The Hanover Scene

View from the Booth

Hanover is no "Rome," but from the perspective of the little white information kiosk on the east side of the Green, it sometimes seems that all those roads leading to whatever is the "Rome" of our time are being detoured past "the College on the Hill."

That may be hyperbole, but compared to the splendid isolation that Hanover and Dartmouth knew only a generation ago, the contrast between then and today's bustling street scene from the Dartmouth National Bank to Baker Library is dramatic.

Before summer's end some 9,000 visitors had stopped by the octagonal formally known as the Dartmouth-Hanover Information Booth and they presumably were only the tip of the iceberg. While the eastern states were most heavily represented, the booth's daily log showed that visitors came from literally every one of the 50 United States and Puerto Rico.

Visits by folks from the Prairie States tend to be sporadic. But I began to see Hanover as some kind of crossroad for all America one rainy day after an unlikely coincidence occurred. An Oklahoma family of four had crowded into the booth to share my description of sights to see at Dartmouth when another young couple squeezed in. In a pause in an exchange with the first group, the newly arrived young man politely drawled his apology for interrupting to ask the father of the family if "I rightly detect the sound of Oklahoma in your speech." The first man acknowledged that he rightly did, and it developed that the two families both resided in Oklahoma, less than 100 miles apart.

The booth this summer helped visitors from 14 European countries, seven nations of Asia, six in Latin America, and four of the Middle East, including both Israel and Lebanon. Canadians continue to be the largest single group of summer visitors from outside the United States, although their numbers were down somewhat this year. In contrast, this summer had a noticeable increase in inquiries from British, German, French, and Japanese travelers.

For the first time in my three years in the booth, there were summer visitors from East Germany and the People's Republic of China, as well as from Yugoslavia and Poland, some of them scheduled to undertake academic work at Dartmouth. A reminder of a bleaker period in East-West relations was the appearance in August of a man who, in conversation, mentioned that just 30 years ago he had escaped from Hungary after Soviet tanks crushed a briefly successful bid for independence. That he had successfully built a new life in America was attested by his mission a visit to the College with his son who planned to apply for admission to Dartmouth.

This summer, Everett Wood '38, retired Pan Am pilot and a veteran of five earlier years in the booth, and my wife Lili joined me in taking turns to keep the booth staffed eight hours a day, seven days a week, for 13 weeks from the day after Commencement through the Freshman Trips in September.

For all of us, a common theme threaded through comments of visitors who had or took time to chat with any of us about the College or the North Country. That was the beauty of the campus.

From Virginians proud of Jefferson's handiwork at the University of Virginia and Californians used to the graceful Spanish influences on their campuses to faculty from the medieval halls of Heidelberg and Oxford, their accents may have been different, but their reaction on reaching Dartmouth was the same. From a simple phrase to a litany, each expressed delight in "the view from the booth," as they would look from the gleaming walls of Dartmouth Row to the belltower of Baker thrusting as a beacon and challenge into the blue, from the barrel-vaulted rhythms in red brick and pale glass of Hopkins Center to the wine-glass contours of the surviving elms towering above this summer's emerald lawns.

Perhaps no information booth is so happily sited as this one, jointly sponsored by the College and the Hanover Chamber of Commerce. As I like to say to travelers who drive up and ask where Dartmouth is, "You are at the heart of Dartmouth."

The admissions office is the target of perhaps 25 percent of the visitors to the booth, and there is always a special kind of pleasure in meeting them. A growing "clientele" are people of all ages and backgrounds who have heard about Dartmouth and the Upper Valley and want to "relocate" within commuting distance of Baker Tower. Indeed, anyone worrying about press reports of "incidents" at Dartmouth should spend a week in the booth. With so many people eager to become a part of "this special place," as John Dickey defined it, it would appear that conventional wisdom realizes Dartmouth, Hanover, and the Upper Valley are doing basic things right.

But the greatest joy comes late each summer, counteracting whatever fatigue is setting in. That's the appearance of the first members of the newest Dartmouth class, arriving for the early sections of the celebrated Freshman Trips. To see their smiles, to sense their enthusiasm, energy, brightness and motivation is to be reassured about the future.