Arthur E. Allen '32
Sailing Coach
ON ART ALLEN'S RETIREMENT in 1994, Athletic Director Dick Jaeger '59 remarked that the 82-year-old was then the oldest coach in the Ivy League. The former Wall Streeter had come back to Hanover in 1968, and at once became firmly lashed to a sport you would not immediately identify as typically Dartmouth. Having spent a good bit of his life on the water (and as an undergraduate, under it, on the swimming team), Allen—a WW II destroyer escort captain, and since his Long Island Sound boyhood, a passionate member of the sail set—immediately joined Bill Hurst as the other unpaid coach of the Dartmouth sailing team. Since then, the Lake Mascoma Navy has won respect not just in the Ivy League, but in regional and national waters as well. Beyond his regular recruiting of talented student helmsmen and -women, it's Allen's boast, too, that the sailing program costs the College not a dime. Through his relentless fundraising among former varsity sailors, the current teams' parents, and his own classmates—he writes hundreds of personal letters a year, by hand—the team has been supplied with 24 new Flying Juniors, a well-maintained clubhouse, and last but not least, an endowment to cover the annual salary of a professional coach.
Art Allen turned Lake Mascoma into the Green Sea
