"The 43-year-old 'Queen of the Snows' Winter Carnival beauty contest is dead."
So began an article in The Dartmouth from Jan. 15, 1973, in anticipation of that year's Winter Carnival, the first one women would attend not only as guests, but as students of the College.
With the advent of coeducation in the 1972-73 academic year, the Winter Carnival Council eliminated the once nationally famous contest, saying ranking women on physical beauty had become unpopular.
But earlier in its lifetime, Dartmouth's pageant was staggeringly popular. For the thousands of women visiting friends and fiancees at the College, the contest was a chance to receive national attention.
Faye Chase, the wife of Russel Chase '45 of Beaumont, Texas, was named Queen of the Snows in 1946.
"All the publicity that went with it was amazing," Faye Chase said in a recent telephone interview with The Dartmouth. "It was a truly wonderful experience."
Russel Chase said his wife was in dozens of publications.
"Really all of them," he said. "The Boston Globe, The New York Times, Life Magazine."
Faye Chase said photographs of the event still hang in her home.
"We still talk about it. It is an event that has followed me through my life," she said. "It has made me a celebrity -- at least among our friends."
A popular tradition
While the Queen of the Snows pageant may seem like ancient history now, during its heyday it was accepted and celebrated at the highest levels of the College -- one of the judges for the 1946 pageant was College President John Sloan Dickey.
For a woman visiting the College, being named Queen of the Snows meant being the center of attention of the entire weekend.
A 1941 issue of The Dartmouth described the frenzy of activity surrounding the pageant winner: "the good-natured it's-all-in-fun laughter was with Joan Walters through the rain and slush, through the blinding ordeal of the flashbulbs and the 'just one more smile please,' the endless wearying questions, the sound and the fury that is the burden of a girl at Carnival."
Of course, the Queen of the Snows was only one of the thousands of women visiting the College each winter.
"The mid-February weekend was often portrayed as a College girl's dream" said an issue of The Dartmouth from 1973.
Airlines were quick to capitalize on the weekend's popularity with women.
A 1937 advertisement for the Boston and Maine--Central Vermont Airways quoted a fictitious Dartmouth man saying, "I'm sending the girlfriend a ticket to come to Carnival by PLANE. Brother, will she be thrilled."
So many women visited Dartmouth during the 1950s -- 1,800 came for the 1952 Carnival -- that fraternities and residence halls were vacated to house everyone.
"There were always chaperones at every house, usually the parents of two of the brothers," English Professor Harold Bond told The Dartmouth in 1978. "Upstairs were off limits to the men."
The tradition of importing women by the bus-load was so firmly entrenched by the 1940s that The Dartmouth featured beauty tips from female guest columnists.
Dorothy Halsey, a Wellesley College student, advised Carnival guests in 1946, "Don't wear ski pants unless you can stare yourself down in a rear view mirror. Broad on the beam may be a Navy expression, but if you aren't careful it may mean you.
The end of an era
With the start of coeducation in 1972, fewer women began to visit the College's winter weekend.
"The time when being crowned Queen of the Snows was the big point of any sensible girl's college life was most certainly in its waning phases," stated an article in The Dartmouth from 1973.
Some of the men of Dartmouth, however, refused to date their female classmates, whom they viewed as intruders.
"It would be like dating your sister for the biggest college weekend in America," a male undergraduate told The Dartmouth in 1973.
Richard Zimmerman '76 wrote a letter to the editor of The Dartmouth later that week stating "there will be about 1,000 dateless men, of which I am one." Zimmerman complained Dartmouth's few female students usually dated upperclassmen.
In a recent interview, Zimmerman told The Dartmouth women still came in by the bus-load during the early 1970s. But, he said, that culture was dying.
"It was a very difficult time to be at Dartmouth," he said.
"Upperclassmen would sit down in lawn chairs and rate the women as they came off the buses with rating cards," Zimmerman said. "The women of Dartmouth were incredibly offended by that."
In 1972 the last Queen of the Snows was crowned. A column submitted to The Dartmouth that year described the winner as "eminently brainless and beautiful, carrying her full-bosomed body with grace and perfect ease."
The column said judges asked contestants questions such as, "If you were a man, would you grow a beard?" Members of the audience were reported as saying "What a lay!" and "Jesus Christ, what boobs!"
"The only unhappy moment of the two-hour sex ritual came when [History Professor] Maryssa Navarro, leader of the hissing section, said dejectedly: 'How can the girls do that to themselves. It's deplorable,'" the column stated.
In an interview last month, Navarro, who still teaches history at the College, said the pageant "got to be very raunchy and disagreeable." Navarro said some students' behavior may have been especially vulgar in 1972 because coeducation was eminent.
"It was a difficult time to be a woman at Dartmouth," she said.
Navarro said the Snow Queen pageant was "part of the tradition of the old Dartmouth that needed to be transformed. Some traditions had to be tempered, and some remained."
And, she said, some were enriched.
