From a miner to a president

Cramping his six-foot frame under a low-lying rock overhang, the young miner splits a stick of dynamite down the middle with a knife and packs it into the wall 300 feet below ground. Cold water drips from the ceiling onto his head and he is grateful for the rubber slicker and heavy shirt he wears as protection in his job as a powderman. After the ex-Marine has left the mine for the day, a muted rumble emanates from the caverns below as his explosive charges are set off, shattering the solid rock into manageable fragments. The chilled and damp zinc miner is a young James Wright, working his way through a regional college at $2.35 an hour in the early 1960s in Galena, Illinois. Not many college presidents, let alone professors, remember a youth like this one. "I got hit a few times by falling rock, not enough to take me off a shift, but enough to leave a few scars," he remembers, flexing his large hands in search of a physical reminder. "Age takes care of these things," Wright says, giving up. Wright said his three years as a miner didn't have much influence on the thirty that proceeded as a professor and administrator at Dartmouth.