Out of the Woods

The young man in the picture, Elihu Ben Klein '51, is the author of one of the most eclectic-and-long-lived-columns in Dartmouth history. Writing under his childhood (and now professional) name Woody, Klein pounded out a weekly piece that was supposed to cover sports but often strayed miles beyond the campus. He had firm opinions on everything from Dartmouth football to Holyoke women ("the nicest in New England") to the Korean War.

Like many sports writers, Klein took up the craft by default. Captain of a championship Fieldston High School football team in Riverdale, New York, he recalls, "I came up and took a look around, and everyone was too big. So I decided to write about it instead."

The young sociology major quickly adopted the muscular style of his hero, New York Post sportswriter Jimmy Cannon. A typical Klein column is a study in terseness: "Previous to last Saturday neither Dartmouth nor Cornell had reached full potential this year," he wrote in 1950, "and it was expected that one of the two powerful Ivy League teams would explode. The Big Red did, and the Big Green didn't, and that's the story of the ball game."

The column reflected the times in more than style. Woody Klein was one with the mid-century macho Dartmouth maleness. In October 1950, after a football game against Harvard the Big Green's first win of the-season he ecstatically described whiskey-laden undergraduates, rude fans, fights on and off the field, "the familiar downing of the goal posts," and a late-night intercollegiate fracas that had to be broken up by the Boston riot police. Klein concluded happily, "That certain intangible something called 'The Dartmouth Spirit' came back with renewed vigor."

"Out of the Woods" didn't stop when Klein graduated. After getting a master's degree at the Columbia Journalism School, he took the column with him to the New York World Telegram and Sun. In 1965 New York Mayor John Lindsay hired him as his press secretary, and the column moved to the Greenwich Village Villager. When he became became editor of IBM's employee magazine, Think, he took "Out of the Woods" to the Westport News in Connecticut, where it has appeared for the past 20 years. His pieces now cover national and local political and social issues more than sports, but the column itself lives on,