50 Years Ago...

The Class of 1968 is back on campus now to lead the class of 2018 into Commencement. Fifty years ago this week, they were deep in their final exams and preparing for Senior Week. But another Dartmouth alumnus, Budd Schulberg '36, was in Los Angeles following Robert Kennedy's run for the Democratic nomination for President. That week he witnessed the second earth shattering assassination of the year.

This photograph taken by Harry Benson, shows the chaos in the kitchen of the Ambassador Hotel on the night of June 5th, 1968. The distraught man in the center with the white hair is Schulberg. Off in the right hand corner is Jimmy Breslin, who had written the famous account of JFK's funeral that was centered on the grave digger.

Schulberg and others writers had just met with Bobby on the night of the California primary. They were standing nearby when he was shot and were among the first people to rush at Sirhan Sirhan. As you would imagine the event had a lasting effect on Schulberg and he wrote about it several times.

To see the photograph and read Schulberg's thoughts on Bobby Kennedy, ask for MS-978, Box 25.

Dartmouth Blues

With commencement only a few days away, we happened to stumble upon some images of a past graduation ceremony inside an alum's personal photograph album. Charles L. Hildreth was a member of the class of 1901 who grew up in Westford, Massachusetts. After graduating from Dartmouth College, he attended Harvard Law School and became a practicing attorney in Lowell, Massachusetts, for many years before dying there at the age of eighty-eight.

What makes Hildreth's photographs truly remarkable is not merely the
crispness of the images, but also that they are all cyanotypes. A cyanotype is an image made by employing a photographic printing process that produces a cyan-blue print; engineering blueprints are probably the most familiar example of the process. We have a few examples of these fascinating images here at Rauner, and Hildreth's are some of the best of them. The image of men and women wearing their turn-of-the-century finest while crowded near the stump of the Old Pine, for example, is a fascinating look into the fashion of the time. It's hard to believe that they were wearing so many layers at that time of year.

Another image, one of my favorites, shows a group of people gathered in front of Dartmouth Hall with Rollins Chapel in the background. On the steps of Dartmouth Hall, initially unremarkable, stands what appears to be a studio camera, complete with black hood for the photographer to hide behind. While two men fuss with the camera, the crowd listens to an orator perform. These are only two of the many remarkable cyanotypes from the album; there are also some fantastic images of the bonfire tower, both before and after being set ablaze. To turn the pages of Hildreth's book, come to Dartmouth and ask to see Iconography 1574.