Dr. Wheelock's Journal

Divers Notes & Observations

EXAM WEEK—MORE WORRIED expressions, more stacks of books under arms, more purposeful strides across campus, and on top of it all, the blizzard of '93 with 20 more inches of snow. After that, spring break, hundreds of Tucker and other interns off to climes and jobs prosaic and exotic, on five continents; hundreds more students going early for Language Study Abroad, mostly in Europe ("When will I ever again be 19 and in Paris?" the quoted one sophomore); ballplayers, with the help of alumni Friends of Baseball, are off to a ten-game schedule in California; the golf team boldly tees it up in Florida against opponents who have been at it year 'round; the Mountain-eering Club goes to Utah and Colorado, where else?; the Ledyard Canoe Club heads down North Carolina rivers.

And there just may be a few oldfashioned types who will take in Bermuda or Fort Lauderdale, or even spend a few quiet days with Moms and Dads, kid brothers and sisters and old high-school flames.

FEBRUARY IN HANOVER REALLY cooled off the cage for the March lion's entrance. It had all the old-timers topping each other's tales of sub-zero cold and waist-high snowdrifts. With Lillian Gish's death at age 99 hitting the nation's front pages, a few even remembered the town's excitement, back in the teens, over the young actress getting picked off in the nick of time from the White River ice floe (no doubles in those days), in D.W. Griffith's "Way Down East."

With a little help from the Skiway staff, U.S. army engineers had a 200- foot-long snow pile to test out CRREL's new tunneling device to be used in Antarctica next summe, for excavating subterranean passageways between various South Pole facilities.

It was also cold enough for a fugitive from the New Hampshire state prison to seek refuge in the Baker Library stacks, only to be smoked out by the Hanover police after a day-long search.

Nothing cold about the climate in Thompson arena, however, as the Green hockey team took the measure of nationally third-ranked Harvard, 4-3, for the first time since 1981; and over Cornell, a 5-3 victory awaited even longer than that. Dartmouth's nine ECAC wins, more than the last three years' combined, put the College in the playoffs; but in the first round, before a home crowd that recalled the sellouts of long-gone eras, we lost a heartbreaker in double overtime to Colgate, 4-3.

Not to be outdone, the 8-0-1 women stickers made it 9-0-1 against Princeton to take the Ivy title, beat Brown in their ECAC playoff opener, then lost by a single goal to powerful Providence. Three of the Green players were named all-Ivy, including Player of the Year Gretchen Ulion '94.

I To round out major sports trill umphs, the men skiers finally 7 achieved at the Middlebury Carnival what they had been working on all season, and beat their nemesis, the University of Vermont, by a gratifying ten points.

ALREADY THE COLLEGE'S MAJOR influence in the cultural and educational life of the Upper Valley, both the Hop and the Hood are currently expanding their outreach activities. The Hopkins Center's new head of arts education, Aileen Chaltain, has installed "Hop Stop," a Saturday series for public school students within, a 40-mile radius of Hanover, introducing them to such Center features as electronic music and theatrical productions. Ms. Chaltain has also encouraged volunteer Dartmouth student groups to visit and teach at budget-deprived schools that have had to abandon such programs as drawing, drama, music, crafts. And more than 6,500 youngsters a year come to visit the Hood museum and take its regular tours. Now, thanks to a $500,000, five-year grant from the Lila Wallace/Reader's Digest fund, the Hood will be able to bring the Hood's facilities, slides, and workshops out into the nearby school systems themselves.

DIGGING AGAIN INTO THE subject of tunnels, we sidewalk- superintended one afternoon as the glacially paced steam tunnel turned the corner from College Street around the library onto Elm Street. A pile-driver was pounding what appeared to be the 2 5-foot long, two-foot wide steel sides of the tunnel into deep clay at about one inch per minute. One lone elm remains on Elm Street, we hope not in progress's path—although it is right opposite Dragon, which is expected to make way for the library expansion. (Before Dragon had announced its move, one cynic surmised that perhaps the library could be built right around it, recalling the recalcitrant corner bar that refused to make way for Rockefeller Center in New York—and another said if that happened, it would then be the nearest any member of Dragon ever got to the library.) It is now reported, however, that Dragon will be spirited away to a -vacant lot on Occom Ridge, and that its neighbor will be the new newly planned $2.2 million home of Hillel, the center for Jewish life at Dartmouth, when it is completed, in 1995. Al-Nur, the Muslim Student Association, is also working toward the establishment of a home on the campus.

Back for a moment to the center of town, plans known as the Downtown Pedestrian Improvement Project are afoot to reconstruct the west side of Main Street from Casque & Gauntlet to the bookstore, as well as the sidewalk on the side of the Hanover Inn facing the Green. Right now, matters could certainly be improved for pedestrians across the street in front of Collis, where bulldozers and all sorts of construction vehicles working on the new Student Center are churning the sidewalk into a sea of mud. One veteran of mid-March mire has called for the laying of duckboards in the area.

What? You don't remember duckboards?

Spring in Haover is not very visible. The snow flies, and so do the students.