Connie Lambert: Doyenne of "The Daily D"

To the uninitiated, Connie Lambert's working environment might resemble the aftermath of a small hurricane. But anyone who's ever spent much time in the offices of an old-fashioned, small-town newspaper would feel immediately at ease in the main business office of The Dartmouth.

Lambert herself is very much at home amid avalanching stacks of newspapers, shelves jammed with research and record- keeping materials, an eternally shifting heap of scrap-paper messages and memoranda, a burgeoning ledger piled with billing forms, an intermittently jangling telephone, and a continual stream of student reporters, photographers, editors, ad salespeople, and subscribers. In her tenth year as office manager of the nation's oldest college newspaper, Lambert says the only concern that ever works its way through all her daily activity is, "What if I ever had to train someone? Most of this is in my head."

As one of only two non-student full-time employees of The Dartmouth (the other is a night-shift compositor), Lambert could be described as a solo act against a constantly- changing backdrop of extras and she's certainly the only long-running act. Not only is student involvement confined to a four-year time frame, but it is also further limited by The Dartmouth's own operational plan which rotates staff annually. Thus a full staff change occurs every November, with some students merely shifting positions, others disappearing from the news or advertising staffs for good, and neophytes appearing for the first time. Frequently the annual "changeover" party in November is Lambert's only chance to meet many of the news staffers, who begin their work day as hers is ending, about 4:00 or 4:30 p.m.

"I see a lot of faces there that I may never see again, but at least I know who's supposed to come and go," says Lambert. Her other way of keeping tabs on the 100 to 150 members of the news staff who wander in and out of the office at will is whether or not a student knows her. "If they know my first name, then they belong here. There's no way I can know all of them, and there's no other reason they would know me," she laughs.

The variety is one of the aspects of her work situation that Lambert likes best. "If you find someone you can't work with today, they'll be gone tomorrow," s,he says. But Lambert hasn't found many people she can't work with. That's partly because of her natural, easy-going friendliness and partly because she consciously, thrust herself into a melting pot situation right after high school, when she joined the Navy for two years.

That was in 1957, and Lambert still looks back on her Navy experience as "a real good time." She also thinks basic training as practiced by the military would be beneficial for almost everyone. "Actually, I think every girl should go through , boot camp," she says. "It's amazing how many girls were there who didn't know how to Wash their clothes or pick up after themselves. Living in a barracks, you definitely learn to live with other people. Every girl should do it. They would learn about themselves and how to relate to other people."

Lambert's years in the Navy spent primarily in San Diego as a storekeeper did something else for her, by heightening her appreciation for her hometown. As she pondered her options near the end of high school, she decided that the only two things she was interested in were "to travel to each state and work, then go on to the next state, or go into the service. My mother finally agreed to let me go in the service," she says. "At least I'd be supervised. But I definitely wanted to travel, just to see how the other half lives."

Now very settled back in her native environs, she says, "I could never live in a city. I like the idea of going down the street and meeting someone I know." But just as what Lambert loves most about her job is its variety, one of the things she has come to appreciate about New Hampshire is its changing seasons. "I love my seasons," she states with feeling. "Where else can you go that you can have your seasons? Summer is hot and muggy, and I don't like the heat, but when we come into fall, I seem to get all my energy back. And we don't have to worry about our houses mud-sliding, away or disappearing in earthquakes. I kind of like to know that when I go home, my house has a good chance of being there."

Lambert starts her day behind the cluttered desk in her office at The Dartmouth at 7:00 a.m. Her first task is to oversee the delivery of the bundles of newspapers which arrive, just before she does, from the West Lebanon plant of The Valley News, where they are printed each day at 5:30 a.m. About 2,600 of the 3,200 copies are delivered directly to the Hinman Post Office in Hopkins Center, where they have to be placed in students' mail boxes. The remaining 600 copies are divided up among three routes - one going to the Medical School, one to administrative offices on the main campus, and one to advertisers and retail sales outlets in town. Distribution of the paper to the students' Hinman boxes is a priority task since it must be completed by 9:00 a.m., so if the student assigned to that job doesn't show up, Lambert does it herself. "I will not deliver around campus, though," she says. "That's one thing I will not do."

Circulation of the paper doesn't fluctuate much because of the fairly stable size of the student body. The size of the paper, though, Lambert says, changes fairly significantly on the basis of advertising inches - never going below eight pages but sometimes going up to 12 or 16 pages or as high as 36 pages for special weekend issues. It depends, Lambert says, on the energy and commitment of the students in the advertising department.

The advertising salespeople are paid on a commission basis for the ads they sell, and their earnings reflect the seriousness of their approach to their jobs. If there are any end-of-the-year profits (not always the case), they are divided in a profit-sharing arrangement among the students holding the top 'editorial positions. But, explains Lambert, "the deliverers, the circulation manager, and the advertising staff are the only ones who are paid on a regular basis. The rest just do it. To them it's a plaything. To us it's a business."

And it really is a business a non-profit corporation, separate from the College, with its own payroll, benefits, and board of directors, as well as all the serious purpose of producing a daily newspaper. Even with what seems to be a casual attitude among some of the students involved in the news operation, Lambert says she is amazed every day to arrive and find that somehow all of the stories have been written, typeset, and pasted into place and a newspaper has emerged. "It gets real heavy for the students with a full class load, and when there are exams, I don't know how they do it," she says. "Once I came in and found a student sleeping in the office. They're not supposed to sleep here, but when it's 6:00 a.m. and you just can't go any further, what are you going to do?"

Her own day has somewhat more manageable time limits, but it is filled with a jumble of tasks that never occur in any neat order, aside from the early-morning circu- lation duties. Once the telephone starts ringing - ideally after Lambert has finished measuring advertising linage for billing purposes - it may bring anything from circulation complaints, news story ideas, or photography requests to classified ads, messages for news staffers, subscription orders, or information requests. In between answering the phone, taking messages, and passing them on, Lambert has to accurately type out all the classified ads she takes, handle the advertising billing, record subscription information, take care of subscription billing, and hunt up information people have requested.

"Some of the calls are stupid," she says. "Once I got a call about a former student who was involved in a political campaign. Someone had found out he was involved in a student fracas years ago, and they expected me to go back through the archives and find the information so they could use it against him. I told them I wouldn't do it because, number one, I don't have the time, and, number two, I don't think I would do it anyway. It was nothing but a school prank. It's not fair to ruin someone's career over something like that."

Lambert is the only person in the office of The Dartmouth with enough longevity to remember such long-ago incidents, and current publisher Toby Benis '86 says that's one of her values to the staff. "We all rely on her a great deal, especially as a source of continuity in an organization that has very little continuity," Benis says. "We can train newcomers in the literary end, but there are problems and questions that come up that just can't be anticipated. That's when, we go to Connie, and if she doesn't know the answer, she can put you in touch with someone who does."

"She's a terrific office worker," adds executive editor Chad Rosenberger '86. "She's very helpful with compiling the briefs that we run and very involved with the business side. But she listens to terrible country and western music, and she and I are always having clashes over that."

Lambert thinks the music the students prefer is just as terrible, but it's one of many things she takes in her energetic stride. In addition to her lively days at the office, her busy schedule also includes time at a second job, a lot of attention to knitting and embroidery, and a few good hands of pinochle two or three nights a week. "I love pinochle," she says, "especially cutthroat. There are three of us who play every week. We start at 7:30 and play till 1:00 or 2:00 in the morning. And I like cutthroat better than partners, because with partners you have to be more conservative. With cutthroat, you can bid your heart's delight."

While her long days sound exhausting, Lambert says she handles it well because she's a good sleeper. "I don't need a lot of sleep, and I get good sleep. I might not go to bed till 1:00 or 2:00 in the morning, but when I lie down, I die. I don't roam at night. I put on a tape when I go to bed, and I hear no more than the first song.

"And I don't get sick," she adds. "When you know that if you stay out sick, you're just going to have to catch up on a day's work, you don't get sick. There's no one to fill in. There are times I could use a helping hand," Lambert says, "but it all gets done somehow. And I really enjoy the job. There's always variety - always something new - and I love it."

The woman behind the scenes at "The DConnie Lambert, helps make order out of chaos.Time passes (and so do some deadlines), but somehow - "I don't know how," she says - there's a "D" every day.

Georgia Croft, whose most recent article for theAlumni Magazine was a profile in the Octoberissue on Efrain Guigui, has spent quite a bit oftime herself in the offices of small-town newspapers.