O, but Green Key Weekend has grown tame indeed!
Soon younger alumni and students will begin celebrating the legendary party weekend, but as with most legends, past splendors have faded into a far more boring present.
Though they try hard, today's revellers can not begin to match the hard-partying ethic of their forbears.
"My recollection only is that Green Key was the best," Gordon Thomas '49 said. "I guess because everyone was sick of winter and it was the middle of May."
Donald Goss '53 said students used to rent out farmers' fields in order to play a game of softball where the base runners were supplied with beer at every base.
"By the end of the game, it certainly got to be less scientific and more a case of let's get to the base to get more beer," Goss said.
Dates and trains
Several alumni recall a time when Dartmouth men would pick up their dates at White River Junction train station, the site of countless memorable events.
Many of them would meet their date, usually girls "imported" from nearby women's colleges, for the first time that Friday afternoon amid the whistling clamor of the steam engines.
"One day my roommate went down and his date tied his tie -- people wore ties in those days -- to the train," Robert Kirk '42 said. "It was an embarrassing situation."
Pairings between students and visiting women were not always successful.
"That was very exciting to go down to White River Junction to pick up your date," Goss said. "Of course, if it was a blind date, the question was what kind of a blind date was she?"
Kirk said he still finds the sheer volume of incoming women astonishing.
"The thing that stands out in my mind is that nobody had cars, there were no planes and it was just trainloads of girls coming up for the weekend," Kirk said. "In retrospect, people will tell you about the big bands or their pretty date, and I'm impressed by the trains ... tells you something about my date."
Goss remembers a friend who, upon meeting his blind date, "immediately dubbed her the 'Beast of the East.'"
Later in the evening, Goss' friend auctioned the "Beast" off to several friends in a fraternity basement. "She really got into it and had a grand old time, dancing and pouring beers on the fellows," he said.
Goss found for himself a romance more fitting for Valentine's Day.
"One of the things that happened to me was we had a wonderful Green Key weekend and I proceeded to take my date to the train station," Goss said.
When Goss got to the station, he said, "I figured, what the hell," and he drove down to spend a week at Wheelock College in Boston with his date Lilian, who later became his wife.
Bands
Fraternities also used to hire local bands to play their parties. One such band was the Green Serenaders, led by Paul Weston '33, later a band leader for The Danny Kaye Show.
"I never had any dates for Green Key because I was always working," said Bill Scherman '34, who played string base in the Serenaders.
Scherman said one year the Serenaders had trouble finding a trumpet player for their band, since they played from memory and without sheet music.
"We finally got one who couldn't ad lib at all, so Weston stayed up all night and wrote up 150 scores of popular songs," Sherman said.
Despite his later fame, "right then he was Paul Weston and leader of the Green Serenaders and we didn't have a trumpet player and he got us one," Scherman said.
The Prom
Many alumni also reminisce about the Green Key Prom held in the old gym. Students would show up in tuxedos with their dates to dance to big names bands like Guy Lombardo, Benny Goodman and Glen Miller.
"They were very excellent," Goss said. "The decorations were unbelievable."
And the party didn't necessarily end Monday morning.
"One of the guys had a car and he had it fitted with what he called the 'white wonder,'" Goss said. The "white wonder" was a beer dispenser fitted into the car's dashboard.
On Sunday, as Green Key festivities began to wind down, the student took off with his friends on a week-long tour of parties at women's colleges -- Holyoke, Smith and the University of Virginia, "where the white wonder was exercised with all its power," Goss said.
Yellowing traditions
But traditions yellow and beer goes flat.
By the 1960s, big bands had become rock bands and students began reinventing old traditions.
"I remember the myth of Green Key weekend but not the weekend itself," Wayne Wadhams '68 said. Wadhams played in two bands, -- The D. Men and The Fifth Estate -- but was absent for all but one Green Key weekend during his four year stay at the College.
"All I remember is sweating my ass off all night, singing and playing, and then crashing afterwards," Wadhams said.
But at the Big Green, partiers never go away.
Phillip Moy '76 recalled one Green Key when the students decided to end their night of partying by occupying the Parkhurst Administration Building, beer keg and all.
Earlier the same year, students had occupied an administration building, and Moy's fraternity, Theta Delta Chi, "thought we should do something similar but with a different attitude," he said.
"Eventually we set up croquet and horseshoes and people came by and we'd sing a stupid song, 'Here's the Revolution,' in mockery of what happened at Brown," Moy said.
Eventually, former Dean of the College Carroll Brewster came along and drank a beer with the mock revolutionaries, he said.
But, overall, alumni memories become les distinct and lose their fairy-tale aura.
"Green Key wasn't a particularly outstanding event in my life," Charles Carner '74 said.
The same sentiment is echoed again and again among many more recent alumni.
"I think Green Key was pretty low key for me," Monie Chaffee '81 said.
"I remember a lot more about Homecoming or Winter Carnival," Wendy Cornish '81.
In fact, as time went on, some alumni said Green Key seemed to blend in with every other weekend on campus.
"It was just a big outside party. Yeah, I mean practically the whole four years was a big party when I was there," Julia Matuschak '81 said.
In those years, Green Key was still strongly dominated by the majority male population of the College.
"I just remember the influx of women from other colleges and thinking, 'What, aren't we good enough?,'" Patricia Berry '81 said. "I would say there was probably a great deal of resentment when the women were coming up."
Berry said she would end up going to fraternities.
"I think for the most part my woman friends and I would just plan to go to the fun parties," Berry said. "I think most of my women friends would agree that the best looking guys were in Psi U, and we'd sort of gravitate towards there."
Associate Director of Alumni Affairs Burgwell Howard '86 said The Hums stood out as a main Green Key event during his stay.
The Hums were a singing competition between different houses.
"I was in Sigma Kappa and we did sort of a rap, kind of making fun of all the other houses," Berry said. "And it was pretty funny, but it wasn't quite received as such by the other houses."
Howard said one Green Key, his fraternity, Beta Theta Pi, invited breakdancers up for the weekend.
"It was actually a pretty good weekend," Howard said. "Good weekend, good party , and actually a bit of urban life brought into Hanover."
The Hums also went the way of the wind, discontinued due to lack of student interest, going the same way of the now merely historical chariot races and wetdowns.
Current students inherit a special weekend that holds nothing special for them.
Green Key, at present, is just another party weekend.
