Recalling the Bay State, the 10th Mountain Division, and a Dartmouth Skiing legend.
From Roger to Ted Williams, Massachusetts has led the league in almost every department—religion, government, war, sports, medicine, technology—and there is an unusual twist to almost every event. A new book by Christopher Kenneally '81, The Massachusetts Legacy (Adams Publishing), offers 150 "landmark events" as examples.
In 1663, John Eliot's Bible was the first to be printed in America—and it was in the Algonquian language. In 1850, Esther Howland invented the Valentine card—and she never married. Paul Revere's Ride and the Boston Tea Party are here, but so is the invention of The Pill. Other Bay State gifts to the world: Goddard's rocket, basketball, the telephone, the telephone directory, the Polaroid camera, Christian Science, and Unitarianism.
Kenneally a graduate of Boston Latin (America's first public school), is an assiduous researcher. Each of his short chapters reveals the kind of unusual I-never-knew-that discoveries that can make a reader a sought-after (or avoided) conversationalist.
Page Smith, '40, author of the eight-volume People's History ofthe United States, was made Captain of C Company of the 85 th Mountain Infantry Regiment, 10th Mountain Division almost at its inception at Camp Hale, Colorado in July, 1943. He led C-85, a mix of skiing non-infantrymen and infantry non-skiers, through the year-and-a-half of training from which it emerged as a confident fighting unit, to its first engagement against the hitherto impregnable German fortifications on Italy's Mt. Belvedere. Page's reminiscences, along with those of 33 other solders have been resourcefully amassed by John Imbrie and Hugh Evans in their volume Good Times and Bad Times, a History of C Company, 85th Mountain Infantry Regiment, 10th Mountain Division, (Vermont Heritage Press).
Dr. Peter Dorsen '66, sports medicine editor for Cross Country Skier magazine, writes enthusiastically about Dick Durrance: The Man on The Medal: The Life and Times of America's First Great Ski Racer. Says Dorsen, "What a life by Dick Durrance and what a feast of photographs by his equally talented wife Miggs. No wonder the USSA decided to use the photo of him hammering down a Colorado slope for their ski championship medal."
Durrance coined the "Tempo Turn," as he won three US Collegiate Championships, retired a Harriman Cup, and took eighth place in Garmisch at the 1936 Winter Olympics on his home turf.
Durrance would apply the same intensity to filmmaking, in this case making The Sun Valley Ski Chase (winning the Cortina Film Festival). No doubt about it, everyone in the Durrance family is a doer, including Dick Jr. '65, who distinguished himself as a skier and leader during his own sojourn through Dartmouth.
