"Veni, Vidi, victus sum."

You can put your profile of me A into one sentence: 'He came, he saw, he was conquered!' " Just how completely Eddie Chamberlain '36 yielded to Dartmouth's charms can be seen from the central fact about his career at the College it has filled his entire working life. He joined the administration as soon as he graduated (still aglow with the pride of having been a member of the team that beat Yale at football for the first time ever), and nearly half a century later he was among the first to benefit from the legislation raising the mandatory retirement age from 65 to 70. It seems reasonable to assert that he was in the "Active" list of College officers in more editions of the O.R.C. than anyone else in Dartmouth's history even allowing for his four-year stint in the Navy during World War II.

The 52 years since he arrived on the Hanover Plain as a freshman have linked him in a direct way with a huge percentage of all the members of the Dartmouth Family who have ever lived. When he came to the College there were still alumni alive who had graduated when Lincoln was in the White House; now he can see from his Parkhurst window members of the class of 1987, some of whom will probably be around in 2069 for the College's Tricentennial. And among all those men and women are the many thousands who were admitted to Dartmouth during his 25 years as director of admissions.

Periods as assistant dean of freshmen, assistant director of athletics, and executive officer of the College preceded that influential quarter-century, and five years as special assistant to the president followed it all brought notable achievements, but it is with all that admitting that he made his indelible mark on the institution. Chatting with him about the admissions business makes one aware of the qualities that account for not only his incredible longevity in that demanding post but also the respect and affection that surrounded him in his profession. It's talking about the hazards and rewards involved in "making 30,000 enemies a year" that provokes the brightest twinkling of the cool blue eyes, the most heartfelt chuckles, the feistiest comments, the most thoughtful replies.

I tell him I once heard the director of admissions job described as something you wouldn't wish on your worst enemy. "I wouldn't go that far'" he replies, "but if you're not able to live with being chewed at, all the time, you shouldn't do it." And he recalls with a laugh a letter his predecessor Al Dickerson received from classmate and colleague Eddie Jeremiah, a letter that began, "Dear Former Friend." Jeremiah didn't mean it not literally but there are those who do. But Chamberlain is a man who had to live through the selection of 25 consecutive Dartmouth classes, an experience that in some ways resembles a cross between the marathon and running the gauntlet. Very clearly he didn't just survive it, he enjoyed it too, buoyed up most of all by the innumerable friendships he made with his colleagues in the work school counsellors, alumni enrollment officers, members of the alumni council, many generations of faculty who served on the College committee on admissions, his counterparts at other colleges, and those who served with him as College Entrance Examination Board trustees. There is no shortage of happy memories to offset even the sourest of encounters with disappointed applicants and their parents, grandparents, siblings, cousins, friends and Dartmouth alumni supporters.

We talk about all the changes that have come in his years at the College. "It's fundamentally the same, you know just different faces, a few different problems, that's all." As we go into it, though, we identify the one really majdr difference between now and 50 years ago: students may be much the same, faculty too. ("Of course, though," he muses, "in my day practically all of them lived in Hanover and we ran into them all the time.") And what goes on in the classroom, in the library, on the playing fields, isn't much different either. But administering the College has changed totally. When Chamberlain joined the administration it consisted of 28 people (excluding people at the professional schools but including three assistant librarians and the assistant manager of the Hanover Inn) and the student body was approximately 2500; now there are more than 250 administrators and some 4000 undergraduates. In those far-off days (in some basic respects the administration of President Hopkins more resembled that of Eleazar Wheelock than that of David McLaughlin) practically the entire administrative cadre had their offices in Parkhurst and, says Chamberlain, "Instead of sorting out where a problem might fit into the organization chart, you just walked across the hall and settled it, there and then. But of course there's a whole string of new commitments that enrich College life and account for so much of the current size; and we're providing a hell of a lot more services for students. On the other hand, we had a janitor for every two dorm floors, and there was a janitor for every fraternity and he changed your sheets every Friday!"

Of the tiny handful of people still on the College payroll who were appointed in the Hopkins years Chamberlain was the first to be signed on and is the only one who worked closely with him; in his various capacities he has had almost daily contact with the three presidents since; he is a oneman archive and a brilliant anecdotalist. But it says much about what has made him the well-loved institution within-a-institution he is that the talk about the pleasures that have come his way here brings him back to the people who meant most to him. To the three men for whom his admiration is unbounded Ernest Martin Hopkins, John Dickey, and Earl Blaik and to "two of the most beautiful people who ever lived," Al Dickerson and Bob Strong. It is, after all, people whose central concern is for people who have most to contribute to institutions, and in that respect as well as others Eddie Chamberlain is up there with the best of them.

Eddie Chamberlain '36