A Full Disabled Life

What Works

I WAS DELIGHTED TO READ THE article on Dartmouth students with disabilities ("Learning What Works," May). I was even more pleased to read of Dartmouth's increasing efforts to improve accessibility and acceptance of students with all kinds of disabilities.

My time at Dartmouth as a student with a disability came just before measures like the Americans with Disabilities Act brought attention to disability issues. Only the newer buildings had ramps, and the different learning styles of people with learning disabilities were only just starting to be studied seriously.

Nevertheless, I have nothing but praise for how Dartmouth handled my needs. In some important ways, the College was ahead of its time. Less than a month before I was to start as a freshman, it became necessary for me to begin using a respirator at night. I had a tracheostomy installed to accommodate the respirator at Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center. At that time, the hospital wouldn't allow me to be on a regular ward it was considered too risky. I had to leave the Intensive Care Unit each morning to attend my first week of classes, but Dr. Jack Turco soon arranged for me to spend the rest of that first semester at Dick's House. Then-Freshman Dean Bonz remained as determined as I was that I should go ahead with my freshman year regardless of whatever problems might arise. Eventually, I moved into Streeter Hall, and spent my junior and senior years living at my fraternity Phi Tau Coeducational Fraternity. All this while sleeping every night with a machine that most hospitals still see as too risky to be supervised by non-ICU nurses.

I will always be grateful and impressed with the openness and courage the College, and Phi Tau, showed in enabling me to live a full Dartmouth student's life despite whatever misgivings some may have had about liability. Even now, in our post-ADA society, people I meet are still impressed with Dartmouth's dedication to letting me find my own ways of "Making Things Work."

PULRANGA@DELPHI.COM

A MORE APPROPRIATE NAME FOR "Learning What Works" would have been: "Dartmouth College Above the Law."

I'm glad that I didn't concede to having my photo appear along with the others that appeared in the article. The authors failed to gain any insight to what I was trying to tell them: The ADA was passed into law many years ago (1990) and the deadlines for implementing changes that can effectively level the playing field have also long past (1992). Nowhere in the article are the ADA deadlines mentioned. Nowhere in the article is Dartmouth's ADA compliance mentioned. The whole article sets the tone that accessibility is nothing more than one big community effort. It may be only a community effort here at Dartmouth, but making the community accessible is required by legal mandates and fire codes (neither of which were ever referred to). The College has chosen to generously spend effort on students who wouldn't be classified as disabled according to the law; and at the same time forced wheelchair users to beg for help from passers-by.

Your coverage of this issue won't change anything here at Dartmouth and the College will continue to turn its back on the handicapped community by leaving in place the biggest obstacle: its policies.

WEST LEBANON, NEW HAMPSHIRE

The Bomb (cont.)

INSTEAD OF WRINGING THEIR HANDS over Hiroshima and Nagasaki ["Syllabus," June], those who condemn the U.S.A. for dropping the bomb should wring their hands over some "unprecedented horrors" of the Japanese variety, such as:

• the atrocities perpetrated for decades by the Japanese against the Korean people;

• the 300,000 Chinese who were slaughtered by the Japanese Army in Nanking;

• the ongoing, planned, calculated Japanese aggression typified by Pearl Harbor and extending throughout the Pacific with appalling loss of life;

• the American P.O.W.s used as guinea pigs in experiments conducted by the infamous Japanese Army "Unit 731";

• the 100,000 Filipinos murdered in cold blood by the Japanese Army in the last days of the war;

• the unspeakable conditions that prevailed in all Japanese P.O.W. camps throughout the Pacific theater;

• the countless lives saved (both Japanese and American) because the invasion of Japan was avoided. The Japanese were prepared to defend the homeland literally to the last man.

Does the course "Memory and Catastrophe" taught by Professors Tansman and Goldman reflect on the fact that the Japanese have barely acknowledged responsibility for waging decades of aggressive, bestial, inhuman war? Do Japanese schoolchildren make "braids of paper cranes as a continuing link"...to the millions who suffered and died because of Japanese policies?

PITTSBORO, NORTH CAROLINA

MY HUSBAND DAVID '33 AND I WERE in Hiroshima in 1973 for three days. We had a very fine guide who had survived the atomic bomb. He said that for two weeks before the bomb was dropped, leaflets were dropped warning the citizens of an attack. His family and others he knew had been evacuated.

MINNEAPOLIS, MINNESOTA

Footnote

LET ME ADD SOMETHING YOU MAY not know about the Eisenhower visit ("Things You May Not Know About the Ike Visit," June). The week after die speech, the press asked the President if he had been talking about McCarthy in the speech and he said he never discussed personalities. But then McCarthy told the press that the President certainly agreed with his call for removing books from our USIS libraries overseas—because the administration was removing them. And Secretary of State Dulles confirmed that 11 titles had recently been removed from our libraries.

Four years later I entered the Foreign Service. Ike was still President, and a good President; but McCarthy and his ilk had seriously damaged the national interest—and the damage continued for years because the administration did not stand up to them—by making it more difficult for our service to report to Washington dispassionately and honesdy on the foreign scene.

PSBRIDGES@AOL.COM

Chip Shot

KRISTIN YOUNG '90 WRITES IN ["Letters," May] to say that she is "embarrassed to say she went to Dartmouth." For once we agree with each other. I am embarrassed she went there, too.

As far as the ad is concerned, rather than worrying about women being "on the receiving end of the putts," she should remember the oldest slogan in golf, "Never up, never in."

KANSAS CITY, MISSOURI

Good Show

UNLIKE ROBERT E. FISHER '42 ("Letters," April), I found the Dartmouth Marching Band's homecoming halftime show hilarious. If Yale chose not to send its band so that friendly insults could be traded, that was Yale's decision. If people weren't laughing at the show, perhaps it was because they were shouting at the freshmen to rush the field, a far more stupid halftime activity.

JGOOD@EPAS.UTORONTO.CA

Not a Molehill

IWAS DISAPPOINTED TO READ THE flippant and sarcastic description of the litigation brought against the College by a group of alumni including former Alumni Councilor Bill Tell '56 ["Dr. Wheelock's Journal, May]. While not among the plaintiffs, I know Bill well, and believe your characterization of his motivations "making a mountain of punctilios out of a molehill of pique to be at best inaccurate and at worst gratuitously insulting. Bill is a committed alumnus and supporter of the College. His concern is that by declaring the right to reappoint alumni Trustees without requiring them to stand for reelection, the College has disenfranchised the entire alumni body Whether the College followed appropriate procedures in taking that action (Bill obviously believes it did not) should be a rather simple matter to decide. However, by gearing up its public-relations machine to make silly, ad hominem attacks, the College demeans itself, and suggests that it feels its own position on the issue is weak.

NEW CANAAN, CONNECTICUT

Tabula Not Quite Rasa

IREAD WITH ENGROSSMENT YOUR March article about Dartmouth faculty who were gifted, life-changing teachers. ["Tales Out of School"] Then, of course, I tried to conjure my own vivid contributions to the list, and sadly drew a blank.

Not a total blank, mind you; far from it Assistant professors Victor Menza and Joel Kudmow in philosophy. Assistant Professor Jon Price in English. Assistant Professor Steven Ledbetter in music. They were central to my liberal-arts experience, and each an exceptional teacher, yet one by one they were told quiedy by their departments or by the administration that it was time for them to move on, to seek employment elsewhere. The tenure system granted them six-year professorial runs which coincided with my four as a student, and I count myself both lucky and grateful.

Let us therefore not forget all of Dartmouth's great untenured, and now former, faculty. I would love to know where and how the living ones continue to share their teaching craft, post-Hanover.

TORONTO, ONTARIO

Green in the Whitewater

THERE WAS ANOTHER SUBTLE DARTMOUTH connection in Meryl Streep's movie, The River Wild, in addition to co-producer Denis O'Neill '70. The opening scene depicts Streep's character sculling down the Charles River. Interestingly, the blades on her oars are painted in the green and white design of Dartmouth crews, perhaps insinuating that the rugged heroine gained some of her wilderness and river travel expertise as a Dartmouth student and rower.

CINCINNATI, OHIO

Earlier Opus

THE "STAGE NOTES" REGARDING the career of the indefatigable Professor Rassias claim that he produced his first traveling play in 1975 ["On the Hill," May], Actually, in 1969 he produced L 'Institution, which played throughout New England at such famous theaters as Holyoke and Colby.

By the way, I wrote L'Institution to avoid writing a term paper!

NORCROSS, GEORGIA

A Good Date Spoiled

THE ARTICLE ABOUT THE HANOVER golf course in the May issue reminded me of a 1930 local (Massachusetts) sports column I came across recendy, written one week in October "...at Dartmouth College where men are green and girls .are as scarce as Norwich touchdowns."

The writer observed, "We always thought golf was a crazy game and if you don't believe me ask the local football players who played the Dartmouth mountain course. It contains everything to kill the golf nut."

CONCORD, MASSACHUSETTS

GLEN WAGGONER, WRITER OF THE article on the Hanover Country Club, must be a 10 handicapper at the highest. The rest of us play short of the pond on the ninth, often hitting a five to the green.

The stand of trees called The Office comes into play on the 13th quite frequently, rarely on the 14th.

Credit should be given to Steve Lyon, the greenskeeper, for maintaining the course as well as it is on a limited budget. He's out no later than five a.m. every morning mowing greens and moving watering hoses. When the in-ground watering system is finally completed, he'll still be there moving pin placements.

HANOVER, NEW HAMPSHIRE

A Line Not Taken

JAY HEINRICHS, WRITING ABOUT THE return of Nels Armstrong '71 to Dartmouth as Director of Alumni Relations ["On the Hill," April], concludes: "Was it Frost who said home is 'where, when you have to go there, they have to take you in'?"

It was Frost all right. I wish Jay had quoted the next line in "The Death of the Hired Man." It seems much more applicable to Nels Armstrong's expressed affection for Dartmouth College:

"I should have called it

Something you somehow haven't to deserve."

HANOVER, NEW HAMPSHIRE

Don't Set This to Music

WHEN DAVID SHRIBMAN '76 WON a coveted Pulitzer Prize in April, I wrote him a letter of congratulation and added a few lines of poesy. He responded: "I think that I shall never see A poet quite as bad as thee."

I agree completely, but nonetheless, here it is (was): "A happier sound than any old Wurlitzer Is the chorus and clang of young David's Pulitzer. Whoopie and zowie and ring all the bells, There's no holding back, let go with the yells. We know him, of course, and so no surprises To learn that his prose has won the best prizes. So fill up the cup, don the green blazer, Hats off to David, true son of Eleazar."

CORNISH FLAT, NEW HAMPSHIRE

We Must Be Mad

AS I LOOK AT THE CARTOON-LIKE cover of the Alay issue and remembering covers of the recent past, I feel compelled to make some observations. It appears to me that the "art" is cluttered and tends to look like any run-of-the-mill newsstand offering. In fact, it is beginning to resemble Mad Magazine. Have we considered a more consistent style for the cover with some emphasis on a design with what might be considered as having a classical Dartmouth significance; something that is identifiable as the Dartmouth Alumni Magazine? Although they contain a Dartmouth person or reference to one, the overall format more resembles pop art and is without any reasonable visual identification with the College.

I know as one ages gracelessly, one tends to be less tolerant and can be accused of not keeping up with the times, but I really believe that some policy should be established taking into consideration the views expressed. I hope others will join me in expressing this point of view.

GREENWICH, CONNECTICUT

Herman, Not Harry

ON PAGE 34 OF THE WINTER ISSUE you said "In the beginning there was Harry Bates, an 1879 Thayer School Graduate. (Yes, we're talking ancient history.) In 1890 the United States census did use his electrical punch-card machine, which begat the Tabulating Machine Company which begat IBM.

There was no Harry Bates of Dartmouth involved with the United States Census via the electrical punch-card machine. The electrical punch-card machine system you talk about was invented by Herman Hollerith, my grandfather, who rented and supervised the operation of the systems used in the 1890 Census. Having agreed to a penalty of $10 for each day a system was not operating, his supervision was very close. His systems saved the equivalent of $1 billion in 1990 money.

There was a Harry Bates Thayer who graduated from Dartmouth in '79 the same year my grandfather graduated from the Columbia School of Mines. They got to know each other at Western Electric, which held the contract for the construction of my grandfather's equipment. Thayer was the project manager. When the Tabulating Machine Company formed in 1896 with Frederic Roebling of the bridge-building family as president, Thayer became the treasurer. He continued to act as treasurer and a director until the Tabulation Machine Company was merged with three other companies in 1911 under the aegis of Charles Flint. Thayer's career carried him to the top of Western Electric and subsequently AT&T.

An interesting side note is that my grandfather might well have sold his patents to the Western Electric Company as a result of his friendship with Thayer. AT&T would then have been in the dataprocessing field along with the telephony and there would not have been an IBM Company as we know it.

MAHWAH, NEW JERSEY

The White Packard

GEORGE WINCHESTER STONE'S comments on those outstanding teachers ("Tales Out of School," May) brought back wonderful memories. In 1948 I was the benefactor of a beautiful white 1938 Packard Sedan with 12,000 miles. It was my "first wheels" and I had been married a year. In those days, a white car was an oddity as most all vehicles were black. The '38 Packard was ordered special for Professor Lambuth from Rogers' Garage. It seems Mrs. Lambuth was color blind and the white car was easy to spot on Main Street. On one occasion, the story goes, she did enter the ice wagon. The car performed for well over 100,000 miles plus. Recently, I saw a copy with a price exceeding $150,000.

NEW CASTLE, NEW HAMPSHIRE

God Meant Us to Think

NATHANIEL WEEKS ("LETTERS," June) says that the Creationism of the Bible is supported scientifically, that Christ died to take our sins, not our brains. He issues this challenge: "Just try honestly to find a single conflict between God's word and God's world."

You need look no farther than page one of the Bible, where it says that God brought forth grass and fruit on day three, but didn't create the sun until day four. Without the warmth of the sun the temperature on earth would be 460 degrees below zero. A blade of grass would not last 24 seconds at Absolute Zero, certainly not 24 hours.

There should be no conflict between science and religion. They are two separate entities. You can accept, on faith, some things you do not understand, but you should reject any portion of your religion which the ability to reason which God gave to you but not to animals tells you cannot be true. Why were you given a brain if you don't use it?

VIRGINIA BEACH, VIRGINIA

Bong

I ENJOYED THE "PRINCE CHIMING" ARTICLE in the June issue, but I was surprised to read that Baker's carillon "is the second largest in the East, after the National Cathedral in Washington, D.C." The second paragraph following this claim indicates that the carillon has 17 bells.

I am aware of a least two carillons in the East with more bells than Dartmouth's. The Mercersburg Academy, in Mercersburg, Pennsylvania, has a carillon of 43 bells. Princeton University's chapel has a carillon of 67 bells. Perhaps a little further research on the subject was in order before the "second-largest" claim was made?

LARCHMONT, NEW YORK

Absolutely. We should have said they were the second-best played in the East. Who's to argue?

Native Symbol

THE CELEBRATION OF NATIVE Americans at Dartmouth ["Occom's Heirs Get a Home," September] is to be applauded. My reaction was that of many alumni: "That's great!" At the same time I feel it would be an appropriate time to restore the Indian as the symbol for Dartmouth, Dartmouth students and graduates, and teams. Is not "Indian" an honorable term for Native Americans? Does it not include both men and women?

It is not my intent to pour salt on old wounds. Radier I feel this anniversary celebration an appropriate time to heal wounds and to restore loyalty to Dartmouth by the many disillusioned alumni.

MOYOCK, NORTH CAROLINA

Bestiality Studies?

lAM DISMAYED BY THE EXCLUSIONARY bias apparent in the newly-announced course of Gay and Lesbian Studies.

Where is the introductory course on bestiality? Or sado-masochism? Or fetishism? Or even heterosexuality?

It makes one wonder whether Dartmouth's vaunted commitment to diversity is nothing but a hollow promise.

EDGARTOWN, MASSACHUSETTS