1942

Fifty years ago this month, starting our second Dartmouth month, we saw what I have always considered the greatest Dartmouth football team of ail time. It was the one game in our freshman year when the Big Green was at full strength with Harry Gates coming out of retirement to join Bob MacLeod, Colby Howe, and Bill Hutchinson in the backfield to decimate a good Yale team, 24-6. The Aegis commented: "With Gates blocking with the clear cut zip of a woodman's axe and MacLeod freed of his role as the key blocker, Dartmouth was for one game what it might have been for them all." I'll never forget my first visit to the Yale Bowl, 50 years ago this month.

Sports and sports journalism, a first love of mine on the Hanover Plain, have continued to be such. Until your letters'and news start pouring into this corner, you'll probably get more of them than you want.

At our 45 th Reunion banquet in June, the question was asked: What was the outcome of the William and Mary football game in our senior year? Ted Arico and I thought there were more points scored than was actually the case; the score was William and Mary 3, Dartmouth 0. The winning 39-yard field goal was kicked in a driving rain on fall houseparty weekend.

Also at our banquet the question was asked: Who was captain of varsity golf in our senior year? The answer: Wilmer Martin. Bill died in April 1973. Two other varsity golfers in our class were Dick Remsen and Mel Figley. Dick has continued to be a topnotch golfer and in 1987 was ranked fourth nationally among U.S. senior golfers by Golf Digest. Mel, who left Dartmouth at the end of our junior year to study medicine at Harvard, recently retired after a long stint as head of the department of radiology at the University of Washington Medical School. Mel, who got additional medical and radiological training in Ohio and Michigan, told me recently that he had a most satisfactory career, sending over 100 radiologists into the world, trained to serve as Mel thought a doctor should. In retirement, Mel is dividing his time between his home in Issaquah, Wash., and Green Valley, Ariz. A permanent move to Arizona may be in the offing. Mel and his wife, Peg, have three boys.

Even the mail bag had sport connections. From Dick Lippman came a release about Joe Wilder whose painting of Russian weight lifter "Alexeev" has been chosen as the subject of a commemorative poster for the 1988 National Symposium on Physical Fitness and Sports Medicine. Joe is not only an internationally acclaimed artist but an accomplished surgeon who has pioneered significant advances in the field of trauma. I might add that the' picture of Joe accompanying the release suggests that Joe could still take the field as the all-American lacrosse player he was.

And finally from Ad Winship, a news story about a New Hampshire law that is threatening to make an athlete out of BobKirk. Bob is a Hanover selectman and as such has been charged by New Hampshire law to accomplish the required seven-year perambulation of Hanover's 20 miles of perimeter. According to Kirk, the walk "isn't going to be like walking along a sidewalk." Stop grousing, Bob, the law doesn't require you to swim the Connecticut River portion of the boundary.

P.O. Box 504, Burlington, VT 05402