Happy 25th and Other Returns
Divers Notes and Observations
I didn't set foot in Hanover until one year after the 1769 charter had been signed and my husband had already begun building the College. I confess I wasn't quite sure what to expect, particularly since the good Reverend's warm letter of invitation included a request for "100 lb or more of tobacco, and if you have a barrel of old pork, bring it with you...."
To proceed in the same vernacular, this year's mens-sana-in-cor-pore-sano award must go to Sally Annis '97, who has just become not only the eighth female basketeer in Green history to score 1,000 points, and this season is barely half overbut also one of four women engineering majors to win a Thayer School Clare Boothe Luce scholarship (The related Women in Science Project at Thayer had already won a $10,000 grant from the National Science Foundation for the project's ingenious mentoring activities in the fields of science, mathematics, and engineering.)
It looks like a building year for both women's basketball and hockey, though there have been some pleant surprises and promise of more to come. Example: after outshooting Princeton 48-13 only to lose by a miserly 4-3, the women stickers took out their frustration on Yale the next day, 7-0. Once a Dartmouth skier, always a Dartmouth skier and "alumknee" Suzanne King '86 and Nina Kemppel '92 finished one-two in the national cross-country championships in Oregon last month.
A sad moment recently when the green flag on campus flew at half-staff in memory of Heidi Hachtel '96, the soccer team's 12-2 intrepid all-Ivy goalie, killed with her father in a tragic auto accident near Seattle.
A sad moment also, late last year: he death, at 91, of John Dickey's widow, Christine"a gentle presence, a quiet competence, and an unfailing sensitivity to the feelings of others" for which she was awarded an honorary Doctor of Humane Letters in 1970, one of the first official acts of her husband's successor, John Kemeny.
And the College mourns the death of former Massachusetts Senator Paul Tsongas '62. Look to this magazine next month for a gentle remembrance.
A happier event came in the guise of the prestigious Ness Book Award, given by the Association of American Colleges and Universities in January to President Freedman for his book Idealism and Liberal Education. He wrote the book two years ago while on sabbatical and published it last year.
Harvard professor Cornel West challengingly keynoted the campus's event-filled week commemorating Martin Luther King Jr. with a ringing address on "Race Matters" before an overflow crowd at Spaulding Auditorium. Indeed, 1997 is going to be a commemoration -filled year. The Medical School has already begun to celebrate its 200th; both the Black Alumni and the Native American associations will observe their 25 th anniversaries later this spring while the big events of coeducation's 25th will take place over the weekend of October 17-20. The state and the Hanover community have already had their say on one aspect of coeducation: voters just elected the first woman in history to serve as New Hampshire's governor—and the Congregational Church, a.k.a the White Church, gathered by my husband in 1771, recently chose as its 21st pastor the Reverend Carla Bailey of Wisconsin.
Nearly 400 students volunteered to cover the phones at the Alumni Fund Telethon this yer. They established two records one, for number of pizzas consumed, and two, for surpassing their $500,000 goal by almost nine percent, raising a total of 5,621 pledges in two weeks of calling. Next month you have one simple and entirely unfinancial College obligation: to vote for your choice of alumni Trustee candidates: Dick Fairley '55, Ed Haldeman '70, and Nancy Kepes Jeton '76, to replace Joe Mathewson '55, who leaves the board in June. You will find biographies of each candidate on the ballot you receive, and you may vote for one, two, or all three, your only criterion being how you think each is able to shoulder the responsibilities of trusteeship.
By the time you read this, as my husband is fond of saying, Carnival will have come and gone. Its theme was "'Twas a Cold and Snowy Knight: a Medieval Carnival," despite the disappearance some years back of the word "chivalric" from the alma mater.
I'll continue to look on from the wintry shadows that enshroud my weathered headstone behind Massachusetts Row. From here I send warm wishes for a wonderful 25th commemoration! But I cannot depart without thanking, first, the anonymous donors who have established the "25 Years of Coeducation at Dartmouth" professorship in my honor—flattered, too, that the distinguished historyprofessor Mary Kelley will be the first to hold it. I suspect, however, that it was all the work of her irrepressible colleague Jere Daniell '55, who just wanted to prove that he knew my fall name.
