Dr. Wheelock's Journal

Divers Notes & Observations

ONE OF OUR MORE FAITHFUL and gimlet-eyed—readers told us that in Sports Illustrated's preview of 1994's top Olympics competitors, among the Americans only one college affiliation was mentioned. You guessed it, of course. Of the eight alumni and students scheduled to participate in pursuit of one Olympic medal or another, five-times U.S. women's luge champion Cammy Myler '92, from Lake Placid, New York, was chosen to carry the U.S. flag in the opening ceremonies.

We attribute the providential absence of the usual "randoms" haunting the campus to the extreme cold and the traffic-halting snowfall just before Carnival weekend. That in turn resulted in what the Daily D called "a quiet Carnival." The spanking new Collis Center drew an enthusiastic crowd of 500 for the first formal in many years, and some of the fraternity houses even took the trouble to create snow sculptures, to accompany what looked like the Abominable Snowman in the center of the campus, emerging from a pile of textbooks. The skiers failed again this year by a miserable two points—to out-schuss the Norwegian-heavy UVM team; but the Green women basketeers ascended to 6-1 in the Ivies by crushing Columbia and Cornell.

Also sports-wise: Maribel Sanchez '96 recently returned from Memphis, Tennessee, with the junior U.S. cross- country title. After the Heptagonals she will head for Budapest, Hungary, to compete in the world championships. And a word for the protean Laura Iwan '94—Phi Beta Kappa, Rufus Choate Scholar, engineering major, head of the local chapter of the Society of Women Engineers, for two years president of the Thayer School's Solar Car racing team: she has just been honored by USA Today as one of 20 members of the paper's all-USA College Academic first team. As if that weren't a handful—or an earful Laura also plays a mean first trumpet in the Barbary Coast.

One of the more personable Montgomery Fellows in recent months was Pulitzer Prize author and PBS documentary award-winner David McCullough, whose all-too-short stay on campus was crowded with appearances in class, seminars, and discussions. Before a packed Cook Auditorium, McCullough engagingly and anecdotally told of his 35 years as an author. He especially embroidered on the character of the subject of his latest work, Harry Truman. He was the first speaker in our memory who was able to give advice on writing to students that was specific, down to earth, inspirational, and immediately useful. McCullough, Yale '55, had visited Dartmouth most recently at Hanover's yearly book-and-author luncheon. He told one group that, at least once as an undergraduate, he appeared "at a Carnival bacchanal when all stops were out, and the beer in the fraternity basements was over my shoe tops." However, he also allowed that Dartmouth was "my kind of college, where the most prominent feature of the campus was the library tower."

Next visitor of prominence: none other than President Jean- Bertrand Aristide of Haiti, as the keynote speaker at a Dickey Centersponsored conference on "The Future of Democracy in Haiti."

We learned that on February 2, the Dartmouth Club of Washington put on a splendid celebration of the 175 th anniversary of the Dartmouth College Case, in the very candle-lit hall of the Capitol where in 1819 Daniel Webster presented his historical plea before the Supreme Court. Speakers this time were Justice Harry Blackmun, former Dartmouth president Dave McLaughlin '54, and Yale law professor and Dartmouth Trustee Kate Stith- Cabranes '73. The occasion took place, we think, on the same evening that the Republican Party observed Ronald Reagan's 83 rd birthday in another part of town—an event commemorated also in Hanover by some of the more conservative students, and highlighted by a Reagan trivia contest.

STILL ON THE TOPIC OF NATIONAL al affairs: We recently read a simple reason for President Clinton's bad case of the sniffles when he was here in New Hampshire during the 1992 campaign. In his latest physical exam, on January 20, his doctors reported that he was allergic to pine trees.

A quiet Carnival and a noisy Olympics, where Dartmouth carried the U.S. flag.