Nels Comes Home

When Nels Armstrong '71 talks of "coming home" to Dartmouth, you can't help listening for a song cue. Dartmouth's new director of alumni relations tells you that the view from the Green looks almost the same in any direction since his student days. He talks about the lovely hills that surround the campus and that focus your attention inward. He describes the confidence that a Dartmouth education can give a graduate, a sense that there are no limits. He even calls up the mist that envelopes you on the way to class in the morning "as if you're carrying the campus around with you."

So he must have had a pretty great time as a student, right?

"Actually, it was rough," Armstrong says. The first time he ever saw the campus was when he showed up for his freshman year in September 1967. His dad and two of his dad's friends drove him up from Newport News. They all had dinner at the Village Green, spent the night in a motel on Route 5, then drove back into campus. "I got out of the car and nobody else did, and it was clear they expected me to be on my own. My father said,'I love you, son,' and then they drove off.

"I didn't know a single soul on campus. I couldn't think of what to do except go up to my room, 203 North Topliff. I spent a lot of time in that room that year. Except when I was in class, or at football practice, I sat on the window seat in Topliff. This place didn't seem exactly welcoming. I often just sat in my room, staring out the window."

He clearly did a lot more than that, helping develop the Afro-Am Society, becoming one of the first actors in the Black Underground Theater & Arts, and majoring in music. He stayed on for three years after graduation, working as a student counselor. He did a stint with the Dartmouth Alumni Fund in the late eighties before going to Case Western Reserve as director of alumni and parent relations. He had been promoted to director of university alumni affairs when he got the call to return to what he insists on calling "home."

Armstrong notes that he is only the fourth alumni director in Dartmouth history, and that the three people before him, Sid Hayward '26, Mike McGean '49, and, most recently, Mike Choukas '51, retired in office. "I'm ambitious about the job and about the College," says Armstrong. "But I figure I have plenty of timeunless a certain president and vice president decide they have other plans."

And what are his ambitions? First, he says, he wants to be sure "we keep having fun. People don't get involved in Dartmouth unless it's fan. By that I don't mean just party time, but the kind of things that families do when they get together." And over the long term, he wants to "keep bringing the Dartmouth family together including people who may be feeling left out."

Was it Frost who said home is "where, when you have to go there, they have to take you in"?

Nek wantsto keepbringing thefamily together.