trips and Expeditions chapter of the book ends with a description of the 75th Anniversary Peak Bag, in which the DOC successfully organized simultaneous ascents of all forty-eight 4000' peaks in New Hampshire this October.

I lucked out on the Peak Bag Washington was the one I got to climb, with 10 other guys. There wasn't a cloud in the sky, and 50 miles of Atlantic coastline was visible. And who could blame us for being a bit proud when the Governor's proclamation was read that this day, October 6th, 1984, was Dartmouth Outing Club Day? For me, though, there was another side to that moment, as I thought back on the stories I have discovered over the past year. For many in the DOC, Mount Washington in winter became the ultimate challenge. In 1911, Fred Harris led the first DOC trip to the mountain, a three-day trip in March, Harris making the highest ascent of the mountain on skis then recorded. In 1928, the DOC suffered one of its few official trip fatalities when Herbert Judson Young '28 died of exposure and exhaustion less than half a mile from the Cog Railway Base Station after a trek across the Bigelow Lawn from Tuckerman's Ravine. In 1932, Bob Monahan '29 of the DOC, working with the legendary Joe Dodge of Pinkham Notch and several others, successfully restored the mountain as a weather observatory by occupying the summit through the winter.

Landon Rockwell '35 described a February snowstorm descent of the mountain. He and Bill Lingley '35 had been forced to stay in the summit observatory for an extra day by a tremendous storm but "had to get back to Hanover" and so decided to descend in what amounted to whiteout conditions. To complete the challenge, they decided to eschew the relative safety of the Carriage Road and instead started their descent by way of the Alpine Garden, with the idea of striking either the Tuckerman's exit route or the Lion's Head trail. After a wild ski descent of the summit cone, they had to cross the Garden and find the line of cairns that led off the mountain, knowing full well that the bottomless drop to Tuckerman's lay only a hundred yards to the right of their route. Of this navigation, purely by instinct and in zero visibility, Rockwell has written:

"It was great. We were having a ball. A ball very close to a line of danger. Danger from exposure and the inexorable finality of exposure. Danger from avalanche if we opted for the Tuckerman route. Danger from a nasty fall if we opted for the Tuckerman route and missed the exit slope in the white-out. Danger from simply getting hopelessly lost. But that's exactly why we were having a ball. Challenge. The Mountain was cutting us down to size. Very small size. Microscopic. 'So you think you know me. Try me now and see how you do.' For a moment I was back in the book of Job: 'Then the Lord answered Job out of the whirlwind and said . . . Gird up thou thy loins like a man, for I will demand of thee . . . .' Like the DOC, the mountain ultimately becomes a part of people's lives.

Such has been the one half of this year uncovering and following out those memories. The other half has been fitting all the pieces together into one (easily liftable) package. It has not always been the smoothest or fastest of journeys but it has been an exceptionally fulfilling one. Like the skis that carry you in a snowstorm, learning DOC history gets you in touch with what you believe in.

A Cabin & Trail crew (above) on Mt. Moosilauke in 1947 hewing logs. In the center, anAdrian Bouchard shot of the observatory atop Mt. Washington, where winds frequent!}/ blowin excess of 100 mph.

The unforgettable Ross McKenney entertainsthe faculty and other guests at a MooseMountain outing in 1954 (both picturesabove). DOCers have always managed totravel well beyond the confines of the UpperValley, as Warren Braley '33's photo of his1932 Southwestern excursion reveals (left).

President John Sloan Dickey '29 loved to entertain freshmen at the Moosilauke Ravine Lodge(top, in 1964). The Mink Brook Boys at the lodge c. 1947 enjoying a little jam session.From left to right: Dean S. Worth 49; David ("Beany") Nutt '41; Hugh M. Chapin '47;Jim Schwedlandt '48 (with Gene Autry guitar); Richard Nickelsen '47; Burt Hickock '45;Dave Kendall '45 (with harmonica); John P. Halstead '45; Rog Brown 45's forehead; SamSmith '49; and Harlan Brumstead '46. (ID's courtesy of Sam Smith.)

David Hooke '84, who was active with theChamber Singers and house manager ofCasque and Gauntlet, joined Cabin andTrail as a freshman. The director of theFreshman Trips -program in 1983, he is theson of Richard Hooke '53 (featured in"Hooked on Toys," Jan./ Feb.'83), a former chubber. Publication of Hooke's history(first run 3,000 copies) is at this time stillin the planning stage.