The Attraction of Peanuts

When I asked Addison Winship '42 for a retirement interview, he groaned. "Oh, Shelby I've been buried so many times already." It's true. We even pre-retired him in this Magazine two years ago, when he announced he would retire early. But, of course, he agreed anyway. He always does, because, as a close colleague once remarked, "He's in love with the institution."

After graduation, Winship served in the Navy, after which he went into business, selling for the National Dairy Products Company (now Kraftco). At the same time, he became a class agent for Dartmouth. "That triggered all that followed," he says. What followed his 25-year career as the College's most prominent and professional fundraiser began three years after he became a class agent, in 1949, when George Colton, then director of development at the College, approached him about coming to work for Dartmouth. "I thanked him politely but curtly," recalls Winship. "I explained that they were paying peanuts."

Then ensued a decade during which the successful businessman began to have second thoughts: "I was working for a great company, but I found myself asking one too many times whether I wanted to live on the corporate merry-go-round for the rest of my life. I realized that if I aspired to go all the way, the price was more than I wanted to pay in terms of personal family sacrifice. Then, too, though it was a good "meat and potatoes" industry, there had to be a little more than total commitment to that because I commit myself to a job totally."

So Winship resigned in 1959, without knowing where he was going next. "I had built a few bridges and figured on finding something in the Boston area," he recalls. Then Colton struck again. "He had heard about my resignation and asked me again to consider Dartmouth. I said the same thing I had said before." Colton, however, twisted Winship's arm to come up anyway just for a talk, a little chat about being special assistant to President Dickey.

"I never missed a day's work/' grins Winship, who confesses that the peanuts haven't been any great hardship. "I realized it was an attractive proposition. Oh, you won't get rich with cash assets working in these vineyards, but you sure can enrich yourself other ways. There is a great feeling among the people you work with, and it is broadening to be part of a campus community, a business whose purpose is working with young people and teachers."

Winship says he would not do much different if he had to do it over again, though he admits to being, iike all of us, "a captive sometimes of the fact that we can travel only one road at a time," He does wish he had taken more advantage of the community he has been living in: "For the last 25 years, I have not partaken of the rich fare of this place. I've been married to my job. I fell into bad habits of tending to the briefcase nightly and on weekends. The job ran me, I didn't run it, and now I've got some catching up to do."

Winship will not retire altogether from college development. He plans to work as a consultant for Marts & Lundy, a New York-based consulting firm composed of a number of officers whose work ranges broadly over the spectrum of charitable and public institutions. Winship will travel widely, but he will not do any consulting for Dartmouth. "You never consult in your own back yard," he says firmly. "A consultant has to be the expert from out of town."

That Winship is expert is widely acknowledged. The national prominence of Dartmouth's Alumni Fund, its recent record-breaking five-year campaign, and its Bequest and Estate Planning Program testifies to the success of Winship's many years as the College's director of development and its vice president for development and alumni affairs.

In 1983, Winship's professional accomplishments were recognized by the presentation of the Eleanor Collier Award of the Council for the Advancement and Support of Education (CASE). The citation noted that Dartmouth had received under his direction more than $340 million in gifts from grants and private sources, an estimated $50 million of which was the direct result of Winship's personal effort. He was also cited for steering the College through the turbulent waters of the late sixties and early seventies with a minimum of alumni alienation.

Winship's unshakeable faith in Dartmouth is an integral part of his working philosophy as a development officer. He sees himself, he says, as a representative of the institution, charged with the task of communicating and interpreting its purpose. "I have no spiritual or intellectual hunger," he explains, "beyond the simple but basic desire to help people who have relationships with this place understand its purposes and feel good about what it's doing."

The keystone of Dartmouth development under Winship's aegis has been a carefully instilled respect for one fundamental fact. As he explains it, "Every individual has the capability for making a major gift according to his or her own resources. A $25 gift for some is a major gift, as major as a $1 million gift from someone else. By osmosis, that philosophy must creep into all our activities here."

He sees Dartmouth as a "very conservative place" for which he is glad. He understands that the pendulum will always swing between the liberal and the conservative, but he is pleased that "it doesn't swing as wide here as at other places." He has kept his fabled calm about the endurance of the institution, he explains, by recognizing that "its varied constituencies all care sufficiently about it to prevent anyone's running away with the place." He grins winningly. "As long as my conservative friends think this place is far too liberal and my liberal friends think it is far too conservative, then I know we're okay."

On June 5, Jack Harned '50 and hislovely wife, Jill, hosted a dinner partyat the DOC House for Ad Winship.Numerous testimonials were presented, but one seemed to capture thespirit of the evening in a very specialway. It was delivered by Ort Hicks '21,who kindly gave us permission to reprint. ED.

The Winship Strategy

For the. benefit of those who were not on campus 26 years ago when Lois and I returned to Hanover, let me repeat what President John Sloan Dickey said in a memo that he had addressed to the Trustees, commenting on the qualifications I was allegedly bringing to the job (but not hesitating to mention my obvious weaknesses). He wrote: "Hicks is not a good public speaker, but he has one great asset he does not talk long!" In addition to my (requested) brevity, I know why I have been invited here: I am supposed to pay tribute to the guest of honor. I did a lot of soul-searching before accepting the assignment. Should I mulishly follow the established precedent by telling you what a great guy Ad Winship is, or should I summon up the courage to "Tell it like it is." I have chosen the latter course.

At my age why should I live a lie? Why should I get up on this rostrum and pretend I like a guy whom I can barely tolerate? True, he gave me a chance to come back from retirement and work for the College that we all love, but he did this only to have me readily available for tennis and squash and bridge. You would expect a young athlete like Ad Winship to have some respect for a man with one foot in the grave the other would be in that grave also, if I could only get it out of my mouth. Even McEnroe stops insulting tennis referees only enough to lose an occasional game, but not Killer Winship! Well before my memory became impaired, I could not recall his ever throwing me a point.

To compound the insult, he put me out on the road traveling for the Campaign For Dartmouth. Why? To raise money for Dartmouth? Only in part. What he wanted to do was to humiliate me. He knew that I had raised about $20 million for the College during my tenure, so what did he do? Raised $204,000,000!

People used to have a modicum of respect for me: now they laugh at me. The Winship strategy could have been summed up in four Latin words: Ortonus Hix delendum est. "Hicks must be destroyed." And he has succeeded, for I looked fairly good until Winship came along.

And how did he do it? Basically what does he have to offer other than charm, brains, energy, imagination,

hard work, talent, executive ability? Cheap qualities that he borrowed out of some out-dated Horatio Alger book.

You misguided people in this room can call him the All-American boy, but in return for the humiliation he has heaped on me, I say: The hell with him.

Ad Winship '42