Dartmouth men were viewed as "animals that were locked up in the wilderness and went crazy when women were around," Lenore Bowne, of the class of 1966 at the University of Mary Washington, said. Bowne visited her future husband Marty Bowne '63 each year for Green Key.
Suzy Hartford, a member of the class of 1965 at Smith College, visited her now husband Robert Hartford '65 during Green Key and was also familiar with the men's reputation.
"I think an awful lot of people thought that the guys were just pigs," Hartford said.
William Sjogren '67 also noted the men's sometimes animalistic behavior during his years as an Phi Gamma fraternity member. Sjogren described his fraternity as being "the football linemen's house -- chock full of John Belushis and not the suave pretty, preppy boys," he said. "We took nothing seriously, especially ourselves."
"Can you imagine what it was like for 2000 some odd women to arrive virtually all at once for a 48-hour, Friday-to-Sunday event with 3200 men saturated with varying blends of testosterone and alcohol?" he said. "What it was like to try to rush through the reacquainting, or the 'get-to-know-each-other' for the blind dates and try to get whatever level of sex you could with however much alcohol you thought it'd take?"
Looking back, he sympathized with the behavior visiting women sometimes encountered.
"For the most part, the women, whether they knew it or not, were the hunted and we were the hunters, although many of us were worse shots than Cheney," he said. "It was all so full of hormones and senses of entitlement and hubris and lack of civility and dehumanization. To the extent I let myself think about it -- in that macho 'aren't we God's gifts to women' world, verbalizing doubt just didn't happen -- and reflect, it was, at best, an uncomfortable feeling, and at worst, left me feeling dirty."
Despite the men's rowdiness and sexual drive Sjogren noted, some felt gentlemanly behavior was not uncommon."
"The guy I was seeing and ultimately married was a good guy and his friends were the same," Hartford said, adding that she believed the reputation the men had as "pigs" did not hold true when she visited. "[My Dartmouth] friends were fine and treated me perfectly peachy."
Hartford recalled an incident where a friend of hers became sick after drinking too much. The Dartmouth men with her friend found Hartford to help undress her and put her to bed, feeling it would be inappropriate to do it themselves.
"There may have been Animal House behavior, which I would simply regard as rampant adolescence, but it was not mean spirited; it was not unkind," Hartford said.
Marty Bowne felt that the men sometimes behaved better, not worse, with female company.
"I'd like to think that the guys were a bit better behaved when women were on campus," Bowne said, "especially if you had a girl that you really cared about you didn't want your frat brothers or others on campus to ruin the whole weekend for everybody by being obnoxious."
Bowne added that a tremendous amount of peer pressure weighted on the students to behave appropriately. Others, however, viewed the behavior of students during Green Key weekend as highly inappropriate, in retrospect.
"The eagerness to connect at some carnal level overwhelmed much of your sense, both common and of basic decency. You'd try to speed-read through the civilities in order to get to the 'good stuff' asap," Sjogren said. "And there was beer everywhere, there for the majority of us who's heightened anxieties and expectations mostly led to the steepest of falls."
Gamma Delta Chi fraternity members presented the Most Obnoxious Date Of the weekend award, an inexpensive metal cup saying "MODO," on the Sunday of Green Key to the young woman whom all the brothers agreed deserved the title, Bowne, a brother in the fraternity, said.
"Generally it was just [awarded for] bad behavior, having too much to drink, being loud and obnoxious, being very flirtatious and not staying with one's date, and hanging out with a whole lot of different guys," Bowne said. "In some cases people would be carrying on a conversation and just slip off a chair or a couch."
Bowne recalled specifically one MODO recipient who became very sick from drinking too much. "She had put on such a performance of vomiting that she was the runaway choice that particular weekend," Bowne said.
The recipient had one of three general reactions, according to Bowne.
"Some just laughed at it because they just recognized that they had earned it. In other cases they were a little shocked by it, and there may have been other cases where they left very shortly after being awarded the cup. In some cases it was presented in absentia because the woman was long gone," having left her date for someone else within a few hours of arriving on campus.
When on campus, strict rules attempted to keep promiscuity to a minimum. Women were prohibited from rooming with their dates. They were housed in the Occom Inn or in bedrooms of fraternity houses, which the brothers vacated for the weekend. During Green Key weekend, women were not allowed in the dorms after about one or two a.m., and anyone caught violating this curfew would be expelled, according to Sjogren.. Despite these precautions, sexual activity did take place during the weekend, heightened by the flow of alcohol.
"There were a bunch of [women] who were sleeping with guys, who maybe if they weren't drunk might have had better sense," Hartford said.
"If one was able to sleep with his date, your choices were limited. Sleeping bags and the golf course were a prime destination. One of my roommates went there in the dark of night with his partner, and the two awoke to soft talk in the early light at the edge of a green with a foursome respectfully putting out," Sjogren said.
Sjogren summed up his experiences with the women at Green Key.
"Was it crude? Yes! Was it fun? As best I knew how to have fun then," Sjogren said.
