The First Four-Minute Mile and the Last Coverup?
Divers Notes and Observations
Busman's holiday? Nugget moviegoers were impatiently waiting the feature was already ten minutes overdue—when the unusual announcement came that the film was being held for a late arrival. After a few more minutes the lights finally dimmed as a distinguished-looking gentleman came down the aisle and slumped in his seat. It was the noted French director Bertrand Tavernier, current Montgomery Fellow and recipient of the Dartmouth Film Award, who had just finished screening his own internationally famous movie, L'Appat (Fresh Bait) but didn't want to miss the new American black comedy Fargo.
A considerably larger audience was enchanted earlier this month by "the world's smallest traveling opera company," Quartetto Gelato. The four, per-forming on nine instruments plus voice, produced more musical flavors than Ben and Jerry ever dreamed of. Another standout concert attracted a standing-room crowd at Spaulding: an all-Beethoven program by the celebrated Pinchas Zukerman, joined at the piano by a hard-working Marc Neikrug.
We have always been impressed by the ingenuity and resourcefulness of the Senior Symposium, and this year's was no exception. The '96s chose as their theme "They Said It Couldn't Be Done." Among the alleged impossibilities covered were the moon-landing mission; the Chunnel; the Mets' rise from nowhere in 1968 to World Series winner in '69; the first four-minute mile; the first artificial heart—and, wonder of wonders, Dartmouth going co-ed in 1972. Each of the events featured a key participant: NASA chief historian Roger Launius; Jack Lemley, chief engineer of the Chunnel project; Art Shamsky of the Mets; miler Roger Bannister; and heart surgeon William De-Vries. Five of the Green's first alumnae-Donna Bascom '73, Mary Donovon '74, Christine Nicholson '73, Karen Turner '76, Deborah Wedgeworth '76—had a tale to tell about those days when landing on the arid moon was a hospitable occasion by comparison.
The Last Cover-up? Condemned to oblivion are the Thayer basement murals painted in the late 193 Os by Walter Beach Humphrey 14, who at the time was one of America's most popular magazine cover artists. "Colorful and jocund," the DAM editors described them in an October 1938 cover story. Since then, the ceiling-high paintings have been covered and uncovered more often than a Midway stripper.
Humphrey's "decorative picturization" of Richard Hovey's poem, "Eleazar Wheelock," came into existence as the result of some vehement alumni disapproval of the Orozco frescoes in the Baker Library basement, completed in February 1934. But it was Native Americans who disapproved when they began to arrive in significant numbers in the 19705. They felt trivialized by Humphrey's insistent prevalence of "500 gallons of New England rum" and his topless females ("Parisian squaws," the Alumni Magazine had called them). The Hovey murals were covered, with the concession to once-more irate alumni that the paintings be exposed each year at reunion and Commencement time. A decade later, a larger and more conciliatory Native American student body bowed to the historical significance of the paintings, and suggested that the covers come off.
Since then there seems to have been little political interest in the murals. They are now under the aegis of the Hood Museum, and were to have become the background of a "branch" museum exhibiting much of the College's extensive collection of Indian art and artifacts. But another priority has intervened, an urgent need for social space. The Hovey Grill is a prime candidate—but without its murals. "Grill room art can be inoffensive, or it can be distracting," says Hood director Timothy Rub. "It cannot be made value-neutral." And so once again the panels are considered decoratively inappropriate for the use to which the room will be put. The decision-makers have hedged their bets with a set of large color stills and a complete videotape of the entire work, should future generations have other notions.
It has been an uncertain sports year so far, despite stellar individual achievement. Squash player Laurie Sykes '99 was named an All-American; basketballer Sea Lonergan '97 is a GTE Academic All-American; a 61-foot, two-and-three-quarter-inch shot put by Adam Nelson '97 should qualify him for the Olympic trials. Other excitement has been provided by a victory over perennially pesky Princeton in men's tennis, and a last-three-seconds win, 8-7, by women's lacrosse over Yale. We saw that the Green is giving its winningest football coach, Bob Blackman '37A, an honorary degree this June. And finally, a couple of personally-triumphant four-hour Boston marathons by entrants #27,335 and #27,762—known on the campus as Dean Lee Pelton and his wife Kristen Wilson.
