Fathoming the Practical Universe Dan and Whit's

There is a store across the river where the uninitiated buyvintage wine and brie. To see the Upper Valley as it shouldbe, you must go behind the Green Door...

HEN I CAME TO DARTMOUTH IN 1959, FRESH FROM THE streets of New York, I kept bearingibout this wonderful store called Danowitz. Supposedly it sold everything.

I needed everything. In New York I had got by nicely with some city clothes, a smart umbrella, several bookstores, a few kitchen utensils for my flat. Now that I had bought land in Vermont, and meant to restore a house and keep a few sheep, I rapidly built a list of about 2,000 things I needed. Many, to my urban ears, had exotic names. Just for sheep fence alone, I would need a driving maul, a post-hole digger, several rolls of six inch spacing woven-wire stock fence, a five foot iron bar, a come-along, two sizes of staples.

About my third week at the College, I drove to the wonder store. It turned out not to be Danowitz at all, but Dan & Whit's. Never mind. People hear differently. Dan & Whit's is on the main street of a town which in England would be called Norrich, but in Vermont is called Nore-wich.

In I walked. What I saw was a medium-sized grocery store, plus a couple of aisles of farm clothes, a good selection of paint, a lot of drawers full of weird little tools, plenty of nails. It was definitely not like a Gristede's in New York, but...this was everything? I felt a sharp twinge of disappointment. Where were the post hole diggers? the mauls? the 1,998 other things I needed?

Roughly half of all Dartmouth graduates are now entitled to smile in a superior way, and conclude that I had not yet discovered the real Dan & Whit's. True. I hadn't. I soon did. though, and when I walked through the famous Green Door and on out back, I thought I was in rural heaven. The front section of Dan & Whit's contains maybe ten percent of the total stock, and most of the rest is back here.I wandered from aisle to aisle, looking at a come along here, a stock fence there, iron bars against the wall, eight kinds of stove pipe on the shelf. Oh, good. Here are salt blocks for sheep.

But now I get to smile. Yes, a great many Dartmouth students discover Dan & Whit's. Nearly all who do find their way through the Green Door and on out back. It may be fraternity members needing stuff for house repairs. It may be a sophomore wishing her parents would be a little less noisy as they exclaim over the incredible selection (and low prices) of maple syrup. Or three Outing Clubbers after genuine barn jackets.

Whatever the case, most think that when they have been out back, they have seen the whole store. They are wrong. They haven't been upstairs. You can't blame them; the way is like a Vermont back road, totally unmarked. But upstairs is still sales space.

You'll have to get one of the people who work at Dan & Whit's (don't call them clerks they are much more than that) to go with you. Maybe Perry. Or Linda. Or Julie Smith '95. If you didn't find the right barn coat out front, there are a lot more up here. Boots? Dan & Whit's could probably outfit an infantry battalion from stock on hand.

I hope you did a small double-take at the mention of julie Smith. She is emblematic of a whole other relation the Col lege has with Dan & Whit's. Julie grew up in Norwich, and it has long been a rite of passage for Norwich kids to work after school at Dan & Whit's. And who are Norwich kids? Many are the children of Dartmouth faculty, of Dartmouth administrators, of nurses, doctors, and staff at Dartmouth Hitchcock. "We get a pretty good quality of kid," says Jack Fraser, son of Dan, and one of the store's owners. True. On one side of the river, Leonard Rieser was dean of the faculty and provost. On the other side, his teenage daughter Abigail worked at Dan & Whit's. Dean Rieser himself came in regularly to buy grain for the family ducks, and a thousand or so other things.

Dean Rieser and his family even used to play a sort of Dan & Whit's game. One team would name an item; the other team would have to say where in the store you found it. Rieser once mentioned the game to Jack's brother George Fraser. George looked thoughtful. "We could use you around here," he said.

Julie Smith, who first put in afternoons at Dan & Whit's when she was 15, now works there only on occasional vacations. But she has been there enough so that a curious thing happened when she entered the College. "I would get into a class, and my professor would already know me. From Dan & Whit's,of course. '

I'm not done with space yet. There is still more to Dan & Whit's. There's the enormous cellar. I don't go down there often, but quite enough to know that that's where they keep the many cords of firewood used to heat the store, lots more paint, sugaring supplies the other ten months of the year, lawnmowers in the winters, snow shovels in the summer...

So how much stuff does Dan & Whit's have? Well, I was talking to Jack last year. (That's Colonel Fraser, if you prefer, in the Army Reserve and he gave up a chance to be General Fraser. He would have had to go back on active duty for four months special training, and he didn't want to put the extra burden on his father.)

Jack is not a boastful man. But that day he happened to be feeling talkative. We were swapping war stones. I had told him about my own days as an artillery captain, and he had told me about the time he commanded Bravo Company of the 16th Infantry, and the considerable coincidence that two of the five junior officers in the company were fresh out of Dartmouth.

Then we drifted into current matters. I asked him something I had long been curious about. Did he know just how big the total stock was? "Well," he said, "I have read that the average hardware store stocks 25,000 to 35,000 items counting every nut and bolt size as a separate item. I'm not just sure what we have. But I think it s around a quarter of a million.

Today Dan & Whit's is even better than it was in 1959. Have I said anything about the local baked goods? The glass cutting, the key-making, the free air for car tires? There may be a better general store in the United States. But I haven t heard of it.

Did I mention that they stock very good wine, and a lot of it?

how muchstuff doesDan & Whit's have?

NOEL PERRIN has been a Dartmouth employee for the last 36 years, a Dan & Whit's customer for thelast 35 years, and the author of several books, including Life with an Electric Car.