Green Key cometh, President Wright. Alumni flock from 'round the girdled earth back to the Dartmouth roost. They might return to admire the Green in full bloom, ripe with freshly fertilized grass and lounging undergrads. They might return to look in on a favorite professor, or to admire a favorite view. The weekend passes, hugs are shared and the green light in the tower clicks off until the next big weekend.
Upon becoming alumni in June, the members of the Class of 2009 will recall many things -- not least of all, President Wright, your anecdote about a certain powder knife. You have shown your knife on a variety of occasions when we had the chance to hear you speak. Your tale about this memento -- how you used it as a miner while working to be the first member of your family to go to college -- is a thoughtful reminder to all that we should know where we came from, and know what it was that enabled us to reach our present circumstances. You, President Wright, have set a nigh incomparable example, ascending from the mines of middle-America all the way to the presidency of the College on the hill.
Personal artifacts elicit memories and form fulcrums of experience. In a way, we all have a powder knife. It could be an algebra textbook, marked up with highlighter and banged up in fits of frustration; or cleats that galloped into the end zone for the first time; or perhaps that towel from all those weekends spent caddying at a local golf course.
And we -- at least many of those who dwell or have dwelt under the Lone Pine -- will likely share one nostalgic artifact of our Dartmouth experience for as long as our memories hold: the pong paddle.
I could not have come to articulate this realization without the aid and initiative of pong scholar and sometime ghostwriter Lee Cooper '09. As Cooper helped me realize, the pong paddle is an undeniably distinctive icon of the Dartmouth experience, perhaps only rivaled by the Blitz terminal or the DOC membership card. The handle-less ovular piece of plywood may appear to some a mere symbol of debauchery, but to a majority of this student body, the pong paddle represents the preeminent arena for social interaction on campus.
Your work combating dangerous drinking at Dartmouth, and with the Amethyst Initiative, is admirable and appreciated, as alcohol-related injuries, crimes and illness are certainly no laughing matter. But the game of pong transcends drinking. Each game is a friendly competition and a chance to build camaraderie through teamwork. Each game is an exhibition of Dartmouth social scene's distinctive identity. Indeed, we students have visited alumni from Long Island to Silicon Valley, who have proved all too eager to show off their backyard pong tables.
Peek your head into one of the many campus social spaces on a big weekend such as this, and you will certainly catch a glimpse of an alumnus or alumna darting to make a "save." Their muscle memory is gone, but their instinct never dies. Alumni share games to reunite with old friends and relive a night of their undergraduate experience. But they might also play to strengthen the intergenerational bonds within a "Dartmouth family," or to educate a significant other about the finer points of the unique game.
I am honored to graduate with Dartmouth's 16th president, yet I hope that my final act at your side will not be a fleeting conversation at the Daniel Webster Dinner, but an acrobatic throw-save and a victory in your first pong game.
Green Key cometh, President Wright, so grab a pong paddle and immerse yourself as we all enter into the ranks of alumni. Please play a game of Dartmouth-style pong before you leave -- not necessarily on Green Key, but prior to our common departure on June 14. Before you relocate from your chair in Parkhurst -- and I from my perches in Alpha Delta, as well as Reed and Thornton Halls -- to a rocker at the Hanover Inn, join me at 9 East Wheelock Street to partake in a game, saluting the Dartmouth powder knife: the pong paddle.
