First and Last Days at Dartmouth

We were talking here last week about memories. A poignant string of mine pertains to when I was eighteen and just off to college. Basically indecisive, I didn’t have much preference about schools, so my father and I took a brief tour of some of the “better” institutions—Amherst, Yale, one other I can’t remember, and of course Dartmouth, his alma mater. When we got there his whole manner changed to superlatives. “We roomed in that dorm. God, what parties we had!” “Let me show you the Orozco murals in Baker Library, gorgeous!”

So I was sold and got admitted to Dartmouth, probably as a legacy. I was surely not Harvard or Yale material. Anyhow, a number of my friends were going to Dartmouth, so that was some compensation. I looked forward to the initiation, which was to be a day’s hike up New Hampshire’s Mt. Moosilauke.

We started up the hill on a bright fall morning, and I was soon seized with an attack of asthma, a disease I’d suffered from for much of my young life. Even at Dartmouth I had to carry around a red box containing a nebulizer, a blown glass instrument with a rubber bulb you squeezed to spray the adrenalin into your gasping lungs.

Finally I had to turn back to the lodge, humiliated that I had  to quit. Not a good way to introduce yourself to your classmates. I settled miserably into the warm and comfortable lodge, tuning into a Boston radio station. They were playing music I’d heard about but never really heard—the new bebop, Charlie Parker, Bud Powell, the sounds I’d poo-pooed as a New Orleans jazz junkie. A light switched on: I finally understood what the boppers were doing, and it was fascinating. The whole afternoon went by in a fog of new consciousness and delight.

I made a  lot of good friends at Dartmouth but never really took to the place. I called it a post-prep school (it’s changed a great deal today), though there were one or two professors who made a lasting impression on me. Jazz beat studying and I did a short stint as a DJ. On weekends friends and I would drive to New York to hear Miles Davis et al. Finally I got suspended in my senior year (drunk driving, too much partying and various social infractions). Spent a night in the Hanover jail. My father flew up and met with the president, who was immovable. We drove home mostly in silence in the yellow Buick convertible he had bought me―a garish embarrassment.

After some part-time jobs, I ended up at the University of Chicago, to be absorbed in their graduate English program. One night I heard Bud Powell play at a joint on the South Side. Music was beginning to preoccupy my life. Later I went on to teach in New York and got totally involved in the jazz world. Let that be another story, one that has produced its own string of memories. It would not have been possible without that asthma attack and, later, getting kicked out of Dartmouth.