Toasting the President

This jughead is onegood-lookin' mug.

UNTIL THE FREEDMAN YEARS Toby jugs didn't have much presence on campus. The Hood Museum owned, rather quietly, five of them, but few people in town knew a Toby jug from a Hummel. (Toby jugs, first produced in England in the mid- 1700s, are caricatures rendered as ceramic drinking vessels. Imagine David Levine working in clay.)

But collector Steve Mullins '54, a member of the search committee that made James O. Freedman president, also made him a Toby jug fan. Today Freedman owns 51 of them.

Make that 52. Mullins and the American Toby Jug Museum (of which he is curator) commissioned Staffordshire's Old Ellgreave Pottery Company to create a Toby of Dartmouth founder Eleazar Wheelock (with the College's original fundraiser, Samson Occom, as the handle). In April the Dartmouth Club of Chicago presented Freedman with Wheelock Toby No. 1 as a farewell gift. "Besides a single jug made once of Eli Yale, which hardly counts," said Mullins "this is the first jug ever made of an American university president or founder."

Alumni take note 149 additional Wheelock Tobies will be made during the next year, then the mold will be broken. To order one, call (847) 570-4867.