Winter Palace

Winter Palace

notebook

CAMPUS

WISHFUL THINKING President Ernest Martin Hopkins, class of 1901, had hoped the class of 1900 would donate funds for a campus literary center along the lines of Yale's Elizabethan Club. Class officers were willing, but their classmates considered the idea too "aesthetic" and chose to fund the DOC House instead.

GREEN ENTRANCE The class of 1967 planted a memorial grove of trees at the DOC House for its 35th reunion in 2002. Six eastern white pines form an oval at the front of the building.

EASY ACCESS Skaters could skate into and out of the basement changing room through a frozen canal. Future plans, never realized, called for a swimming pool and bathhouses.

READERS’NOOK The house originally contained the J.H. Rust Memorial Library, a collection of books on camping, hiking, and winter sports made possible by a donation of $500 from the parents of J.H. Rust ’30, who died in a canoeing accident on the Connecticut River in 1928.

VOCAL SUPPORT Songfests became popular at 1930s banquets. Participants initially focused on drowning out other tables, but through time the singing became more harmonious.

TECH WONDERS The building was outfitted with radio equipment to broadcast music in the dining room and, via an amplifier on the roof, outside for skaters. Floodlights allowed for night skating.

GOOD EATS Upstairs, a kitchen and dining room were “fitted up as a restaurant, designed to meet its own expenses,” according to David Hooke’s Reaching That Peak: 75 Years of the Dartmouth Outing Club. “Ma Preston’s chicken and waffles soon became famous,” wrote Pete Sawyer ’32. The kitchen and dining room were expanded in 1940, but the restaurant was not profitable and eventually closed. It opened for summers only until sometime in the mid-1980s.

STEAK BREAK This football postgame dinner was a tradition on the DOC House lawn in the 1960s. “Some 260 people attended this all-you-can-eat affair, and it was judged a huge success,” Hooke wrote of the first such meal.

It’s one of the most unsung buildings on campus. The Dartmouth Outing Club House, designed by College architect Jens Frederick Larson, opened in 1929 as a center for winter sports and club activities. The owner of Occom Pond, Mrs. C.P. (Fanny) Chase, donated the land, while funding for the $60,000 building came from the class of 1900, whose members were all given honorary DOC memberships. Its restaurant is long gone, but the DOC House still hosts events and rents skates and skis. Here’s a quick look at some of the building’s little-known history.

Sue Shock