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JUNE 2000
Article
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JUNE 2000

Two Dartmouth scholarathletes have worked their way into the Baseball Hall of Fame at Cooperstown, New York—but not for how they play the game. In 1947, right after Jackie Robinson crossed the color barrier, Whitney Williams '50 interviewed the great second baseman and then-commissioner of baseball Ford Frick for a Dartmouth thesis on "The Sociological Implications of Breaking into Major League Baseball." Visiting Cooperstown a few years ago, Williams asked if the hall would be interested in his thesis and his correspondence with Robinson. The hall's library archivist took him up on the offer.

A few months ago, Williams got talking with Big Green pitcher Jonathan Miller 'OO. When Williams heard that Miller had written a paper titled "Baseball Under Segregation, 1867-1947," he urged the reliever to pitch his paper to the Hall of Fame. Miller's scholarship, like Williams', is now part of Cooperstown lore.

"It's always nice to be rewarded for your efforts," says Miller, a history major who also edits a weekly sports publication on campus. "I hope I have contributed, in some way, to our general understanding of baseball's great and storied history."

Bragging Rites Guggenheim. Fellow' Russian professor Lev Loseff has been awarded a $34,000 Guggenheim Fellowship to write an annotated, bilingual edition of Nobel Prize-winner Joseph Brodsky's poetry. "Brodsky was a genius and the most unusual man of letters from the past century—an unbelievably versatile writer who wrote in two languages, Russian and English, and belonged to two cultures," says Loseff. Brodsky, a Soviet exile who was Dartmouth's 1989 Commencement speaker, authored nine volumes of poetry before his death in 1996. Loseff is translating Brodsky's Russian poems into English and his English poems into Russian. "He was thedearestfriend," says Loseff. "This work allows me to keep this friendship alive."