When Jim Adler '60 was visiting colleges in the fall of 1956, he and his father unknowingly came to visit Dartmouth on the Friday of Homecoming weekend. They decided to stay and watch the bonfire.
"Everyone was running around and singing and I turned to my father and said, 'this is it!'" Adler said.
Dartmouth has changed a lot over the years, but Homecoming and the fond recollections alumni have of it have remained constant.
"The big weekend at Dartmouth that has changed the least is Homecoming," Adler said. "Homecoming today is in many ways identical to the way it was when I was there."
One thing that all of the alumni seem to remember about the weekend is the bonfire.
"The thing that sticks with me most is the bonfire," Rick Silverman '81 said. "It's just this great feeling being out there on the Green with the embers burning away."
Martha Beattie '76 echoed Silverman's thoughts.
"The Homecoming bonfire just reinforced the total euphoria that I felt about being a part of Dartmouth," she said.
The building of the bonfire, which has been a tradition at Dartmouth since 1895, has changed over the years. Today, students at the Thayer Engineering School design the fire, but twenty years ago there were no such precautions.
"There was no engineering. Part of the fun was the fact that it was kind of dangerous building the bonfire," Anton Anderson '89 said.
This year, the Thayer school used specific materials in making the various tiers of the structure. In the past, however, less The materials used to build the bonfire have also changed.
"We used to burn all kinds of stuff," Adler said. "We made it out of railroad ties soaked in creosote, and we put anything that would burn inside."
The Homecoming football game, another tradition of the weekend, is one more vivid memory alumni can never forget.
"The entire freshman class went to the football game, and I have this memory of all of my classmates being there and being squished in the seats. It was packed!" Beattie said.
The football game is also remembered for the traditional rushing of the field, when students run onto field and form their class year.
"We were quite famous for having made an '88' one year," said Silverman (class of 1981).
Interestingly enough, one aspect of Homecoming is much different now than it was fifty years ago.
"Our dates were all imported [from surrounding colleges]," Adler said. "You would go down to the bus station or White River Junction to pick up your date, or maybe she would drive up."
"They would turn the second or third floor of the fraternity over to the women, and men were not allowed upstairs. People would sneak up, of course, but if you got caught upstairs with a woman in bed, chances were you would both be thrown out of school," Adler said, recollecting the various fraternity parties of the weekend.
These practices continued even after women were admitted to Dartmouth for the first time as first years in 1972.
"It was a real bittersweet memory," Beattie said. "We watched as 8-10 buses rolled up in front of the Hanover Inn and all of these girls kept pouring out. We were Dartmouth women but at the same time we saw that there had been women at Dartmouth for a long time and they had filled a much different roll. We felt so fiercely proud that this was our bonfire, so it was really interesting contrast."
Alumni also have fond memories of the fall foliage during Homecoming. "I grew up in Los Angeles, and in L.A. we have two seasons: green and dead," Anderson said. "I enjoyed the fall colors."
When Anderson came back to campus for Homecoming twenty years after graduating, "The memories started rushing back."
He stopped, though, when he saw a few students sitting off to the side of the bonfire and looking bored. "I wanted to grab these guys and tell them, 'You're having the time of your life!'" Anderson said.
