David O. Hooke '84
Facilities Manager, Outdoor Programs
NOT SINCE JOHN DICKEY '29 was president has anyone at Dartmouth more looked the part he played. David Hooke—bearded, burly, rugged—is a living extension of a breed of Dartmouth person who connected the life of the mind with the life out of doors. He continues a distinguished line going back to legendary woodcraft advisor Ross McKenney and Outing Club founder Fred Harris '11.
He is a great writer and a superb builder of cabins—the two poles of a Dartmouth education.
He wrote the definitive history of the Outing Club. He knows all the tales, from stories of the mountain god who lives atop Moosilauke to the origin of the name of Smarts Mountain (a trapper named Smarts who poached the traps of the local Abenakis, was caught, and drowned beneath the ice of Reservoir Pond). He tells the story of "Doc Benton" better than anybody.
He is a shrewd businessman and entrepreneur. He has turned the Ravine Lodge into a modest but successful resort, with occupancy rates higher than they have been since the building was used as a ski lodge. And he has done it cleanly, with integrity. I once offered to help market tapes of the Doc Benton story in this magazine, if David were willing to record that part of Dartmouth's strictly oral history. "Yes," he said, in true Nixonian fashion. "But it would be wrong."
David is likely to be uncomfortable about this article. He will say that others deserve more credit, like his boss EarlJette '55A, for instance, but that modesty is in keeping, too. He has a quiet about him, a self-deprecation that is attractive and natural. Yet his eyes and face are animated, and he is quick to laugh. You could not ask for better company at the Ravine Lodge.
He has a profound sense of place, and understands the importance of that sense in students. He has a keen sense of the sacred. In Dartmouth terms, no more than that needs to be said. ■
On Reservoir Pond: Central casting could not have come up with someone better than David Hooke to manage the real estate of the DOC.
