Green Visitors Annually Paint Cambridge Red

Dartmouth's bellicose braves swarm into Cambridge again this weekend, out to protect then persons and a 70-year reputation for bloody battle with Harvard--some of it by the football teams.

As is its custom for the Crimson games and for every weekend save the Winter Carnival, the tribe leaves the beloved, ice-elated Hangover campus on masse. Only twice has the Big Green played host, and it can boast of but 21 wins and 3 ties in the 55 meetings of the series.

The story of the visitors from the North is as old as it is sad. You can take a man out of the country, but you can't take the country out of the man. Every year the Dartmouths hit the town loaded with rural manners and rural beverage.

Unsober Savages

Indians and alcohol are a common anthropological problem, however, and science may find the Hanoverians an even more fascinating study than the Peruvians, Pueblos, or Polynesians. Anthropologist Robert Redfield says that the typical primitive folk society is "small, isolated, nonliterate, and homogeneous, with a strong sense of group solidarity." No less an authority than Daniel Webster called Dartmouth small.

No matter how it is characterized, the New Hampshire school can be depended upon a good fight. Harvard men are perennially hard pressed to defend their honor and property, when the Green are around; and if business is good for Square merchants during the weekend, it's even better for cops.

The gridiron series began in 1882, but the rivalry didn't. The Crimson won the first 18 games, and teams had met 16 times before Dartmouth could get the damn ball over the goal-line.

The 1882 opener saw the varsity win 4g., 19t. to 0, which means 53 to 0 in English. Said the Boston Globe, "Dartmouth might possibly be able to cope with the Boston Latin School."

Revenge finally arrived for the Big Green, and it couldn't have come at a better time than in 1903. Dartmouth gleefully christened the new Harvard Stadium by triumphing, 11 to 0.

Two ties and a Crimson victory came before the New Hampshire club took its second contest, 22 to 0, in 1907. "The sentiments that were expressed on the field after the game were anything but complimentary," according to the Boston Post.

The varsity bounced back to take the next four, winning, 5 to 3, on a blocked kick in 1911 and, 3 to 0, the following year on a field goal by Charley Brickley, "the most accurate booter who ever lived."

By then, relations between the two schools had become more strained than ever, and each decided to go its own way for ten years.

By 1922, both clubs were ready to have at each other again, with the green particularly fired for the renewal. The seven days before the game were designated as "Fight Week" in Hanover. When Saturday rolled around, 2,300 rabid undergraduates, alumni, and townspeople stormed into Cambridge only to see their boys go down to a 12 to 3 defeat.

Indians Prevail

What happened after that is best forgotten, however, as Dartmouth grabbed 19 of the remaining 26 encounters with one ending in a tie.

Even Harvard was willing to admit that the Green was the best team in the country in 1925, after All-American Swede Oberlander's passes submerged them, 32 to 9. Art French kept the Crimson in the picture by leading them to victory in 1926 and 1928. In the latter game, French, like Coolidge, didn't choose to run, and the varsity won by virtue of a baffling lateral attack.

The 1931 Crimson win was another one-man show--this time by quarterback Barry Wood. 1932 saw the longest run of the H.D series, as Carl Pescosolido returned a kick-off 93 yards to edge the Big Green, 10 to 7.

After a tie in 1933, Dartmouth went on the rampage, not losing again until 1941. The Indians whooped it up with a series of annual Yard riots during the Thirties; they had confined their boisterousness to hotel lobbies in the previous decade.

Stay in Stoughton?

They reserved their biggest stunt for 1939, when the Indian undergraduates demanded lodging in Stoughton Hall. The visitors certified their claim with a crusty but trusty document that proclaimed: "Whereas the President and Fellows of ye Colledge have proposed...that ye Indian Collegge wich is gone to decay May be Removed & Used for an additional Building to Harvard College, we do Hereby signifye to ye Corporation our Consent to their Proposall; Provided that in Case any Indians should...be sent to ye Colledge, they should enjoy their studies rent free in said building."

Signed by William Stoughton, the deed referred to the hall constructed in 1695--the one that collapsed in 1861.

The varsity finally broke through to win in 1941 after the burning in effigy of an Indian in a monster pre-game rally. The only Crimson victory since then took place in 1946, although Harvard got a three-year reprieve because of the war.

The latter game was a memorable one; it was only the second of the 55-game series to be played at Hanover. The first was held there in 1884, merely because the Crimson was on its way home after playing Ottawa.

A small band of Harvard partisans went up to the 1946 contest, and it just happened to have on hand the Saturday issue of The Dartmouth, or rather the CRIMSON version of it. Green undergraduates got out of bed after a night's revelry to read that their varsity had suffered food poisoning from a training table candy ration.

Frats Suit Up

Fraternity players flocked to the field house in answer to the coaches "plea." Retaliation was in order the following year at Cambridge, but two Crimers visited Hanover first to foil the plans. Bombing the Yard with toilet paper, kidnapping some Lampoon "fruits," and dyeing the Charles green were among the abortive projects.

In 1948, the Dartmouth cheerleaders messed up the intricate half-time maneuvers of the Harvard Band, which in turn decided not to serenade the visitors the following season. At the last minute, however, the bandsmen magnanimously reversed their decision.

1950 saw an out-and-out Square riot, although there weren't enough Dartmouth men to give the 1,000 Harvards much action. Then the cops moved in to grab Bursar's cards; the mobs switched allegiance. They didn't even know what a Bursar's card was, much less have one in their wallets.

When the crowds milled down Boylston St. for the game the next afternoon, the Dartmouth staffers among them were surprised to see a pre-game issue circulated and shocked to read that their football coach had resigned that morning due to ill health. So was Tuss. Only the CRIMSON were not surprised by it all

Last year, the Green eleven previewed some of the rough stuff that was to endear them to Princeton fans later in the season and the CRIMSON published an extra with an objective report on the game--nothing more, nothing less.

Temporary tameness broke traditional turbulence.