Two Shootings, One Mistake: The Cost of Leniency in Dartmouth’s Boom Boom Lodge Debacle

Colloquially known as the Boom Boom Lodge incident, the fatal shooting of graduating student Joseph Maroney in 1920 unsettled Dartmouth College in ways that administrators would have preferred to avoid. From the obvious displeasure of the student body to the criticism in the news to even some scrutiny from the government, the whole debacle was pleasant for none.  The shooter, Albert Meads, was hardly an unknown given he had previously been involved in the supposedly accidental death of Norman F. Arnold in 1916, a casual “misfiring” of a gun in the dorm halls they said. Accounts of the 1920 incident, both in Dartmouth histories and in contemporary press coverage though, simplified the Maroney shooting into a quarrel over liquor prices in the Prohibition era. This neat framing conveniently leaves out the awkward fact that Maroney had been sober for more than a year and that there was no grand thief-in-the-night tale. The more uncomfortable part of this story concerns not just the tragedy of 1920, but Dartmouth’s earlier decision to allow Meads back on campus after Arnold’s death, which, in hindsight, reads as a heavily misjudged decision. 

After Maroney’s death, correspondence between President Ernest Martin Hopkins and former faculty member Frederick Adler revealed how uneasy many already were about Meads’ presence. Adler, who had taught Meads himself, condemned Meads’ character in no uncertain terms, and Hopkins admitted that it was “a pity beyond measure that Meads should ever have returned to the College campus.” He assured Adler that Dartmouth would take “no action, direct or indirect, to temper the law’s course in this matter.” Hopkins’ comments acknowledge, if indirectly, that Meads’ readmission had been an error and perhaps one that now looked far more consequential than it had in 1916. More than that however, it strikes one as quite odd that, in opposition to the past, the law would operate as per normal and perhaps there was more than meets the eye to how Hopkins handled the first shooting.

The surviving correspondence on the case is equally notable for how much energy was devoted to Dartmouth’s public image. From friends, alumni, and occasional influential onlookers, Hopkins received a steady stream of offers of legal advice, reassurance about alumni opinion, suggestions on how to manage rumors about alcohol on campus, and more than a few invites to what could be viewed as emotional-support-and-friendly-catch-up golf. In a letter to the Associated Press, he expressed reluctance to make any public statement unless it was necessary to protect Maroney’s reputation, separating Dartmouth as an institution from Meads as an individual. “Among the exceptions there will be men potentially dangerous to the welfare and reputation of the group as a whole,” he wrote.

Even in 1920 though, some observers accused the college of mishandling the situation. One letter claimed that Dartmouth had sided with Maroney because of his “popularity”, using Meads as a convenient scapegoat and expediting his removal from campus before commencement. Hopkins, in private, rejected the idea, insisting that Meads had already benefited from extraordinary leniency after the Arnold shooting but did concede that perhaps it was a mistake to have let Meads roam free. His tendency to bootleg alcohol for instance, was a well known campus and administrative fact. 

What emerges from this all is a picture of an administration attempting to balance accountability with the instinct for institutional self-preservation. The Maroney case prompts a few difficult questions: Why was someone who killed another student, accidental or not, allowed to return to campus with little supervision? How much weight did Dartmouth place on its reputation compared to student safety? More than a century later, those questions still feel uncomfortably familiar, especially following the events of the past year. As such, Dartmouth’s 1920 tragedy remains more than just a curious episode of college lore; it serves as a reminder of how institutions manage crises. Unfortunately for the colleges, it's not always with the clarity or foresight they would like or wish to claim.

To read this and more correspondence about the Meads-Maroney shooting, request DP-11, box 6766, folder 17 at Rauner Library.

Posted for Erica Mao '28, recipient of a Historical Accountability Student Research Fellowship for the 2025 summer term. The Historical Accountability Student Research Program provides funding for Dartmouth students to conduct research with primary sources on a topic related to issues of inclusivity and diversity in the college's past. For more information, visit the program's website.

Sally Drew Hall: "One of Dartmouth’s Greatest Ladies of All Time"

For nearly a century, generations of Dartmouth students have turned to the college’s infirmary, known as Dick’s House, for first aid and medical care. Yet few realize that this enduring institution was born not merely out of necessity, but as a lasting testament to the profound love and devotion a mother had for her son. That mother was Sally Drew Hall and it was her perseverance, generosity, and unwavering dedication in the face of heartbreaking tragedy that gave rise to what we now know as Dick’s House.

Throughout her life, Sarah “Sally” Drew Hall was devoted to serving the many communities she belonged to. She served as a trustee of her alma mater, Radcliffe College, as well as Boston Children’s Hospital. Beyond her institutional roles, she was also an active member of the League of Women Voters and a dedicated supporter of the American Red Cross.

But it was the sudden and tragic death of her son, Richard “Dick” Hall, in 1924 that would inspire her most enduring act of philanthropy. Dick died of polio in 1924 during his sophomore year at Dartmouth. At the time, the college lacked proper on-campus medical care, and Dick passed away far from his family in a local hospital.

In the midst of overwhelming grief, Sally and her husband, Edward K. Hall (Dartmouth Class of 1892), resolved that no other Dartmouth student should have to endure serious illness without the comfort of home and family nearby. They donated $300,000 (around $5.7 million today) to create that home and worked hand in hand with the college, sharing ideas and overseeing the project to ensure it reflected their vision.

In 1927, the year Dick was meant to graduate, Dick’s House was completed and opened its doors. Throughout its planning and construction, Sally worked closely with the architect she selected, Jens Larson, to ensure the building felt more like a residence than a hospital. She insisted on including guest rooms so that family members could stay with ill students and advocated for the hiring of a House Mother, so there would always be a comforting presence within its walls.

Once construction was complete and attention turned to the interiors, Sally truly came into her own. With a deep sense of purpose and an eye for warmth and beauty, she immersed herself in designing a space that was both functional and comforting. Her notebook (now preserved in the Rauner Special Collections Library) contains detailed plans for each room, along with swatches of wallpaper, paint samples, and handwritten notes. These materials reflect not only her aesthetic sensibilities but also her profound dedication to making Dick’s House feel less like a hospital and more like a true home.

The final cornerstone of Dick’s House was placed during a special ceremony attended by members of the Class of 1927. At the event, Sally and Edward Hall shared their vision for the building:

“This House will serve as an infirmary for Dartmouth students who are sick, as a place of recuperation for those who simply need rest and a bit of care, and for all who sojourn within its walls we hope that it will serve as a home.”

Just five years later, in 1932, Edward Hall passed away. Sally continued to oversee Dick’s House with unwavering devotion, receiving frequent letters of gratitude from students who had stayed there. In one of her own letters, she responded to a student:

“If Dick’s House has served you well both physically and spiritually, it has once more fulfilled its highest purpose and I am happy indeed.”

In 1947, twenty years after Dick’s House first opened, Sally was awarded an honorary Doctorate of Humane Letters by Dartmouth College at the commencement of the Class of 1947. Among the seven recipients that year, she was the only woman. In presenting the degree, President John Sloan Dickey called her “one of Dartmouth’s greatest ladies of all time” and praised her unrelenting commitment to the care of students through Dick’s House. Fittingly, Dickey himself would receive hospice care and pass away at Dick’s House more than four decades later.

When Sally passed away in 1949, she ensured the continued care of Dick’s House by establishing the Sally and Edward K. Hall Fund, overseen by her daughter, Dorothy Leavitt. The fund was created specifically to preserve the home-like atmosphere she had so carefully crafted from the wallpaper and furniture to the comforting library still intact today. Her son’s portrait still hangs in the lounge, and the quiet warmth she instilled in every room continues to embrace each student who walks through its doors.

Though Sally Hall was formally recognized with an honorary degree, her letters make it clear that her greatest reward was knowing that, thanks to her, generations of Dartmouth students, just like her son, would find rest, healing, and comfort in the house.

To see Sally Drew Hall's design plans for Dick's House, request MS-1370. Her correspondence can be found in Mss 003179 and ML-33, boxes 8, 9, and 10.

Posted for Caítlin Layhe Nugent '25, recipient of a Historical Accountability Student Research Fellowship for the 2025 summer term. The Historical Accountability Student Research Program provides funding for Dartmouth students to conduct research with primary sources on a topic related to issues of inclusivity and diversity in the college's past. For more information, visit the program's website.

New York, Boston, and Chicago in Costa Rica? Sounds Bananas!

Every day, when you walk into the ‘53 Commons Dining Hall — locally known as FOCO — or any other dining location at Dartmouth, you can pick one out of three choices of fruit: apples, oranges, or bananas. The latter, in particular, are displayed in an array of baskets of their own, for you to select the one you desire. The variety extends not only to the state of ripeness, but also to the brand. At least at FOCO, Dartmouth alternates between Dole and Chiquita bananas, offering one brand on some days and the other on the next.

Dartmouth’s connections to these fruits extend beyond their availability within dining locations. Victor Cutter, one of the college's beloved Trustees and Alumni, was president of the United Fruit Company, the corporation that became Chiquita. Cutter, a Dartmouth ‘03 and Tuck ‘04, took a job as a timekeeper for the United Fruit Company in Costa Rica shortly after graduating. He quickly began to rise within the ranks of the Company, landing a promotion that placed him as the superintendent of the Costa Rican Zent division, located in the Province of Limón.

The United Fruit Company is notoriously known for its monopolistic and exploitative operations in Latin America. The company left behind a legacy of environmental degradation, labor abuses, and political interference in the region, as the United States profited at the expense of local workers and governments. Cutter’s personal collection, housed at Rauner, is firsthand evidence of such.

One compelling artifact is a leather-bound collection of maps of the UFCO’s properties in Costa Rica, which Cutter saved from his time as superintendent in Costa Rica, carefully preserved for around a century. These maps are detailed cartographic records of United Fruit’s landholdings in the country, with delineations of the different farms, existing railroad crossings, and even projected railroad lines, as the company sought to tighten its grip on Central American transportation networks.

Strikingly, individual farms are labeled New York, Boston, and Chicago—names of U.S. cities imposed onto a foreign land. This naming was not merely administrative. It reflects a deeper form of colonial capitalist thinking: that Costa Rica could be transformed into an extension of U.S. commercial and cultural space. The land was not only used, but renamed, repurposed, and reimagined to serve corporate interests.

The railroad system, in particular, was a key tool of United Fruit’s monopoly. In Costa Rica, as in other countries where it operated, the company owned and controlled the very infrastructure that allowed bananas to be exported, often to the detriment of national sovereignty. Railways were designed not to connect Costa Rican communities, but to move bananas efficiently from the plantation to the port.

To this day, that legacy of corporate colonialism remains visible. Incredibly, some locations in Costa Rica still bear the names given to UFC-owned farms. Boston and New York remain identifiable on modern maps of the Limón region, corresponding precisely to locations recorded in United Fruit’s internal documents. The names that once served as internal waypoints for corporate logistics have, in some cases, become permanent fixtures of local geography—reminders of a time when a U.S. company could redraw the map of a sovereign nation to mirror its own.

Cutter's maps of Boston Farm and New York farm overlaid onto the modern Google Maps satellite image. The corresponding areas are still labeled "Boston" and "Nueva York."

To take a look at these maps, come to Rauner and request MS-63, Box 2, Folder 7, or see what else is in Victor Cutter's papers.

Posted for Alejandra Sequeira Argüello '27, recipient of a Historical Accountability Student Research Fellowship for the 2025 summer term. The Historical Accountability Student Research Program provides funding for Dartmouth students to conduct research with primary sources on a topic related to issues of inclusivity and diversity in the college's past. For more information, visit the program's website.

Summer Exhibit: Let the Old Traditions Fail

Rauner's current exhibit, "Let the Old Traditions Fail: Persistence of Feminist and Queer Life At Dartmouth in the Twentieth Century" was designed by the students in Professor Matthew Ritger’s ENGL 61.03/WGSS 66.20 class, "Early Modern Literature and the History of Sexuality." Throughout the quarter, the students explored academic debates over the history of sex and gender, the relationship between identity formation and sexual orientation, and the difference between representations of these issues in literary/dramatic texts and legal/institutional archives. The course was focused on early modern England - the age of writers such as William Shakespeare, Christopher Marlowe, Margaret Cavendish, and Katherine Philips. In their exhibit, the students dove into Dartmouth's own archives to see how these dynamics and debates manifested in a different time and place, and in a unique institutional archive.

As the student curators explored the history of feminist campus publications such as Spare Rib and Inner Bitch, or Dartmouth's history of cross-dressed performance before coeducation, or the institutional panic in the face of a growing community of queer students at Dartmouth in the 1920s, they found striking continuities, stark differences, and many fascinating stories. Throughout the records of twentieth century Dartmouth, there remains evidence of the close relationship between literature, drama, and daring acts of self-expression that challenged the "old traditions" of gender and sexuality and defied the narrow definition of "the Dartmouth man" still retained by many aspects of campus culture. Despite facing expulsion and violent threats of repression from so many directions, queer and feminist life has persisted on campus in unexpected ways.

This exhibit is on display from July 9th through September during the Summer 2025 term.

Bad Art on the Cutting Room Floor

We are always touting our beautiful books--so important and culturally significant!--but this summer we are working with a class called "Baaaaad French" and another one called "Bad Art!" We have so much to offer it is dizzying! We have books that have been banned for daring to suggest the earth is not the center of the universe; others that challenged the social mores of the day to such an extent that they were deemed pornography; others that were cheaply printed for a mass market that the cultural elite suspected of being, well, too damn dumb to deserve to read; and many books with lots of naughty bits.

We have so much that not everything we selected could make the final cut to be used in class. Case in point, Did She Fall?, by Dartmouth's own Thorne Smith. The book was marketed to titillate. Its racy pulp cover shows our heroine, Emily-Jane, practically falling out of her dress engaged in a passionate kiss, but the blurbs on the back were what caught our eye: "She could have given lessons to Lolita," and "When she was bad, she was very, very bad, and when she was good, she was luscious until somebody killer her, or Did She Fall?"

That one didn't make it into the class, but you'll be happy to know that Lolita did!

To find out if bad, bad Emily-Jane fell, ask for Alumni S662dia.

Just When You Thought It Was Safe to Go Back Into Rauner...

This month we have a new single-case exhibit installed at Rauner Library, one appropriate to the summer and especially to this coming Fourth of July weekend. Since the movie Jaws just turned 50, we decided to do a survey of sharks and shark attacks in the collections.

We found quite the variety, including 16th-century tomes on ichthyology, painted and written accounts of attacks on sailors, informative pamphlets for 19th-century children and for 20th-century navy men, and -- naturally -- a student's review of Jaws in the Dartmouth. He wasn't entirely convinced that it was worth all the fuss it generated, but we recommend you come by and read his thoughts for yourself. 

The Angling Nudist

Anyone who has spent some time either in our reading room or following our blog will recognize the name Viljhalmur Stefansson. Stefansson was a Canadian explorer born to Icelandic immigrants in 1879. After numerous Arctic expeditions, he became a renowned lecturer and advocate for the Arctic. Stefansson was a lecturer at Dartmouth from 1947 until his death in 1962, and the college acquired his significant collection of polar exploration materials in 1952.

Among the many collections we acquired was a 96-box collection containing Stefansson's personal and professional correspondence over a 67-year period. We are always finding new gems within these boxes, and this week turned up another winner. On May 28 of 1935, Stefansson received an unsolicited request from Henry S. Huntington, the brother of an acquaintance. In it, Huntington says that he would like to come over and talk with Stefansson about "the Eskimos from the 'nudist' angle". After a period of profound silence, Stefansson eventually responded to Huntington on June 14th, admitting that the idea of  "Eskimos from the nudist angle" had "somewhat startled" him and was likely the reason that he had taken so long to reply.

Huntington was a Yale graduate and Presbyterian minister who in 1933 had co-founded The Burgoyne Trail in Otis, Massachusetts, one of the country's first nudist colonies. His promotion of the lifestyle was firmly based in its health benefits and its ability to free people from obsessing about sex. When he met later with Stefansson in July, it was with an eye toward recruiting the charismatic public speaker to give a presentation at the International Nudists Conference in August of the same year.
However, despite Huntington's well-meaning intentions, the potential for negative PR was too great a risk for Stefansson. The explorer responded tersely to a series of initially unanswered letters from Huntington by saying that he had decided against participating "on the principle that there is no point in getting eaten by lions except for what you think is a supreme cause." Subsequent letters from Huntington are marked in pencil with "No Ans", suggesting that for Stefansson the conversation was over.

To hunt for similar gold nuggets with Stefansson's correspondence, request a box online from MSS-196 and then come to Rauner to start digging.