Oh, You Shouldn't Have!
WHAT DO YOU SAY WHENAN ALUMNUS GIVES YOU A ZEBRA HERD?
The proverb "Don't look a gift horse in the mouth" doesn't apply to Dartmouth. No one has ever given the College horses lately. But Dartmouth has received gift zebras, and corn, and stamps, and mountains. And there was a man who sent a dirty T-shirt to John Dickey, enclosing a note that said he'd given everything else to Dartmouth; he may as well give the shirt off his back. All of these gifts, including the shirt, were accepted.
GUARDING THEIRALTAR-FLAME
A $l,OOO bequest by John Wilder Parkhurst, whose coming to Dartmouth was denied by his death in World War II, provides for an endowment to supply firewood for the president of the College's fireplace in Parkhurst Hall.
ONLY DRIVEN ON SUNDAYS
EVERY YEAR FOR almost a decade during the presidency of John Dickey, Ralph Rickenbaugh '28, a Denver car dealer, donated an almost new Cadillac to the College to be used as the President's fancy automobile.
GOLDEN DOUR
IN 1981 CHARLES Marx '31 donated a collection of rare United States gold coins, appraised at $60,000, to Dartmouth's museum collection.
FLD. WAIERFT. PRPTY.
A COLLEGE trustee once gave Dartmouth 270 acres of property in Key West, Florida. Most of the land is submerged mangrove swamp.
TEA FOR SIX
A SIX-PIECE SILVER tea set once owned by Daniel Webster was given to Dartmouth in 1978 by Judge Bailey Aldrich of Boston "in commemoration of my warm friendship for Frank L. Harrington '24."
All of the pieces are engraved with the Webster crest, a horse's head.
SMOOTH SKATING
A GIFT OF $6,000 from Mary Fletcher in 1967 is jointly used by the town and College to help pay for the cost of clearing snow from Occom Pond for skating.
CAN'T LICK THAT
IN 1982, MEADE Alcorn '30 gave his stamp collection to Dartmouth to honor his friend and classmate Nelson Rockefeller '30. The collection includes mint sheets of every stamp issued during the Eisenhower administration.
FINE PRINT
BAKER LIBRARY received a gift of about 200 miniature books from the widow of Allerton Hickmott 'l7. Many date from the eigh-teenth and nineteenth centuries, and most are less than two "inches long.
BIG BE!
THE WILLIAM W. McCandless Fund was established in 1966 with a gift of $51.44 from E. Marshall Nuckols, Jr. The sum represented the payment of a bet by William W. McCandless, Princeton '56, on a Dartmouth- Princeton football game.
FILL THE BOWL UP
THE FAMILY OF William Buchanan '24 donated a soup tureen that once belonged to the Earl of Dartmouth.
PEAK GIVING
HENRY Teague '00 bequeathed to the College the Mt. Washington cog railway, which in 1952 carried 35,000 passengers to the top of the mountain. He also gave Dartmouth the top of the mountain, which he had purchased during the Depression for a few hundred dollars.
STEP UP
ARAILING IN Dartmouth Hall is the gift of the class of 1944. A gold plaque identifies it as "A Class of 1944 Hand Rail."
GIT ALONG,LITTLE DARTMOUTH
FOR TWO YEARS Dartmouth owned the 91,000 acre Diamond A Ranch near Wagon Mound, New Mexico. Acquired in 1958 as a bequest of Leon Williams '15, the ranch (and its 2,600 head of cattle) were sold.
A RUM FOR THE MONEY
AGIFT FROM Harvey L. "Dusty" Rohde '39, a sprinter during his undergraduate career, recently helped Dartmouth acquire an all-rubber athletic track.
IT IS, SIR, A SMALL GIFT
NE OF THE most important items ever given to the College was a gift of $1,000 from John Wheeler, an Orford, New Hampshire, farmer. The College used the money to hire Daniel Webster '01 to defend the College against the state legislature in the famous Supreme Court case.
LIGHT FANTASTIC
DURING THE energy shortage of the seventies, the College turned down a proposed gift of flood-lighting for Baker Tower. The would-be donor cut the College out of his will. But only a few years later, he gave the Mary Hitchcock Memorial Hospital ten percent interest in four of the largest tuna boats in California, and the hospital later sold the boats for half a million dollars.
Incidentally, the College did get its flood-lighting for Baker Towerin 1977 a gift of theclass of 1940.
COLLEGE ON THE COB
A FARMER FROM Kansas City, class of '21, donated a prize bull to the College and authorized it to be sold for $1,500. A few years later he offered the Alumni Fund 43,764 pounds (that's 22 tons) of No. 3 white corn. "I had visions of this grain arriving, to my horror, in boxcars at White River Junction," says Cliff Jordan '45, former executive secretary of the fund. Instead, Jordan had the corn sold for about $1,000.
THE ORIGINAL ZEBRA
A ZEBRA THAT won a place in Dartmouth history is a stuffed version, a gift of Elias Hasket Derby, a Massachusetts shipping mogul, .that was a favorite possession of John Wheelock. Along with the skin of a black snake, the vertebra of a whale, and the tooth of a mammoth, the zebra was one of the first gifts to the College's natural history collection.
GIFT OF ADIFFERENT STRIPE
IF THE COLLEGE had accepted all that corn, it could have been eaten by the zebras given to the Alumni Fund by J. Gary Bucher '65 as a 20th reunion gift. But the College sent them out to a New York animal dealer instead, netting about $20,000.
Marx'schange.
NelsonRockefeller '30
Baker received a handful andmore of Hickmott's books.
Along with the railway came the top of Mt. Washington.
"Dusty"Rohde '39
