"Things were always more festive," Coburn said. "During the week 99.9 percent of the campus was men, but on big weekends women were all around."
According to a 1968 Winter Carnival press brochure, just 50 women journeyed to Hanover to join their dates for the weekend during the first Carnival in 1911. By the 1950s, however, the weekend saw as many as 2,000 women coming from distances as far as Colorado and Florida, the New York Herald Tribune reported in February 1957. The majority of the females came from women's colleges in the northeast including Smith College, Mount Holyoke College and Colby College.
To accommodate the influx of women on Dartmouth's campus, Clement Malin '56 said men often vacated their fraternity houses for the weekend.
"The houses were completely cleared out," Malin said. "All of the men left for major weekends because we would give the girls the whole house and all of the dates would stay there."
Male students who were not members of a fraternity sometimes had difficulty finding a place for their dates to stay, some alumni recalled.
"You had to find someone to house your date," said Ken Reich '60, who was unaffiliated during his time at Dartmouth. "The College had rules. No women were allowed in the dorm rooms after hours. When I had a date she stayed with a professor or community member."
Once the women were settled into their various rooms, they were given the "Girls' Guide to Winter Carnival." According to the March 1950 Sports Magazine, typical date events included the Outdoor Evening, the Glee Club and jazz concerts, the ski jump and at least one varsity sports contest. Unlike today, these events were not free and the typical Dartmouth man in the 1950s spent on average $40 entertaining his date for the weekend, the magazine reported.
Beginning in 1923, the culminating female-focused event of the Carnival was the Queen of the Snows pageant. Sports Magazine's March 1950 issue reported that the Queen of the Snows selection process was initiated by student leaders, who determined an initial pool of 45 Dartmouth dates on the first day of the weekend. The Winter Carnival Council then interviewed these women and announced the contest's winner at the Outdoor Evening, an outdoor winter cocktail party.
The first Snow Queen was Florence Rice of New York City, who later went on to be a movie star, and was famous for her role in the 1939 Marx Brother's film "At The Circus."
The presence of women at Winter Carnival sometimes captured national attention. In 1928, the Boston Herald did a spread of women's fashion at the Carnival, while The New York Times featured women at the event in a 1966 edition of its paper.
While Winter Carnival has sometimes been synonymous with parties and drinking, Coburn said the Carnivals he attended in the late 1950s were more wholesome than those that followed.
"It was the 60s but it was early on," Coburn said. "It was a less sexual time then. A more innocent time than occurred six or eight years later."
The role of women at Winter Carnival began to change when the College admitted women in 1973. After Dartmouth became coeducational, the number of women who visited Hanover for the winter weekend steadily declined.
