Cramping his six-foot frame under a low-lying rock overhang, the young miner splits a stick of dynamite down the middle with a knife and packs it into the wall 300 feet below ground.
Cold water drips from the ceiling onto his head and he is grateful for the rubber slicker and heavy shirt he wears as protection in his job as a powderman.
After the ex-Marine has left the mine for the day, a muted rumble emanates from the caverns below as his explosive charges are set off, shattering the solid rock into manageable fragments.
The chilled and damp zinc miner is a young James Wright, working his way through a regional college at $2.35 an hour in the early 1960s in Galena, Illinois.
Not many college presidents, let alone professors, remember a youth like this one.
"I got hit a few times by falling rock, not enough to take me off a shift, but enough to leave a few scars," he remembers, flexing his large hands in search of a physical reminder.
"Age takes care of these things," Wright says, giving up.
Wright said his three years as a miner didn't have much influence on the thirty that proceeded as a professor and administrator at Dartmouth. "I am a product of many experiences," he says. "I am a work in progress."
But a moment later, he recalls his lunch breaks at the mines.
The men would gather in the back of an old panel truck with their lunchboxes and the old-timers would spin yarns about life when they were young.
Ten years later, Wright would be telling stories about America's history too -- only indoors in front of a hundred people and for $10,000 a year as a history professor at Dartmouth. He estimates he has taught five percent of the Dartmouth alumni alive.
Leaning back in his chair, his eyes gazing out his office window overlooking the Green, Wright says for him, mining "was a good job."
"But I'm glad I'm doing this and not that."
The uniqueness of Wright's background is underscored by a 1997 University of Illinois survey of Big Ten universities which noted that only about two percent of faculty came from similar working-class backgrounds.
In his early twenties, Wright had never heard of Dartmouth, and was barely cognizant of life farther east than Chicago.
His life as president of one of the most prestigious universities in the nation, raising funds that run in the tens of millions of dollars, is a far cry from the small change he once worked for.
Standing in his cavernous Parkhurst office, current College President James Wright is still at ease handling the makeshift powderman's knife he used nearly 40 years ago in the zinc mines outside Galena, Illinois.
The knife -- really an old file wrapped in black electrical tape -- sits on Wright's desk, embedded in a piece of wood from Heart Mountain, a Japanese internment camp.
Wright is proud as he shows visitors the other possessions in his office that he has collected over the years.
"The things on my desk all mean something to me," he says.
Especially important to Wright is a huge chunk of lead, heavy enough to require two hands to lift, which he picked up in the Galena mines. Sitting on his desk, it serves as a reminder of his time working for the Eagle-Picher Mining Co. as a powderman and trimmer, knocking loose rocks from the ceilings of new blast zones.
The mine was cool and damp, whether it was high summer or the deepest part of the icy Illinois winter, Wright recalls. The din of crashing rocks and heavy-duty engines was a constant companion, and the air was filled with rock dust and diesel fumes.
"It was not good air," Wright says. "The dust and residue of explosions would hang there for a long time. The smell was very intense."
"At the end of a shift, I would often have such a headache," Wright says, remembering the "powderman's headaches" caused by nitroglycerine in the dynamite he worked with.
"I expect those kinds of conditions wouldn't be allowed today," he says.
"Trimming was by far the most dangerous part of the job," Wright says, however, recalling the death of a trimmer at a neighboring mine.
A porcelain figurine given to him by former College president John Kemeny's wife, a brick from the Berlin wall and assorted autographed baseballs (Wright is an admittedly poor player, but an ardent Red Sox fan) line up on the wide mahogany desk from which Wright pilots his college.
Joining them is a polished handle mounted on a smooth piece of rich dark wood. When queried about how he obtained it, Wright is vague.
"It's from my high school," he says without explanation, his eyes sparkling.
If someone had told the young Midwesterner what his future would look like, Wright says laughing, "I would have thought they were teasing."
"I don't think growing up where I did, mining, anyone would have thought like that," he adds.
The mines which once dotted the landscape around Wright's birthplace are closed now.
Today, Galena has transformed itself into a vacation spot boasting 1.2 million tourist visitors annually. Golf courses and private clubs have replaced Mom and Pop general stores and local dives. It's a very different place from the small river town Wright was raised in.
Two weeks after his high school graduation, Wright joined up with the Marines, traveling to Hawaii and Japan as an airman.
After his military stint, the 21-year-old Wright thought he'd try mining -- "I thought it would be fun," he says -- and soon after entered the University of Wisconsin-Platteville , hoping to become a teacher.
During the school year, he worked as a night watchman in order to afford his $160-per-semester tuition.
Wright's educational experience was thrilling for him.
"It was quite a striking moment in the history of American higher education," he says, recalling the radicalism that animated most schools in his day.
The man who spent his nights furtively studying Shakespeare in between keeping a lookout for fires and intruders at the mines would soon be offered a Danforth Fellowship, guaranteeing him tuition to any university he wanted to attend for an advanced degree.
"I tend to be very sympathetic to programs like financial aid," Wright says, crediting his teachers for encouraging him and leading him to the success needed to obtain the fellowship.
In 1968, Wright gave back to the profession that had inspired him, joining the Dartmouth faculty as a junior history professor.
His first office, in Reed Hall, Wright estimates, could fit in his current headquarters about a dozen times over.
"If two students came to visit me at once, we would have to go outside. I had a chair for one student but not enough for two," he says, chuckling.
Though the students he taught at Dartmouth were Ivy League undergraduates and many were wealthy East Coasters, Wright notes that he had one thing in common with many of them.
"I certainly came to know students who were [the first in their families] to come out to college," he says, recalling his own first-generation college student status.
Wright's parents were "pleased," he says, that their son had earned an advanced degree -- both of Wright's grandfathers had not made it past the 8th grade. But still, Wright is not sure his parents grasped the implications of an Ivy League professorship.
"I think they understood that it indicated I had done well," he says modestly. "They were more troubled that I was moving far away."
But move away he did -- and he has stayed on, passing through his first job as a teacher and occupying later administrative posts as provost and dean of the faculty.
"This is a special place," he says of Dartmouth, and his three decades of service speak for themselves.
