Erin Quinn-Hurst '02 and the other women on Dartmouth's Nordic Ski Team are ready for a little competition this Winter Carnival.
"I'm really excited," Hurst said. "The team is looking so good, especially for Women's Nordic. We are pretty much blowing everybody away in every Carnival. It's going to be a blast."
The Past
Quinn-Hurst's competition is a bit different from that of the women of Winter Carnivals past, who came to Hanover to vie for the Queen of the Snows crown.
Before Dartmouth went coed, Winter Carnival offered the men of Dartmouth a rare treat -- girls!
Buses, trains and boyfriends with cars brought women by the thousands from colleges across the Northeast.
"They came by from Wellesley, Mount Holyoke, Skidmore, Smith, Colby Junior College and lots of other places," Lance Tapley '66 recalled.
"It was very distracting indeed from our studies to see all these beautiful, intelligent women on campus. Every one was intelligent and beautiful, as I recall," Tapley said.
It was a treat for the ladies as well.
"When I was at the University of Vermont, it was very, very cool to be invited by a Dartmouth guy to Winter Carnival," Virginia Guarino recalled of the 1968, 1969 and 1970 Winter Carnivals that she attended at Dartmouth with an escort from Kappa Kappa Kappa fraternity.
The Queen
The "Queen of the Snows" pageant began in 1932 to celebrate the special visitors, and remained a highlight of Carnival until 1975.
Women from the Seven Sisters colleges usually captured the crown, but in 1936 the honor went to the president's daughter, Anne Hopkins.
The pageant was a spectacle in 1970, when a skydiver descended on the Green from 3,500 feet to crown the Queen, and again in 1971 when Playboy shot its "Playmate of the Month" at the Carnival.
Tapley remembered an annual speech that might raise some eyebrows in today's audiences.
"The dean of the College at the time, Thaddeus Seymour by name, who went on to become the president of a college in the South, used to tell a story about a certain 'Suzanne Horney' when the Carnival Queen was crowned. I forget the details, but it was good for laughs all around. Both men and women laughed. I suspect this would not be very correct these days," Tapley said.
The Date
Even if they didn't win the crown, women from all across New England found it an honor to be invited to Hanover.
"I'll always remember walking back from a Glee Club concert at the Hop, with the snow sculpture in the middle of the Green. It was, you know, that quintessential college moment," Guarino said.
Most Dartmouth men brought one girl to Winter Carnival. In 1952, Bob Daly '54 brought seven.
All were winners in the "Why I want to come to Winter Carnival with Bob Daly" essay contest. Daly's friends sent entry forms to Smith College, Wellesley College, Skidmore College and Vassar College, Daly told The Dartmouth last year.
He could not decide on the "most interesting and honest expression," so he chose to escort the seven best instead.
The girls came in droves, many bringing their friends along for the College men who didn't know any girls to ask. Special parlor cars were added to the trains in Springfield to deliver the women from Smith and Mt. Holyoke to Dartmouth in style. A special Winter Carnival train ran from Boston as well.
"You could spot all the girls who had been invited because we all had 'six footers,' green and white scarves that the guys gave us," Guarino said.
"It was the proudest possession of my entire world," a Mt. Holyoke graduate who attended Winter Carnival in the early 1960s, laughed.
"You could tell all over the Mt. Holyoke campus who was going with whom. If you were dating Dartmouth, your scarf would have been green and white."
Women took center stage in Hanover for the weekend.
"The guys moved out and the women would sleep in the fraternity houses," the Mt. Holyoke grad said.
"Or the guys could get the women rooms in various houses in town. There's a house in Hanover that used to be a taxi dispatch service. The guy who ran it would set up as many bunk beds as he could for girls to stay in," she added.
Co-Education
Even after Dartmouth began to admit its own women in 1972, the busing continued, much to the dismay of Hanover's own female population.
"I was in the second class with women in the incoming class, so the ratio was about eight or nine to one," recalled Lucy Karl '77.
"On Friday of Winter Carnival, the buses would arrive. Buses upon buses of women from other schools. The women from Dartmouth, who weren't very high-profile in the fraternities at the time, we were kind of persona-non-grata on campus that weekend. We just stuck together and stayed away from the weirdness! That was my freshman year; I arranged to be off campus every year after that."
Times were changing with the advent of co-education. Dartmouth women gradually replaced the imports. The Queen of the Snows competition faded in popularity, and there were only five participants in 1975. Women began to compete in other venues during Winter Carnival.
Today
This year's "Carnival Queens" are the women who face off on the ice against Harvard and Brown, on the basketball court against Cornell and Columbia, on the Squash courts against Princeton and Tufts and on the slopes in the annual Carnival Classic.
The 1947 issue of Sport Magazine proclaimed, "With a classic profile, a pair of blue eyes or a winning smile, rarely does anyone steal the show from the Queen. There have been queens of all sorts. Girls who like to cook, girls who like to dance and even girls who like to ski!"
Yes, at this year's Carnival, the Queens like to ski.
"Its busy," Kate Pearson '02 said of skiing on the Carnival Nordic team.
"We race Friday and Saturday, but I think for most of the skiers, there's nothing they would rather be doing, so it makes for a very fun weekend."
