Winter Carnival weekend has become an integral part of the Dartmouth experience over the past 99 years, and it all began with an article in The Dartmouth.
Fred Harris, a member of the class of 1911, altered College history when he penned a December 7, 1909 letter to the editor requesting "a meet or field day during February."
In the letter, Harris imagined a winter field holiday that would rival the excitement associated with other fall and spring events.
The first "Winter Meet" was held in late Februrary of 1910, just two months after the letter's publication, marking the beginning of nearly one hundred years of ski jumps, hiking and outdoor festivities.
Harris, however, almost missed this first event, because his dorm, South Fayerweather Hall, was damaged by fire the night before the Winter Meet. Students jumped into snowdrifts to avoid the blaze, while Harris escaped with a sprained knee. Luckily, no one died in the blaze, and the meet continued.
The first celebrations included such contests as a 100-yard dash on snow shoes, an obstacle course race, the 100-yard dash on skis and a ski jumping contest.
The event was dubbed Winter Carnival and moved to early Februry to celebrate the end of midterm exams in 1911, a year that also saw the addition of the Outing Club Dance, which was attended by 50 women and lasted until 3 a.m.
"The girl of the 1910s had a flare for lemonade, and the student caught dunking his moustache in his beer was deeply frothed upon," Frank Danzig '34 wrote in an article in the 1935 Winter Carnival Silver Anniversary Brochure.
Carnival weekend, and the popular events from those early years, quickly became key aspects of Winter term.
"The Winter Carnival of the Outing Club won a deserved success, and will undoubtedly remain a permanent feature of Hanover winter life. This is as it should be," a 1911 article in The Dartmouth reported.
The Carnival continued to develop, the first theme being "Jutenheim Iskarneval," a celebration of the various Scandinavian carnivals on which the Carnival was modeled.
The early years of Winter Carnival also featured the "Queen of the Carnival Ball" pageant for female guests, beginning in 1923. The title changed to "Queen of the Snows" in 1928, and the tradition lasted until the advent of coeducation in 1972.
Through the years, the Carnival's popularity continued to grow. By its Silver Anniversary in 1935, worldwide celebrities traveled to the College to take part in the festivities. For example, World Champion Women's Figure Skater Evelyn Changler performed at that year's outdoor events, according to the 1935 Silver Anniversary brochure.
Danzig's article also compared the original Carnival's female visitors with the dates of 1935:
"In [1910] it was customary for one's Carnival date to be selected on the basis of her skiing ability, and woe to the girl who couldn't snowshoe. Nowadays, one's guest must be more adept in the gymnastic arts," Danzig wrote. "She can expect to be almost frozen to death watching the outdoor events, danced to death in crowded fraternity houses, and stifled to death in a 2x 4 room provided for her sleeping accommodations."
Prominent author F. Scott Fitzgerald came to campus in 1938 to research for the screenplay for "Winter Carnival" (1939) with Budd Schulberg '36, as reported in The Dartmouth. Fitzgerald's trip ended when he was fired for overindulging in alchohol while conducting research in Alpha Delta and Psi Upsilon fraternities.
By 1952, Carnival grew so popular that a traffic jam of excited but uninvited guests stretched eight miles long. Some Hanover residents were nearly driven out of their homes by the large influx of visitors, according to a 1968 Winter Carnival brochure.
Winter sports and activities have remained a Carnival fixture throughout the past century, today ranging from skiing and sledding to the Polar Bear swim and human dogsled race.
Paul Dalton '54, a member of the Dartmouth Ski Team, shared one memorable Winter Carnival experience from his freshman year when he skied through the football stadium as part of the ice show.
"They had the freshmen ski down on narrow strips of snow in a criss-cross pattern," Dalton said. "We were holding torches, and it was very exciting."
Dalton also remembers a year when there wasn't enough snow to construct sculptures. As a member of Zeta Psi fraternity, Dalton and his brothers had to build an ice statue out of frozen orange juice "imported" from a Tampa, Fla., chapter.
