Lest The Old Traditions Fail
Years ago I attended a Dartmouth wedding. The bride and groom were Dartmouth graduates and so were both their fathers. Many of the couple’s friends were Dartmouth alumni so at one point all alumni present were invited to gather and sing the college alma mater.
Originally written in 1894 and titled Men of Dartmouth, a revised version was necessary when the college became coed in 1972— three years after I had graduated.
First up was picking a new title. Men of Dartmouth officially became Dear Old Dartmouth along with an additional eight lyric changes in 1988. One phrase that survived the re-editing actually explains why it took 16 years for a new version to be finalized. Those words are “Lest the old traditions fail.”
As an alumnus myself, I joined the group and quickly was pegged as an outlier. Soon after the singing began I fell silent. I didn’t and still haven’t ever learned all the words for either Dartmouth’s old or new alma mater. Afterward an alumna actually berated me for my ignorance but I wasn’t completely clueless. The old rendition had a stanza that I had committed to memory…
They have the still North in their hearts,
The hill winds in their veins,
And the granite of New Hampshire
In their muscles and their brains.
Do I remember it because I took two geology courses at the college nearly six decades ago? N-a-h! But does any other school anywhere own up to having those who matriculated there leaving campus with rocks in their heads?
I confess I wasn’t much into Dartmouth traditions. Hey, the latter half of the 1960s when I was a college student was a “to hell with traditions era.” Pot came in and restrictions on hours women were allowed in dorm rooms went out.
While I was at Dartmouth the student body elected a fictitious candidate to be president of student government which led the college administration to abolish it. Then in the spring of my senior year 45 students were jailed for a month after a takeover of the College’s administration building protesting against the Vietnam War and ROTC’s presence on campus.
In the 57 years since I graduated, my visits back to Dartmouth have been almost exclusively because of the good fortune to have great friends who live where the College is located in Hanover, New Hampshire. But there was a moment when that changed. It was at my class’s 50th reunion in 2019 and involved a tradition I had never given any thought about before.
The only other Dartmouth reunion I had attended was my class of 1969’s 40th a decade earlier. My reaction upon seeing those who were there for their 50th reunion at the time left me asking myself “Am I going to look like that in 10 years?”
Disappointingly, my 50th felt to me a bit too much like being instructed about how to remember Dartmouth in my will. Of course there was a modicum of logic to that. We were 72 and despite thinking that was the new 52, it wasn’t. A decade earlier I had seen the future.
But back to a Dartmouth tradition and an epiphany— an aha moment —that this one created for me. At commencements 50th reunion classes are seated in the front closest to the graduation ceremonies. These events take place on The Green— a five acre space of lawn with criss crossing paths that is actually the only thing remaining circa 1769 when Dartmouth was founded and a pine forest felled.
As I sat there I thought about the thousands of others who also had sat there before and particularly the 50th reunion class of 1919 a half century earlier. I wondered how many may have attended my own graduation?
I could only find this picture of them gathered before their their own commencement. What I discovered is that if someone who was born in 1897 and reached the age of 20, his life expectancy was early 60s something. That likely narrowed the number of those attendees from the class of 1919 who made it to my 50th in 1969.
And there was something else I realized. The First World War had begun in 1914 and the United States had entered it three years later. I wondered how many of those who had served and fought in WWI might have been at my commencement?
According to the Dartmouth Alumni Magazine, 3,407 Dartmouth alumni and undergraduates did serve, and 112 were killed in WWI. Some of these men may have also been veterans of WWII as well. What were they thinking as they sat there in front of me in 1969 at a time when Americans my age were fighting another war that many of my generation opposed?
As they sat there at their own graduation history was unfolding for them in 1919. The edition of The New York Times that day in June preceded the signing of the Treaty of Versailles by five days…
… to be continued
