Dr. Wheelock's Journal
Divers Notes & Observations
ANOTHER OF THOSE FOOTBALL games that get talked about all winter long. The setting: Memorial Field, Dartmouth vs. Princeton, and the Green was hoping for an unprecedented four-way tie for the top spot, possible only if Penn beat Cornell.
Near the end of the game in Hanover, the news came over the loudspeaker of a Penn victory. I Four seconds to go, Dartmouth ahead, 10-7, but Princeton's ball on Dartmouth's one-yard line. The Princeton place-kicker's grandmother couldn't miss an easy 18-yarder, and neither did he. The field goal evened the score, and the tie backed the Tigers alone into the title.
The season saw a gallant comeback for Dartmouth, predicted by the cognoscenti to tail-end the league this year. But after a hesitant start came six straight wins, four of them against Ivy rivals. At the previous week's so-so victory over Brown, the game's most wildly-cheered moment was not a touchdown run or even a heroic tackle it was play-by-play's announcement that Yale had just upset Princeton, leading to the hoped-for scenario limned above. But 'twas not to be.
IN AN EQUALLY HOTLY CONTESTED arena, it looks like Senator Dole or Speaker Gingrich will miss Hanover this year. The closest they got was the Republican governors' conference in Nashua though affable and youth ful-looking Congressman Rob Portman '78 (ROhio) energetically plugged the Dole campaign last night in Rock Center. Everyone else is coming through. Pat Buchanan, self-proclaimed "only authentic conservative in the race," packed Webster Hall. Also in the "self' department, self-made industrialist Morry Taylor was here. Lamar Alexander, checked shirt and all, has been and gone. Steve Forbes came during the first week of December.
We learned the other day that Dartmouth has a hat in the ring, from the head of theoretical physicist John Hagelin '76, candidate of the Natural Law party. His platform looks and sounds pretty much like everyone else's, with the significant addition of a call for meditation—that's meditation, not mediation or medication, though a little of all three might be put to good use around the Beltway these days. Hagelin got 95,000-plus signatures to get on the ballot in California, so he must be doing something right. As Buchanan kept saying, "That's what it's all about."
The hot campus topic in early December was an international conference on the Arctic, sponsored by the College's Arctic Institute and CRREL—you remember, the U.S. Army's Cold Regions Research and Engineering Laboratory, right out there on Lyme Road. About 300 polar scientists and research managers, from 21 countries including China and Russia, are to attend this landmark gathering. The goal is to name the ten most pressing areas of future polar research. The next issue of this magazine will cover the conference and show the many ways Dartmouth has studied the Arctic.
THE HOOD MUSEUM HAS outdone itself with "Image and Self," an exhibit of the art of Native America. Organized by three Native-American student-curators, works by tribal artists afford an innovative look into native perceptions of their own culture, its anger and its humor, its frustration and its hope. This part of the show completely avoids today's stereotypes of Indian life. But there is also an accompanying exhibit of what we have come to accept as the best of those stereotypes, a spectacular collection of the early nineteenthcentury paintings of George Catlin: of chiefs, pow-wows, warriors, headdresses, huntsmen, plains and buffalo, rivers and canoes.
SOMETIME BACK WE TOLD YOU of the class action suit filed almost a year ago by seven alumni against the Trustees, seeking a change in the way the College selects Alumni Trustees. That suit was dismissed by a New Hampshire Superior Court in October. The seven have announced that they will appeal.
The class of 1961 has engaged sculptor George Lundeen, who created the life-sized statue of Ben Franklin that now graces the Penn campus, to do a similar one of Robert Frost. If the class and the College decide to locate that statue on "the road less traveled by" as you recall in the poem, that's something that will make all the difference.
BEFORE WINTER GETS TOO well under way, a summary of fall sports achievements. Foremost, both men's and women's cross-country were victors for the second straight year in the Heptagonals. The women missed by seconds placing in the NCAA's top ten. Field hockey beat Yale twice to win the ECAC championship, but Cornell was the women's nemesis in the soccer ECACs. Men's soccer, with 12 freshmen making up half the squad, struggled early in the season, but as they got to know one another they finished with a flourish, 3-4 in the Ivies. Looking ahead, we hesitate to jinx the men and women basketeers, but we predict that both will wind up first or second.
Early Carnival word: February's theme will feature dinosaurs and the slogan, "'Round the Girdled Earth They Roamed."
Not to go that far back, but we did greet one of Dartmouth's historic winter sports figures in the bookstore this afternoon, signing copies of the new book, The Man on the
Medal. It was wiry, pint-sized bundle of energy Dick Durrance '39, leader of the first U.S. Olympic alpine team in 1936, four-time collegiate champion, winner of 17 national titles, pioneer documentary filmmaker on skiing (200 of his pictures are in the book) and, undeniably, the College's best-known skier in its heyday of skiing prominence.
No braggable snow yet, but the days grow colder even as we approach that solstice when they start growing longer. Puts us in mind of what 1933's newsletter editor, a certified Maineiac, wrote his classmates (from Florida) last April: "If you can't take the winters, you don't deserve the summers."
Hopeful Republicansshow up. and the campus gets North Polarized.
