Naked people on roofs and bicycles, chariots made out of empty beer kegs, carnal activity on the golf course and an invasion of hippies for a Grateful Dead concert are just a few of the sights the College has seen during the 75-year history of Green Key Weekend.
Amidst Dartmouth's many illustrious and austere traditions, this 'Mardi Gras' of party weekends stands out as a reminder that when 4000 students are cooped up in a quaint New England town for a long, bleak winter, look out come spring and sunshine.
A History of Craziness
"Harvard men have the brains, Princeton men the clothes, Yalies the conversation, but it's Dartmouth for the sex and stuff," said a female undergraduate at Mount Holyoke College who was visiting Dartmouth for the 1951 Green Key Weekend.
Although modern Green Key Weekends are a celebration of spring more than anything else, the weekends of old had an indisputably carnal flavor.
The following excerpt from a 1938 editorial in The Dartmouth offers insight into one of the main reasons Green Key Weekend was founded:
"Hanover is God's gift to women this weekend as hundreds of the proverbially fair sex invade the New Hampshire plain from the world at large. By train, car, hook or crook the belles will barge into this normally peaceful hamlet."
Long before the College went co-educational in 1972, Dartmouth men needed a way to attract women to campus.
After the dark, snowy winter of 1899, the men of Dartmouth were desperate for a way to celebrate spring. The creation of Spring House Parties Weekend -- featuring fraternity parties, female guests from colleges far and wide, athletic events and a prom -- provided a way for the "sons of Dartmouth" and the "daughters" of many area women's schools to release their pent up winter energy. A tradition was born.
Dates, imported from across the country, were usually housed in fraternities. Several chaperones, usually married couples or elderly women, stayed in the houses to make sure hospitality was limited to breakfast and place to sleep.
In 1921, the College gave control over the weekend to the newly formed Green Key Society, which the administration deemed the only campus organization that could ensure a peaceful weekend.
Lulu McWhoosh and the golf course sleeps
Despite the efforts of the Society, Green Key Weekend remained ever the enemy of prudence and the administration's notion of peace.
In 1931, Lulu McWhoosh, a student at nearby Slippery Mountain Teacher's College was inspired by the revelry of the weekend to ride around the green naked on her bicycle.
The Lady Godiva-style incident prompted the College to cancel Green Key Weekend for three years.
In 1954, the Hanover police closed the Hanover Country Club golf course because of the "misuse of the town's normally afforded pleasure privileges" by 69 students and their dates at 4 a.m. Saturday morning.
Hanover Police had discovered a student eating in the middle of the eighth hole on the green just an hour earlier, prompting the police to patrol the area. The student was arrested and found to be in possession of a Canadian Club, cupcakes and hot dogs, as well as marijuana and heroin.
By the 1960s, illicit use of the country club had developed further. Hundreds of students and their dates brought blankets, pillows and, in some cases mattresses, seeking the privacy of sand traps and grassy fairways.
Hanover residents complained about the blatant exposure their children were receiving to the "less puritan" aspects of life as a Dartmouth student.
Next year the College sent a crew of grounds people armed with sprinklers and bullhorns to restore respectability at dawn.
Hey, any chance I could borrow your airplane?
Desperation for dates sometimes brought Dartmouth men to risk life and limb.
Alumni Jacques Harlow '50 said he once narrowly avoided an air disaster trying to bring his roommate's date back to her school.
"My roommate's date missed the bus back to Skidmore, so we had to fly her back," he said. His roommate was a pilot and had access to a small propeller plane, he said.
On the return trip to Hanover, Harlow noticed something was wrong with the compass. Later in the flight, his roommate, the pilot, admitted they were lost.
"We just flew up the Connecticut then," Harlow said. "Only problem was they didn't turn the lights on."
Meanwhile, the plane's gas tanks were becoming severely depleted. "We landed, rolled about 100 meters and the engine stopped. We'd run out of gas," he said.
However, not all Dartmouth men succeeded in bringing their dates to the College. In later years, not even heroic efforts could save the weekend.
In 1948, 166 Dartmouth men attended a court ruling on behalf of their dates, students at Colby Jr. (now Colby-Sawyer) College. The women voluntarily admitted to drinking alcohol on Colby school grounds the week before Green Key weekend. They were convicted by the Colby Superior Court of underage drinking and sentenced to a minimum of one week campus confinement.
In reaction, 301 Dartmouth men signed a petition asking Colby to lift the restrictions for Green Key Weekend. Dean C. Cameron '49, chair of the Green Key dance committee, added his own telegram "requesting special consideration due to low ticket sales."
Unfortunately, the Colby Superior Court forced the women to stay home.
The end of the prom
The changing attitudes about the nature of a good time among Dartmouth students in the 1960s, rendered the prom tradition antiquated. In 1966, prom-goers dressed in shorts and t-shirts dancing to rock and roll instead of the traditional big band jazz, indicated to the College that the days of elegant revelry were over.
The focus of Green Key Weekend's wild and craziness shifted from the prom to fraternity parties and bizarre sporting events.
A highlight of the 1963 Green Key Weekend was a piano smashing contest between the brothers of Chi Phi Lambda and Pi Lambda Phi fraternities.
A sacrificial upright piano was wheeled into the center of the Green and attacked with sledgehammers, according to coverage in the Dartmouth.
Another staple of Green Key Weekend was the Wetdown Ceremonies, first held in 1880 as an opportunity to drench newly elected student government representatives with lemonade, beer and raw eggs.
As the years went on, the Wetdown Ceremonies changed and became more rowdy, with the newly elected officials competing to break through human walls of seniors, being pelted with various liquids and whipped with belts along the way.
But President-elect Jon Heavey '97 need not worry because in 1966 the administration suggested chariot races as an alternative to the Wetdown Ceremonies, in order to cut down on the injuries.
Students took to the idea, and the chariot races were soon a battleground for the Greek houses.
Chariots were constructed out of two wheels and a seat and were meant to resemble those of Roman warriors. Designed to scale or with modern additions of all-weather tires or inoperative V-4
engines, these vehicles acquired such names as "Thunderbolt" or "Wild Thing."
Four students pulled one passenger in the makeshift chariots. The vehicles raced in laps around the Green and were pelted with a mixture of egg, flour and fruit chunks along the way. Due to shabby construction and sharp turns made at high speeds, the chariots seldom survived intact.
Chariots were required to make three laps, and prizes were awarded to the fastest, slowest and best-looking entrants .
In 1976, accusations of chariot sabotage between Gamma Delta Chi and Beta Theta Pi exploded into a fist fight. The repercussions of the fight resulted in the 1984 discontinuance of the chariot races.
Alumni Philip Moy '76 recalled one Green Key Weekend when students decided to end their night of partying by occupying the Parkhurst Administration Building, beer keg and all. Earlier the same year, student protesters had occupied an administration building, and Moy's fraternity, Theta Delta Chi, "thought we should do something similar, but with a different attitude," he said.
"Eventually we set up croquet and horseshoes, and people came by and we'd sing a stupid song, 'Here's the Revolution,'" Moy said.
Eventually, former Dean of the College Carroll Brewster came along and drank a beer with the mock revolutionaries, he said.
In 1978 the Grateful Dead played Thompson Arena during Green Key Weekend. According to an editorial in The Dartmouth, many students felt like aliens in their own arena among the hundreds of Dead Heads that descended on Hanover for the sold out show.
Drink 'til you boot
By the 1980s, Green Key Weekend had gone the way of many of the College's festivals, becoming less a celebration than an excuse for many students to party harder than they normally would.
In recent years Alpha Delta fraternity's party has become a centerpiece of a Green Key Weekend.
In 1987, eight fraternities were the subject of a sting operation conducted by the Hanover police. A plain-clothed police officer accompanied an 18 year-old woman to the fraternity parties. When she was served alcohol, the police shut down the parties. No criminal charges were brought.
The rock band Anthrax played on AD's lawn in 1982 and in 1988 students shook their bones to Blues Traveler on the AD porch.
When Rolling Stone wrote an article in September, 1992 on AD for its College Issue, author Eric Konigsberg '91 used Green Key Weekend as his backdrop. A picture caption accompanying the story reads, "Drink Till You Boot: Green Key Party 1989."
Last year, several AD brothers lived up to Green Key's wild reputation. As a funk band played to hundreds of students on the lawn in the afternoon sunshine, several AD brothers with exhibitionist streaks performed a buck-naked line dance on the house's roof, to the delight of many observers and the embarrassment of others.
