How "Eleazar" Pulled It Off

Descending from leaf-watching on Balch Hill one warmish Oc- tober afternoon in 1933, Dick Dorrance and I (both '36, as is every- one in this chronicle whose name ap- pears without class numerals) talked of shoes and ships and Charles Lutwidge Dodgson and Ogden Nash, not nec- essarily in that order. As we neared the outrun of East Wheelock, dilating upon our joint admiration for H.I. Phil- lips of the New York Sun and Franklin P. Adams of the New York Herald Trib-une, the lower-case sun slid behind the Vermont hills and the sugar maples at our backs shone luridly in the alpenglow. We sat on a rock to drink it all in as we discussed authorship and anonymity. Dick had been editor of the paper at Trinity School in Manhattan; I had been an editor of the weekly XRay of Newton High School in Queens. It might be fun to run a column of shorts and light verse like "The SunDial" (Phillips's) or "The Conning Tower" (F.P.A.'s) in The Dartmouth, for which we were both covering news as freshman reporters. It might be even more fun if we ran it anonymously, or, rather, pseudonymously. By the time we'd resumed our walk, in the dark, and eaten, on our meal tickets at the Campus Cafe, we had pretty much decided to start a collaboration.

It took several more such conferences to decide on a plan of operations. If this columnist (we decided to name him Eleazar) was to become the College fixture we envisaged, he must be distinguished by individuality and high standards. Like Phillips and Adams, he would eschew the amateurish inversion for rhyme's sake ("To get away from winter's snow/1 off to Florida would go"). Meters would be as varied as possible. Cheap trochees would be avoided (rhyming a bunch of words ending in "ation," for in stance). And of course rhymes must be genuine rhymes, in which the last stressed vowel and every sound, or phoneme, thereafter are identical (a form of discipline now as extinct as the leather ski boot). His copy, we decided, would always be typed, in green, on a typewriter used for nothing else. (We were already foiling detection although we had not yet written a line.) Dick had the machine, a redundant Royal portable, which we thenceforth kept under lock and key in an "Eleazar" trunk.

We tackled the logistics one day in 405 Streeter. "What do you figure will be the effect on our marks?" Dick asked, lighting his pipe in elaborate imitation of Industrial Society's Professor Riegel, with many delays en route, as the match flame crept ever closer to his fingers.

"I don't know. You can't put a percentage figure on it. No two courses are alike. Some give no numerical grades. Stone [Psychology] doesn't believe in grades at all. B's instead of A's, probably."

"C's instead of B's might be more like it." It never occurred to either of us to make separate estimates for each. Our course schedules were similar, and so, apparently, were our IQs and intellectual profiles. I agreed with Dick's probable-damage assessment. It turned out to be a remarkably prescient guess.

We decided to go with it. Handling our copy paper with gloves, we typed out our first work. I say "we" typed it. It was Dick's typewriter, and since he typed monodigitally, he would not be hampered by the use of a glove. (We decided later that if the typewriter was discovered we'd be dead ducks anyway and donned the gloves only for handling the copy and its envelope.) We/he tapped out:

Collegiate CatastropheOf all sad plights of college menThere's none that can compareWith looking in your mail-slotFor mail that isn't there.Or listening while the mailmanComes traipsing down the hallAnd, blithely passing by your room,Leaves nothing there at all.Yet, when he brings a stack of mailThat seems like half a ton,You find your roommate's nameacrossThe front of every one.And if as rarely is the case There's something there for you,It's only ads, or cards that tellOf fines for books past due.But after all that's not so bad;The thing that really vexesIs that your roommate always getsThe letters sealed with X's.So when you write your girl atSmithThe missive that enchants her,Be sure you emphasize this point Some day you'd like an answer!

We mailed it to The Dartmouth specifically to Gail Raphael '34, who ran "Merry-Go-Round," a weekly column modeled on "The Conning Tower." The trickier one we sent off not to TheD, but to Jack-o-Lantern (if Eleazar was to be famous he had to appear everywhere).

Even before "Collegiate Catastrophe" appeared, in The Dartmouth of October 27, we started on Eleazar's phase two, commissioning an artist in Dick's father's ad agency in New York, Dorrance, Sullivan & Cos., to design a cut, reading "From Eleazar's Quill" and featuring pines on a snowy hill, to run at the head of a weekly column we hoped The Dartmouth directorate would consent to.

The creative process was pretty much the way you would imagine it, usually with one of us tossing out a line and the other providing the next, as nearly as possible right on the beat. The first couplet of the next Hanover lament, "Blow Hot, Blow Cold," sprang fully formed from Dick's lips: "For stimulating people's wrath/There'snothing like a shower bath.""Phenomenon," I jumped in, "whosebeauty lies/In f/zermosomething what? surprise.""Thermostatical," said Dick. "How's that again?" "Thermostatical. 'Phenomenon whosebeauty lies/In thermostatical surprise' "I love it! 'lts temperature will neverhold/But vacillates from hot to cold.' "'Or cold to hot; whichever way —' " We got the next line out together, as in a B musical: " 'You set the thing, itwill not stay.' "

We mailed that 18-liner to Raphael too, in time for the November 3 paper. In the November 11 Dartmouth, the last one before the Thanksgiving recess, Eleazar's contribution was "The ForLetterman," the lament of a non-jock, which started out: He walkedalong West Wheelock Street/And Watchedwith jealous eye/The barrel-chested lettermeniWho swiftly sauntered by and ended with: You can't compare a touchdown withthe things that I can do —/I got a "D 'inEccy and a "D" in Psychy too./In fact inevery course I took/I didn't do much better,! So I don't see why I can't wear I A "D" uponmy sweater.

The second semester opened with a couple of landmark events for Eleazar. On February 10 "Merry-Go-Round" ran what was to become his most frequently reprinted poem, "O Say, Can You Ski?" (Among others, the U.S. Eastern Amateur Ski Association's 1934 Ski Annual published it and the D.O.C. used it on its official announcement, in 1936, of Walter Prager's arrival as Dartmouth's ski coach.) It went, in part, like this: Perhaps you think you have the skillOn skis that practice brings The little kids who live in townCan show you lots of things.You may have read a dozen booksAnd knoiv just what to do:A rec class and the best of skisShould be a help to you.But little Willie from Lyme Road,Although he's only four,Can do maneuvers that would shameThe average sophomore.When you come scorching down ahillIn telemark position,And strike a soft spot, piling upIn pretzel-like condition,Then little Willie whizzes downUpon his tiny skisAnd does a jump-turn over youAs nicely as you please.

Shortly after our debut as members of The Dartmouth's sophomore news board, Dorrance and I worked as a team on a news story that had brought Dartmouth to national attention: the disappearance of Clarence L. Marks Jr. '34, the son of a wealthy Philadelphia family. The new editor-in-chief, Thomas Henry Lane '35, assigned us to investigate the case, and we wrote a series of pieces signed with a combined byline, F.D. Dorpler. Now that Eleazar was going independent, Lane summoned Dorpler and put him/us on Eleazar's case.

As time went by, we "investigated," and cleared, several Robinson Hall "insiders." They included fellow sophs Dick Jewell who had a suspiciously keen interest in the invisible bard (and who at one time briefly suspected me), Budd Schulberg, and David E. "Dang" Scherman. Scherman had involved himself, by responding to Eleazar's first column "From Eleazar's Quill." That column started with a 32-line poem, "Spectre in Solitude," about the Ghost of Dartmouth Hall, and ended with a shortie that went, in part:

the m.g.m. lion are a strange beast his mane is long his eyes are bright helikes to roar with all his might at showsboth afternoon and night . . . leoin other towns they hear him roar inhanover they get him sore our dartmouthcrowds are too much for ... Leoeach time he wrinkles up his snout thenugget crowds begin to shout and when heroars they drown him out . . . leo

Two days after that the paper announced the results of the Experimental Theatre's play writing contest. The top winners were Maurice Rapf '35, H.E. Wheelock '34, Jerome Spingarn '35, Harry Ackerman '35, and Richard E. Lauterbach '35. The surprise was that an honorable mention went to TheSilver Punchbowl, a play about Dartmouth's gift from Governor Wentworth by Eleazar.

On April 17, a few days after Mary Hitchcock Hospital held a fund-raising fair in the Alumni Gym, a story appeared in The Dartmouth, headlined "Eleazar, In Nocturnal Visit, Writes Verse With Green Quill By Candlelight." The story pointed out that Eleazar's copy normally arrived by mail, but this time delivery had been made by the nocturnal bard himself. What had happened was this. We had decided that with this column, which consisted entirely of the poem "Big Affair," an after-the-fact plug for the Mary Hitchcock fund-raiser, it was time to shake up the D staff and generate a little publicity. Pinkerton men from Boston either had got into the act or were about to because of the boldness of this ploy. (The Lane directorate brought them in without letting any of the staff know, including Dorpler). We had operated all along on the theory that sleuths of one brand or another would get after us, so we handled this copy as we did our other, typed copy, with rubber gloves. The "haste" that precluded typing and mailing was just an excuse to try out an untraceable handwriting I had worked out, made up of nothing but squares and triangles, with connecting lines, that emerged as script without a single curve. I laboriously wrote out the 37 lines with the quill pen, a greendyed turkey feather with its shaft sliced to a point and slit to serve as a nib and we burned a green candle down to the socket of the brass candlestick we had picked up I forget where. In the small hours, after checking that there was no one hidden in the D offices, we walked briskly in, set the whole package on Lane's desk, eyedroppered green ink onto the already much-stained desk blotter and departed.

Green Key weekend was enlivened by another flurry of Eleazar hijinks that earned the bard a Page One story. This time the special circumstance was not that Eleazar was rushed but that he was out of town. As a matter of fact he was rushed too. In the Saturday Green Key issue, May 5, Eleazar had an extra column which included the poem "Don'ts to a Damsel." It started out: So you have come to Hanover,! A smiling Green Key guest?/ If first you'd learnthese simple points,/ Perhaps it might bebest./ The house is yours for just two days—/ Don't scatter things at will,/ And don'tleave empty cold-cream jars/ Upon the window sill . . .

The news story explained the extraordinary circumstances. The copy for the special column had arrived in Robinson by special delivery mail the day before, from Washington, D.C., with an enclosed note that the columnist was "spending a few days here with friends." For once the copy was not on Eleazar's Old Pine stationery and was not in green. It was typed instead on Franklin D. Roosevelt's own letter paper, engraved, as was the envelope, simply THE WHITE HOUSE. Delivery of the copy had climaxed a logistical tour de force for the columnist. Along with his regular copy the previous weekend for his Tuesday column, he had offered the poem for the Green Key issue. "Please answer via the Commons bulletin board," he had asked. The editors had but they had added a zinger designed to trap their elusive contributor: his deadline for the Saturday paper was 7 p.m. Thursday. On Thursday afternoon a freshman heeler was posted in a phone booth outside the office, at 5 p.m. when most of the staff had gone off on assignments or on non-D activities. By around 6:30, word having got round, a small crowd collected, causing the remaining staffers to fear the skittish bard would be frightened off. They needn't have worried. While Baker's chimes were announcing 7 o'clock, a Western Union messenger walked into Robinson Hall with a telegram that read: PLEASE RESERVE 7-INCH COL UMN FOR SATURDAY'S PAPER. COPY TOMORROW MORNING. ELEAZAR. The special delivery from the White House was delivered the next morning. So confident was Eleazar that all would go off as planned that Nugget Green Key audiences, at all regular Friday performances as well as the special midnight one, saw a green slide advertising the next day's "From Eleazar's Quill."

The original copy had indeed been in green on Eleazar's stationery. But we had mailed it to the White House, where Roosevelt's personal secretary, Louis McHenry Howe, had had it retyped on a sheet of F.D.R.'s stationery. (Howe was a friend of Dick's father, I believe.) When we received the Thursday deadline we couldn't hit it with a special delivery letter, even from the White House. We phoned the White House and arranged to have it sent out Thursday special delivery for Friday arrival (try that with any confidence nowadays) and, by means of a letter mailed from Lebanon, overpaid West- ern Union to deliver the Thursday tel- egram as close to seven as possible. The W.U. people apparently read the papers too and went along with the gag perfectly.

There were a few more columns in May and early June. The final one, on 1934's Commencement weekend, comprised a Commencement poem, "Semper Cum Laude," which played off 1771 against 1934 and wound up Thespan of years has widened since the firstCommencement Day/ When Eleazar's college met to send its students forth,/ But themodern ceremonies have the spirit of theold,/ For they praise the name of Dartmouthin the forests of the North, and a couple of prose items. The bard offered his thanks to the paper, to "so many innocent people on the campus for cheerfully shouldering all accusations that they are Eleazar" and to "the Class of 1934 for selecting him their favorite poet over Bob Browning and Bill Shakespeare." The last item consisted entirely of one line: "THE GREEN QUILL" WILL INTEREST YOU.

Came the fall term, September 1934. Even before the equinox, the October Jack-o-Lantern was out, with hints in its lead editorial about Eleazar's identity ("We are one of the few people who are not Eleazar . . . who know who Eleazar is ... we took a solemn oath never to reveal Eleazar's true identity, although we have much fun casting suspicion on innocent peoples") and this Frank Stockman '35 cartoon:

The Green Quill turned out to be a book. It was Eleazar's first and only collection of his verse, a limited edition of 500 28-page books, printed iDartmouth green on cream paper, deckle-edged and bound with green silk cord. Dorrance and I, having honed our typesetting skills setting Dartmouth stories and heads for a year at the Dartmouth Press, set every word during the summer on Dick's 9 inch X 12 inch Victor job press in the Dorrance apartment on Riverside Drive (looking down on Babe Ruth's little penthouse across 90th Street). Mrs. Dorrance bound them with the green silk cord, and we stamped in their numbers and slipped them into their matching cream envelopes. When publication day neared, we mailed them, separately and in bundles, to our "comp" list and to retail outlets. The book sold out at both bookstores by nightfall.

The November Alumni Magazine contained a review of The Green Quill, and Editor Sid Hayward had found just the right man to review it (although some people thought it was Eleazar reviewing himself). It was headlined:

Who Is the Mysterious Eleazar? THE GREEN QUILL, by "Eleazar." Collection of Verse. On sale only at the bookstores in Hanover, 25 cents. Entire proceeds of sale donated to Mary Hitchcock Hospital. The clever rhymes in this anthology first appeared in The Dartmouth last year. The author, "Eleazar," is unknown. Reviewed by Dean Chamberlin '26 There is a life-blood in his verses,there is vigor in his penHis felicity at rhyming is a joy toDartmouth men.He has the trick of versifying theleast of campus news,has done more for college spirit thanthree rallies could produce.Memorabilia and occasions are histhemes from day to dayAnd he handles current hist'ry in amost diverting way.Not the least of his fine rhyming ishis frequent change of pace,But hoiv did he contrive to keep a secret in this place?He is not a Frost or Hovey, a Laingor Lattimore,He's just a campus poet, a namelesstroubadour.Sometimes his verse is ragged, butit's hardly ever dull.

We thought he got the last line backwards.

Briefly after The Green Quill came and went, Eleazar was happy to lie slightly lower. Both Dorrance and I, after all, had the standard number of hours of classes. The Dartmouth competition was hotting up: in this semester we would have to show why we should be editor-in-chief (Millimet? Schulberg?) or sports editor (Des Stewart? Scherman?). Dick and I both wanted to have at the news columns, so we covered news like crazy. We were all over the campus, and came to rest only in Robinson Hall or Baker's Reference Room. We got to our own digs only after 11 p.m.

All this normality lasted only a couple of months. The morning of November 26, just before Thanksgiving, green signs not of our doing were all over town: ELEAZAR'S IDENTITY REVEALED CONCRETE PROOF IN JACKO OUT TODAY. The Thanksgiving issue of the humor magazine, it turned out, featured a full-scale expose. Under a 36-point headline, ELEAZAR REVEALED, the piece alleged that "After three months of investigation and compilation of evidence," the magazine had run down the long-sought bard. "Eleazar," the article said, is Richard Miller Spong, Class of 1936, a member of Theta Delta Chi fraternity, and, although we hate to admit our blindness, of the ]ack-oLantern literary board."

Spong, the editors asserted, had made his "first misstep" early in October, submitting a poem to Jack-o and asking that in case of rejection the MS be placed in the office window for him to retrieve. The staff had kept an allnight vigil; Bob Sellmer '35, arriving at 6:00 a.m. to relieve Spong, found him sleeping and the poem gone. There followed a series of plausible allegations: that Spong's landlady recalled that he typed for hours late at night and went out at "crazy hours"; that on November 13 a student answering Spong's description had tried at three Hanover shops to buy a green typewriter ribbon; that the International Printing Company, Plainfield, N.J., had received several letters from Spong ordering stationery a line cut of Eleazar's pine-tree letterhead was reproduced, with a letter typed on it ordering "200 sheets and 200 envelopes, order No. 15673, with the monogram placed exactly as it is on this sheet" and signed "Richard M. Spong, 49 South Lebanon Street, Hanover, N.H."; and that Professor Stearns Morse had stated confidentially that Eleazar was a member of his English 31 writing course but that he was "not at liberty to divulge his name." (Spong and I both took the course.)

Eleazar's own Operation Refutation went into high gear immediately. Dick and I took the day off and repaired to Lebanon to work the phones. (We would have preferred Claremont as farther removed from the chance of being observed by an errant undergraduate, but took the risk to save time.) We satisfied ourselves that none of the people or firms mentioned in the Jack-o piece had actually been approached by the hoaxers, got off a wire to the D asking for extra space for the next day's "From Eleazar's Quill' and then beat it back to 405 Streeter to write same. As to how we'd get the copy to Robinson by the deadline, our telegram said the bard would let the editors know the drill by 7:15 p.m. We got the piece written and typed well before the deadline. We even had time for dinner. Upon leaving the Campus Cafe, I headed for Baker Library and Dick drove to White River and a phone booth. I was back in the office in time to be one of the staffers listening on several extensions when, at precisely 7:15, a muffled, obviously disguised voice with a ridiculous accent said, "In Baker Library is a book, the title of which is The Hoax, by Italo Svevo. Its number is Fi-5355h. In this book will be found the copy."

A Page 1 box in the next day's Dartmouth recounted the story and referred the reader to Eleazar's regular column, on Page 4. The lead of the column was of course the refutation, which began "Richard M. Spong is no more Eleazar than is the janitor of Wheeler Hall."

Blase and above it all as Eleazar had appeared in his Jack-o refutation, he really was bugged a little. Realizing that some people would come away believing that Spong (or maybe that janitor) was writing all his stuff, he had decided, even as he was writing his Nov. 27 riposte, that he had to stage a dramatic demonstration of his authenticity. Before heading home for the recess, he that is, we got started on the spectacular. We located a ship's chandler in Portsmouth who could provide us with what we wanted. We even had a start on the green-typed message we planned to send to TheDartmouth the day before E-Day: "Tomorrow evening, when the chimes of Baker ring out the hour of six, the hand of Eleazar will write upon the sky."

E-Day was December 4, 1934. Back on the 3rd from Thanksgiving recess, I dropped the bard's sky-writing mes- sage on the Managing Editor's desk. The logistics had involved a whirlwind of activity. Dorrance and I had already placed our order with the Portsmouth chandler. Dick and our faithful, sworn- to-secrecy lieutenant, E. Stuart Fer- gusson, electronics buff and jack-of- all-trades at Acme Newspictures, in New York, picked up our order: a green rocket, six feet long, and the lumber for a launching trough. They drove directly to the launch site, a wooded knoll below the large cove off the Vermont end of Ledyard Bridge, arriving there in the early-fading light of a December afternoon. They came in from the south, via Route 5, because a rocket six feet long and boards even longer were not easy to conceal in the rumble seat of Dick's Pontiac convertible. Dick left handyman Fergie without trepidation.

Well before 6 p.m., Dick and I joined the crowd of 600—700 students who were gathering on the Green in response to the D's article of that morning headlined ELEAZAR PROMISES PUBLIC DEMONSTRATION TO- NIGHT and quoting our note. Heads started swiveling when, after the 16 notes of the Westminster Chimes had rung out from Baker, the first of the hour strokes was sounded. Fergie's instructions had been to touch off his rocket when he heard our stroke No 1 in Lewiston.

On the stroke of six the rocket appeared. But barely. It arched low in the west, moving south to north, not much higher than the roofs of Robinson, McNutt and Parkhurst. Spectators on the Dartmouth Hall side of the campus saw it better than we in mid-campus; those along the west side couldn't see it at all. Amid a swelling crowd murmur, we started back to the old drawing board.

Eleazar's sky pledge, quoted in the D, had included a rain date, the same hour the next suitable day. While I went off on a Dartmouth assignment, Dorrance hastened to Norwich to confer with Fergie. That stalwart reader of Kipling, G.A. Henty, and the novels of Ouida had left nothing to chance in the security department. He refused to stay in Dick's room in Streeter or answer to his own name. He registered at the Norwich Inn. He called himself Ceiba and the whole rocket caper Operation Ceiba, a code name triggered by the fact that he and Dick had visited La Ceiba, Honduras, one summer on a Standard Fruit boat. Briefed by Dick, he headed early the next morning for Claremont. He brought back three rockets. They were the biggest he could get, but no six-footers. They were less than two feet long including the stick. And they were not green. They came only in red, white and blue, so he got one of each.

We were only a fortnight away from the winter solstice, and it was dark by five. From the center of the campus we paced off, in the gathering gloom, three straight lines, at azimuths as close to 120 degrees apart as possible, to minimally populated equidistant points. The launch sites were Observatory Hill, Wheelock Vale cemetery and (ulp) out behind New Hampshire and Wilson. Fergie sorry, Ceiba drew the hill. To Dick fell Wheelock Vale. I, as the only former (short-lived) member of Harry Hillman's harrier legions, inherited the "hot corner," which though unlighted was crossed fairly frequently by students taking a shortcut to dinner via the part of College Street later expunged by the Hopkins Center. Well before Launch minus one, the other two were in place, their rockets angled in their receptacles to trisect the Green. I, on the other hand, walked about my little patch of outback whenever I thought I saw a figure approaching, and only when the carillon modulated from its pattern of changes into the Westminster Chimes did I whip out my rocket from under my parka and crouch over the milk bottle I had set in place. I angled the projectile northwest and then, like the other two, on the third of the hour strokes I applied my match flame. I cannot remember what color my rocket was (my memory of that night is in black and white) but to my amazement it went just where I wanted. The others did too; the three almost met over the campus. I hadn't long to admire the effect, because at the "whoosh" of the rocket several figures converged on me. I yelled "There he goes!" and dashed toward College Street. A small phalanx veered in response and raced past me. Then I just walked away.

Shortly after the return from the holiday break, on January 11, the D carried a story that made a big change in our schedule and in our lives. The new directorate had been chosen. Dorrance was the Managing Editor; I was the News Editor. The big headline, of course, was that Budd Schulberg was Editor-in-Chief. Joe Millimet was Editorial Chairman, Bill Minsch Editorial Director. The functions of Features Editor and Sports Editor had been combined under the title of City Editor, and that was the redoubtable Scherman. Furthermore, I was to continue as film critic, writing "Day by Day."

The new set-up meant further inroads on our time. Eleazar had not yet published a column in the new year when the paper carried a notice: "Eleazar Will you act as a judge in the Duchess of Dartmouth Contest? Not necessary to reveal identity, as letters to be judged will be published." A story headlined ELEAZAR BREAKS SILENCE, ACCEPTS CONTEST DUTY, two days later, started out: " 'DELIGHTED TO JUDGE DUCHESS CONTEST STOP CONGRATULA- TIONS TO NEW DIRECTORATE AND VALE TO OLD.' Thus did Eleazar, mysterious bard of the frozen latitudes, break a long silence that had caused concern in The Dartmouth office and on the campus."

The Delta Alpha parade held in conjunction with the Norwich game of October 5, 1935 (D 39, N 0), included an entry from Lord Hall that featured a coffin labeled ELEAZAR. This stirred Mark Twain-like reactions in the bard. We exhumed the Royal and tapped out a note on the pine tree stationery: "Out of the mists of Wheelock Vale . . . Lord Hall's entry in the Delta Alpha parade was timely. ELEAZAR's in town again!" The note found its way to the D's Monday editorial meeting and after some back and forth in the Notices column there appeared, on October 15, the familiar "From Eleazar's Quill." It led off with "Hanover Homecoming": Eleazar's back, you say?And no one saw him come?No one heard the brass bands play The bugle, fife and drum?No one saw the bamiers fly?No one sensed a thing?No one heard the joyous cryThat made the welcome ring?The specially chartered invisibletrainThat bore the invisible bardHad "Eleazar Special" onA bright green invisible card.

Despite the hoopla, our senior-year work load drove Eleazar back into his trunk. Besides the curricular require- ments, our Dartmouth jobs required more time than ever. The paper had taken up the cause of marble workers in Proctor, Vt., who were striking for higher wages and better working con- ditions, and our social conscience did not sit well with Ernest Martin Hop- kins especially since the Proctor company was owned by a loyal Dart- mouth alumnus. State troopers halted Dartmouth trucks delivering student- and faculty-contributed food, clothing and money to the strikers. Alumni screamed for Schulberg's head; Hoppy warned the paper of possible discipli- nary action; Budd in an editorial called the prexy a fascist, and finally the pres- ident summoned the editor to his office to discuss expulsion. Hoppy rocked him, Schulberg wrote recently, by ask- ing, "If you were sitting in my chair, what would you do?" Budd gulped and stammered, "I guess I'd have to say, 'Look, I don't agree with this young man about ... a lot of things they're printing in that paper, but this is a liberal aits college, and there's a tradition of editorial independence for The Dartmouth." Hopkins paused and then replied, "Yes, I'm afraid I have to agree with you." Our campaign continued.

Dorrance and Kappler alternated in riding herd on Night Editors, supervising the closing of every issue at the press right until the next directorate took over, in January 1936. Soon therea fter, starting our final semester, we considered resuming operation. But Eleazar had been silent too long, and I had serious skiing to do. "Of course if we don't resume the column we'll never have a chance to reveal ourselves and get off stage to roaring applause," I said, without much conviction.

"Everybody's probably forgotten about Eleazar anyway," Dorrance replied.

That wasn't so. During leazar's silent last semester the Class of 1936, in its Senior Preferences, voted him second to Browning as its Favorite Poet reversing 1935's placement and ahead of Frost. (1937, a whole year postobitum, was to vote Browning-EleazarFrost too). The vote renewed our yearning to set the record straight, and Commencement provided a dramatic opportunity.

June 13, 1936. The sweating Sachem the übiquitous David E. Scherman in breechclout and suntan, was in midflight in his Class Day Oration, a traditional work of far-fetched prophecy. Suddenly a ripple ran through the black-gowned '36ers sprawled on Observatory Hill. Describing the activities of an unlikely Hanover judge, Elwood Doyle, in the far-off year of 1966, the Sachem exclaimed, "A green arrow shot through the door and transfixed the judge to his bench. I jumped up it was ELEAZAR!" Could it be? That morning's Dartmouth had said the Oration might reveal the bard's identity. Did Scherman know the secret? Was he Eleazar? Scherman went on: "Who are you?' gasped the dying judge. The shrouded figure reached up to his mask and pulled it off. I saw! My God, it couldn't be! It was —"

Two shots cracked out from the vicinity of Bartlett Tower, and the Sachem fell dead at the foot of the Old Pine.

The wonderful thing was that Scherman didn't know. I had sold him on the near-revelation and assassination as the perfect ending for his Class Day act. Then, a few days before Commencement weekend, we arranged with the D's managing editor, Bill Leonard '37, for a day-long interview the day before Class Day for "something important." In it we spilled the whole story, making Leonard the first person, except our parents and our two trusty New York gofers, to know the identity of the perpetrator, which over the years had been laid to English professors Franklin McDuffee, Stearns Morse, James Dow McCallum, Allan Macdonald, and Kenneth A. Robinson; President Hopkins; Ann Hopkins; Dean Chamberlin; Boston Post sports columnist Bill Cunningham; football immortal Eddie Dooley; the former director of the Dartmouth in China program, and a sizable fraction of the Classes of 1934 through 1937.

We wanted the Saturday Dartmouth to carry the whole story and be hawked by newsboys even as the Sachem fell, but we were no longer on the directorate and that would have been a bit much. As it was, Leonard, a crack journalist, had hours of work boiling down the three-year history of Eleazar into a four-column piece in the Sunday extra Commencement Edition (bannered ELEAZAR REVEALED! . . . OLSON SIGNS WITH RED SOX).

At the end of Leonard's story was Eleazor's "L'Envoi." It said, in part: The Sachem's bow, the Sachem'ssmileWere oily for a little while.The feathered Sachem was too smart.We blithely shot him through theheart.Before, we've sliced with straightedged razorsA host of would-be Eleazars,The night was dark; it kindly hidThe deeds that Eleazar did. and ended: The green quill now is laid aside;The last of the emerald pink is dried.The pines still sway; Eleazar passes He looked at Dartmouth throughgreen-colored glasses.

Frank Kappler '36 (left) and Dick Dorrance '36, who jointly created "Eleazar, as theylooked in their senior year.

Cover of The Green Quill, the only anthology of verse by the mystery bard.

"Let's play 'Eleazar': you put up signs, I'llwrite poetry."

Eleazar's untraceable signature, all squares and triangleswith connecting lines.

FOR THREE YEARS in the thirties the campus was enlivened by the presence of a mysterious "Eleazar" whose topical verse appeared regularly in The Dartmouth. His identity had everyone guessing, and just as intriguing were the bizarre ways in which he submitted his copy (once on White House stationery). The quality of the verse made every literary figure in Hanover suspect. Eleazar eluded detection completely until "they" chose to unmask themselves on Class Day in 1936. In this article Frank Kappler '36 tells how he and classmate Dick Dorrance pulled off this clever operation for so long, inducing one to wonder: would, or could, undergraduates today devote so much mental energy and free time to prankish fun?

Frank Kappler carried his Dartmouth journalistic activity over into -postgraduate lifeand for 46 years was writer or editor forNew York newspapers, radio, and magazines. His longest association was as writerand associate editor of Life, for which healso did three books about the magazine. Herecently completed a fourth, LIFE: The First 50 Years, to be published by Little,Brown. When he retired in 1982 he wasassociate editor of People weekly.