The tale of the short-lived commune was one of the anecdotes Hooke related in a "Smoke Talk" on the history of the Dartmouth Outing Club. The Smoke Talk, named for the Outing Club newsletter "Woodsmoke," described the 100-year history of the Outing Club as an integral part of the College's identity that Hooke detailed in his 1988 book "Reaching That Peak: 75 Years of the Dartmouth Outing Club."
Another of Hooke's anecdotes concerned the 1955 choice to use Holt's Ledge as the site for the Dartmouth Skiway. Holt's Ledge had not been considered until a College official stopped to "take a leak" on the car ride back from the day's search, looked up at the cliff and said, "what's that?" according to Hooke.
The Outing Club needed revitalization in the 1970s, as Put Blodgett '53 Tu '61 and Jim "Pork Roll" Taylor '74 described the woodsmen's team as "a sorry drunken relic", according to Hooke. The environmentally sensitive kind of "outdoors" people at the time associated the Outing Club with "chainsaw-axe type of people" they detested, Hooke said.
The College's switch to coeducation brought worries over the integration of the Outing Club, but the issues facing the club proved less serious following the graduation of students who opposed integration, Hooke said.
Before the Outing Club was founded, there were no social events held in the winter, Hooke said, and Dartmouth men were "cooped up playing cards and generally being grumpy."
Fred Harris of the Class of 1911 wrote in a winter 1909 letter to The Dartmouth, "The question what is there to do at Dartmouth in the winter?' gives rise to the thought that we might take better advantage of the admirable situation of our College."
Harris suggested, and later founded, the Outing Club, Hooke said.
The Outing Club "catapulted into the center of College life" with the establishment of Winter Carnival in 1910. Carnival, which at the time took place in the February gap between semesters, included a dance, "at which the hormones flowed freely," Hooke said.
The term "chubbers" to describe Outing Club members was coined after a December 1933 misprint in The Dartmouth, and conveyed the image of a student with "the odor of woodsmoke about his clothes, sleeping on rocks, yearbook picture taken in his Outing Club jacket... and the perennial Outing Club enthusiasm for life," Hooke said.
Hooke said the Outing Club has lacked someone to continue the task of recording the almost 25 years of Outing Club history since the publication of his book.
The talk inspired Billy Corbett '10, president of the Dartmouth Mountaineering Club, to consider completing the research next term, he said in an interview with The Dartmouth.
"The College runs on history," Corbett said.
This history could include recent Outing Club events like the relocation of the Appalachian Trail, as well as the establishment of the Jonathan Belden Daniels climbing gym and Dartmouth Organic Farm, Hooke said.
Students who attended the lecture were impressed with Hooke's description of the Outing Club's spirited roots, they said.
Kurt Kostyu '12 said he was particularly moved by the story of a 1959 search conducted by over 500 people for Outing Club Chairman Ralph Miller '55 DMS'59 and Robert Quinn after their plane, responding to an emergency call, crashed in the Pemigewasset Wilderness, killing the pair.
Outing Club members also volunteered their services fighting forest fires in fall of 1947, contributing 12,700 man hours between Oct. 21 and 27, Hooke said.
The Smoke Talk was the fifth lecture in a series sponsored by the Sphinx Foundation, comprised of Sphinx senior society alumni, which has been celebrating the history of Dartmouth over the past three years, according to Paul Killebrew '67, the foundation's director.
Jere Daniell '55, an unofficial historian of the College, advised the Foundation to ask Hooke to speak, Daniell said.
"I thought this would be a perfect way to integrate the Sphinx speaking series with the DOC Centennial," Daniell said in an interview with The Dartmouth before the lecture.
