The Wonderful Winters of Old

  

As students are bundling up for a chilly ‘Blizzard of Oz’ Winter Carnival this weekend, we thought we’d take a trip back through the wizardly festivities that Hanover has seen over the years, from ‘The Winterland of Oz’ in 1972 to ‘There’s Snow Place Like Home’ in 2002, to try and answer the question: what continues to draw Dartmouth students to the story and setting of L. Frank Baum’s quintessential American fairy tale? 

As a member of the 2002 Winter Carnival committee explained to The Dartmouth, “obvious connections between the Emerald City and Dartmouth” gave them lots of material to riff off of to play up the theme of the event. Beyond the visual synchronicity and a fervent love of the color green, both the citizens of Oz and Dartmouth students suspend their notions of reality for a bit. Since its inception, Winter Carnival has promised an escape: from coursework for Dartmouth students, and into Hanover’s snowy woods for the guests who joined them.

Despite the magical theme and a towering snow sculpture of the Emerald City, complete with staircases and a slide, the 1972 Winter Carnival arrived amidst a flurry of change, controversy, and anticipation; as the final Carnival held before co-education and the last to host a Queen of the Snows competition, students were abuzz with speculation about the women who would be joining the undergraduate population in the coming academic year. When asked whether the admissions office would be taking beauty into consideration for female applicants, Admissions Director Edward Thoyt Chamberlain stated that scholastic achievement would be the “most heavily weighted” factor for all prospective students and dismissed the feasibility of physical assessment, telling The Dartmouth, “‘You can’t trust pictures they send us. We all know that’” (February 11th, 1972). 

Just days earlier, on February 8th, the college newspaper published a brief article entitled “Sexism: Carnival Council Seeks Dumb Broad” to announce the Winter Carnival Council’s decision to remove the “intelligence criteria” for the Queen of the Snows contest; by February 14th, the paper had dubbed the newly elected Queen “brainless and beautiful.” While Kappa Kappa Kappa member Bill Farnum celebrated his fiancée’s coronation with her in front of the Emerald City, his fraternity’s snow sculpture, ‘Eleazar Goes Broad-Minded,’ depicts the founder of the College leaning down towards a young woman splayed on the ground and inviting her to attend the school. Echoing early imagery of Wheelock gesturing towards a seated Native American student, the sculpture points to the varied response of Dartmouth students to the nearing onset of co-education.

Though the majority of students polled supported the shift to admit women, anti-coeducation sentiment during this period was palpable. Several of the early female Dartmouth students reported feeling particularly unwanted and out of place during Winter Carnivals, as women from the Seven Sisters colleges continued to be preferentially invited as dates for the weekend’s festivities. Beneath the Oz-themed spectacle, the Carnival became a site where broader cultural shifts – and the discomfort surrounding them – played out in very public ways.

Want to see these images for yourself? Head over to Rauner and request Iconography 1647: Photographic files"Snow Sculpture 1972" to explore the 1972 Winter Carnival, or DA-671, Objects 50 and 80 to view the 1972 and 2002 Winter Carnival posters.

You can also check out the ‘Baum-y Weather: Blizzard of Oz Strikes Campus’ exhibit in Rauner’s main entrance to learn more about L. Frank Baum’s beloved children’s novel, its many sequels, and various artistic, musical, and cinematic adaptations. While you’re here, stop by the reference desk and peek at our ‘Something Cool’: a photo of the child actress who played Dorothy in the iconic 1939 film adaptation shooting pool on campus with her short-lived Dartmouth fiancé at Alpha Theta fraternity in 1967!