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University of Vermont

Dartmouth Starts a Campus Navy in World War II

Eighteen-year-old George Berkowitz, wearing his brand-new Marine uniform, lined up in military order with his Dartmouth College classmates and awaited his orders.

The drill instructor shouted, “Right face!” Berkowitz turned left face. The drill instructor came over to scrutinize him, read his nametag and said, “Berkowitz!”

“Yes, sir,” he said.

“Youʼre the dumbest sonofabitch I ever saw,” replied the drill instructor.

Aerial view of Dartmouth’s East Campus.

Berkowitz still remembered that insult years later, after he had founded the Legal Seafood restaurant chain. He believed the drill instructor for a week. “It was an indoctrination into the Marine Corps,” he said. “It’s a very fast way to gain maturity.”

Berkowitz belonged to a staggering number of young men who grew up fast in the military during World War II. In 1940, fewer than 500,000 served. The next year, nearly 2 million men put on uniform. The military gobbled up more than double that number over each of the next two years. By war’s end, the United States had 12,209,238 soldiers, sailors, marines and Coast Guardsmen, a 3,550 percent increase in six years.

Dartmouth Looks Into the Abyss

On Nov. 11, 1942, more than two years after instituting the draft, Congress lowered the draft age to 18. About 20 million young men were newly eligible, but half were rejected the first year. Some had health problems, and 20 percent who registered couldn’t read.

Edward Stettinus and Ernest Hopkins

Dartmouth President Ernest Martin Hopkins realized the lower draft age could mean bankruptcy for his college. Formerly assistant secretary of the U.S. War Department during the first world war, he knew how many young men would get drafted in the second. He also knew very few of them could enroll in college, much less earn a degree. Dartmouth faced a crippling shortage of students.

Hopkins also knew the U.S. military desperately needed college-educated commissioned officers. It needed all sorts of expertise – engineers, navigators, quartermasters, metallurgists, radiomen, aerial photographers.

The solution was obvious: bring military training to campus on a massive scale.

And so the military and academia combined college education with military service. They did it through three major programs: the Naval Indoctrination Training School, the V-12 Naval Training Program and the Army Specialized Training Program.

The Navy V-12 Program

On July 1, 1943, the first day of the summer semester, the Navy V-12 program began on 131 college campuses across the nation. It had more than 125,000 students. In New England, 11 colleges hosted the V-12 program. Brown in Rhode Island. Bates in Maine. Middlebury in Vermont. Dartmouth in New Hampshire. In Connecticut, Yale, Trinity and Wesleyan University. Holy Cross, Harvard, Williams and MIT in Massachusetts.

Bobby Kennedy (second from left) at Bates. Muskie Archives and Special Collections LIbrary.

Hopkins called on his friendship with Secretary of the Navy Frank Knox to make sure Dartmouth had a viable V-12 program. He had tremendous success. Dartmouth College hosted the largest V-12 program in the country, with 2,000 enlisted men and an officer staff. Dartmouth had 10 times as many military recruits as civilian students, who were either 4-F or pre-med. The military recruits so overwhelmed the civilians that some enlistees didn’t remember any civilians at all at Dartmouth.

Hopkins himself served in the War Department’s Office of Production and Management. It wasn’t unusual for academics to join the war effort. The presidents of Harvard and MIT, James Bryant Conan and Karl Compton joined the National Defense Research Committee. Harvard Law School Dean James Landis directed the Office of Civilian Defense.

Pearl Harbor

Across New England’s campuses, boys had a hard time studying or making plans after graduation. They knew they might get called up. Campus newspapers reported on the war in Europe. Nazi troops occupied the Rhineland, advanced into Czechoslovakia and then invaded Poland. Nations fell like dominos as the Nazis conquered Denmark, then Norway, then the Netherlands and then Belgium.

As commencement exercises took place in the spring of 1940, the Nazis invaded France. The fall of the French government was one of the most shocking defeats of the war. Soon afterward, Hitler’s advance guards swung north to the English Channel, where they threatened to trap British, French and Belgian forces along the coast. The Allies quickly organized a fleet of hundreds of boats to evacuate the troops from the beaches of Dunkirk. Over eight days, 338,226 were heroically ferried across the English Channel to Dover in everything from destroyers to small fishing boats to pleasure craft.

Tom Braden was then a 23-year-old Dartmouth senior who later became a well-known columnist. He also wrote Eight Is Enough, a book adapted into a popular television series. He was galvanized by the fall of France and the Battle of Dunkirk.

Tom Braden. He survived the war and died in 2009.

Braden and his friend Ted Ellsworth wanted to join the fight, and decided to join an army already fighting – the British Army. They were selected for the Royal Americans, an elite unit in the King’s Royal Rifle Corps comprised of a dozen American graduates of Dartmouth, Yale and Harvard.

Braden made it through the war. Ellsworth survived, though he was captured and imprisoned in Oflag 64 at Schubin, Poland. Another Dartmouth graduate, Charles Bolte, lost his leg at the hip in Egypt at the Battle of El Alamein.

Making Up for Lost Tuition

In the days before the United States entered the war, young men anxious to see action joined the Royal Canadian Air Force, the British RAF, the British Royal Navy or the American Field Service as ambulance drivers.

Colleges developed courses to train students for the still-undeclared war. Starting in September 1941, for example, Bowdoin College lent its facilities for Naval Radio School training for more than 300 recruits living on campus.

The University of Vermont, struggling financially, brought U.S. Air Force training units to campus. Special six-to-eight-week courses were offered to help make up for lost tuition revenues.

New Curriculum

Harry Hampton, Dartmouth Class of ’45, was in his dorm room studying with his roommate on Dec. 7, 1941. Suddenly they heard someone yelling in the corridors that the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor. Everyone grabbed their radios and listened to the news from the Dartmouth Broadcasting System.

“Everybody had the feeling, well, when will I be—or had an awareness that we were all going to be ripe for pickings by one of the military services,” Hampton said.

Like most colleges, Dartmouth telescoped four years of education into two years and several months so students could graduate before they went to war. High school students like George Berkowitz were allowed to graduate early once they’d been accepted into a college. Students often graduated high school in March and started college in June.

Schools altered their curriculum. They redirected physics, math and sciences courses to the needs of men in the armed forces. Popular courses in foreign languages included Russian, Chinese and Japanese. Courses were given in air photography, camouflage and mapping – Sometimes teachers with no training taught photography, camouflage and mapping.

Samuel Florman, a V-12 from the class of 1946, remembers correcting a Dartmouth geology teacher making mistakes in his aerial photography course.

“The faculty was being asked to do all sorts of cock-eyed stuff that they werenʼt trained for,” Florman said. “You had a chemistry teacher teaching, you know, Italian or whatever and that was because of the faculty themselves had enlisted or had been called up. So that they were scrambling to cover the courses that needed to be taught.”

Dartmouth Starts a Navy

At Dartmouth, fraternities closed, Winter Carnival was cancelled, the Daily Dartmouth ceased publication and food and fuel were rationed. The college operated like a naval base during the rest of the war, run on military time, with reveille at 0600 and Taps at 2200.

The school called dormitories the “Navy Ships of Dartmouth.” Dorm rooms meant for two single beds had two sets of bunk beds. Every day the V-12 students woke at 6 a.m. to a recording of “Oh What A Beautiful Morning.” Every day they had room inspection. Then ty did calisthenics, formed in a line and marched to their meals. They were reviewed on Saturday. The commander came down and inspected them from their haircuts to their shoes.

“When you were in the Navy here, you really were in the Navy,” said Alan Epstein, a V-12 recruit from the class of 1947.

Cadets undergo water and obstacle course training at UNC-Chapel Hill.

Once they got their uniforms, students had liberty from noon Saturday until Sunday night. Few had cars. Some joined the Outing Club and went camping. Others went home, taking the train or hitchhiking – a man in uniform quickly got a ride.

Some visited girls’ colleges nearby. Dartmouth’s Mary Hitchcock Memorial Hospital was training nurses for the military. They wore uniforms too. Since there were so few women on campus, the nurses had a lot of choices about who to date.

Once a month they had strength testing in the gym. If they didn’t keep up, they were shipped out to boot camp. Each student had to do a certain number of sit-ups and push-ups and shimmy up a rope.

Parris Island

On the Way to Parris Island

Dartmouth had a pool with a platform 30 feet or so above the water. Trainees practiced jumping off a sinking ship from it. They learned survival swimming, how to sweep their arms along the surface of the water if it burned. They had to leap off the platform, take off their trousers and blow them up over their heads to make floating wings and float around for a half hour.

Berkowitz remembers the courses as demanding, but the students were motivated. If they didn’t pass, they were sent off to war.

At Dartmouth, Chinese professor Wing Tsit-Chan had a reputation for never flunking anyone. “Everybody was trying to get into his class,” remembered Berkowitz, who took Chinese from him for one semester. Because of that course, he ended up in China. There he repatriated Japanese military and civilians from North China and Korea — a plum duty. “The best thing that ever happened to me was taking his course in Chinese,” Berkowitz said.

Paul Glover, class of 1945, didn’t buckle down to his studies – at first.

“I cut the classes and went to the ski meets and all that. And the professor was a guy named B.H. Brown, whose son had been in my class in Hanover High School. And of course I knew the old bastard. And he called me in, he said, “Glover, if you donʼt pass this exam pretty well, youʼre on your way to Parris Island.” In those days you were out to take a train the next day, and then you were a private. You werenʼt any officer candidate. And a lot of people flunked out that way.”

Broken Promises

Though promised they could finish school if they maintained their grades, some groups of students, such as the engineers, suddenly received orders to go to basic training.

“The next thing you knew they were in the Battle of the Bulge,” said Peter Beck, a medical school student in the Army Specialized Training Program. “They took quite a lot of casualties there thinking they were going to avoid the war completely by staying in a classroom.

An American GI captures a German soldier during the Battle of the Bulge.

Decades after the war, Florman remembered the broken promises:

…representatives from the various services started showing up on campus and giving presentations. And it was like going to the movies. You went…this evening the Army is telling you how wonderful the Army is and what wonderful chances, opportunities you will have if you will only sign up with them. Theyʼll leave you in college. Then when you do go into the Army, youʼre going to be a four-star general before you know it. Then there were people…I know we didnʼt have an air force in those days. But there were special programs if you wanted to fly for the Army or if you wanted to fly for the Navy.

Florman called it “a salesmanship evening.”

…And a lot of my classmates—and I guess maybe even those in the class ahead—would sign up. And maybe one semester, two semesters later, as the war required, all the promises were forgotten, and suddenly dozens of classmates were swept off to boot camp and were in the middle of battle before anybody really knew what had happened.

From Dartmouth to Boot Camp to the Grave

Florman remembered a boy sent to boot camp because he had a soft voice.

They marched on the Green. And this is how you march. This is how you turn. As a matter of fact, this brings to mind: You were expected to take turns and after a while shout out the orders and lead the group and show leadership qualities. And if you didnʼt—and there was one; I donʼt know if he was our classmate, but he was down at Thayer School, Joe Vitalini, a wonderful fellow with a quiet voice. And he didnʼt satisfy the drillmaster. And next thing we knew, he was on his way to boot camp.

The drillmaster so frightened Florman he pulled his braces off his teeth during a drill, That earned the respect of his drillmaster and saved his naval career. The drillmaster selected another boy, Gene Cafiero, to lead his unit in close order drill. He later served as president of Chrysler Corp.

Many were not so lucky.

Memorials at Dartmouth College

Over 300 of the 11,091 Dartmouth men who served in World War II died. The Class of 1942 alone lost 34 members. Twenty-three young Dartmouth men died in 1943, then another 23 in 1944, and still another 24 in 1945.

George Berkowitz survived the war and died in February 2022 at the age of 97.

End Notes

With thanks to the Rauner Library Oral History project, World War Two at Dartmouth.

Images: Ernest Hopkins United States Office For Emergency Management, Lee, R., photographer. (1941) Edward R Stettinius, Jr., former director, Priorities Division, Office of Production Management OPM, and currently September 2,lend-lease Administrator. Dr. Ernest M. Hopkins, Minerals and Metals Executive of the Priorities Division. President of Dartmouth College. United States, 1941. Sept. [Photograph] Retrieved from the Library of Congress, https://www.loc.gov/item/2017689452/. Bobby Kennedy at Bates By Unknown, Courtesy of the Bates College Historic Photographs Collection – The Edmund Muskie Archives and Special Collection, Lewiston, Maine, Bates College, 1940s, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=45202568. Tom Braden By http://spartacus-educational.com/JFKbraden.htm, Fair use, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?curid=48798732. East campus By Kane5187 – Own work, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=2949909.

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The Vermont Eugenics Survey Purifies the Population’s Polluted Protoplasm

The Vermont eugenics survey began with the rural exodus of Vermont farmers and didn’t end until well after Hitler used its ‘philosophy’ to justify his race experiments.

The state’s eugenics supporters thought the westward migration had skimmed the cream from country farms and villages. They believed the people who remained lacked the intelligence and drive of the Yankee Protestants who created Vermont.

Eugenics aims to improve the genetic quality of the human population by promoting more reproduction among ‘biologically fit’ people and less reproduction among ‘degenerates.’

Though eugenicists claimed they based their views on science, the Vermont eugenics survey actually responded to increased immigration from Europe and Canada. It sought to eliminate from the population such traits as harelips, sloppiness, tuberculosis and poor memory. Eugenicists even believed poverty was hereditary.

Original caption reads “Two cretins.” From a book by geneticist Reginald Ruggles Gates.

Inventor Alexander Graham Bell was a proponent. So was birth control pioneer Margaret Sanger. Even W.E.B. Du Bois believed in developing the best versions of African Americans in order for his race to succeed.

Vermont was far from the only state to use eugenics to breed a better population. Connecticut started the ball rolling in 1896, with a marriage law that prohibited anyone who was epileptic or feebleminded from marrying. The next year, Michigan started compulsory sterilization, which spread to 32 states. In the end, state governments forcibly sterilized 65,000 people, mostly women.

Henry Farnham Perkins

The Vermont eugenics survey began with Henry Farnham Perkins, a Mayflower descendant who married another Mayflower descendant. Both came from families of distinguished academics.

Perkins was born in 1877 in the wealthy section of Burlington, Vt. He graduated from the University of Vermont in 1898, and in 1903 got a job at the college as associate professor of Zoology. That same year, the American Breeder’s Association was created to study eugenics.

He plodded along for nearly two decades until he learned of a U.S. Army study after World War I ended. The Army had used the study as part of the draft process, and concluded that men from Vermont had an inordinately high rate of ‘defects, such as diabetes, epilepsy, deformities and mental deficiency.

Perkins set about to correct that problem and preserve Vermont’s Yankee Protestant identity through ‘investigation and social reform.’

The Vermont Eugenics Survey

Perkins started off in 1922 by revamping his Zoology curriculum and started teaching courses on heredity and evolution. He taught that social ills had biological links, and that certain groups of people exhibited a general deterioration toward mental illness, criminality and promiscuity.

That inspired the Vermont eugenics survey, which studied rural Vermonters. Perkins hired fieldworkers to hunt degenerate families in the Vermont countryside. They looked for three categories of degeneracy: chorea, or people with Huntington’s disease; pirates, or people who lived on houseboats; and gypsies, people with dark skin.

In reality, they targeted French Canadians, Indians, African-Americans and immigrants.

Perkins revealed his animus toward immigrants in a comment about French Canadians: You cannot believe a thing they tell you…They are a pretty genial folk but many have a pretty low I.Q….the French are a complacent people; it would be impossible to have a French Mussolini for instance. That kind of drive is lacking…

At least, he thought, they were better than the Irish.

Rural Vermont, the target of the Vermont eugenics survey.

Fieldwork

One fieldworker, Harriet Abbot, gathered information on 4,642 people by the end of 1927. Sometimes they disclosed their family histories to her because they thought she was writing a book.

“Unwittingly, her informants opened up their homes and hearts to her, completely unaware of the real purpose of her research,” wrote Kevin Dann and Christie Carter in From Degeneration to Regeneration: The Eugenics Survey of Vermont, 1925-1936.

She and other Vermont eugenics survey fieldworkers identified such traits as illiterate, illegitimate, insane, thief, queer, pauper, immoral, dishonest, rape, syphilis, liar, epileptic, twin, stillborn, dependent, alcoholic, a little odd, wanderer, wild, cruel, one eye and shiftless.

Fieldworkers went to the Rutland Reformatory for Women, a home for the wayward. The fieldworkers believed the institution’s ‘sex delinquents’ were bad women, and got that way through heredity.

Purifying the State’s Polluted Protoplasm

In 1927, Perkins got funding for a bigger survey, called the Vermont Commission on Country Life. Through it, he developed a program that called for Vermonters to ‘wake up’ so that their grandchildren wouldn’t be dragged down by ‘avoidable low-grade Vermonters.’

The commission concluded that Vermont should prevent the marriage and reproduction of its ‘feeble-minded’ citizens.

On the positive side, the VCCL urged Vermonters to keep track and study their families. “It is the patriotic duty of every normal couple to have children in sufficient number to keep up to par ‘the good old Vermont stock,” the commission reported.

It also recommended ways to promote tourism in order to attract economically successful – therefore biologically fit – visitors and summer residents. Vermont implemented many of those ideas, such as banning billboards, licensing cabins, building highways and encouraging summer homes.

Forced Sterilization

Eventually the Vermont eugenics survey took over the VCCL. Then in 1927, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in Buck v. Bell that forced sterilization was constitutional. That opened the floodgates for Vermont and other states to pass and enforce their compulsory sterilization laws.

Vermont passed its compulsory sterilization law in 1931, the 25th state to do so. The law targeted ‘idiots,’ ‘imbeciles,’ ‘feeble-minded’ or ‘insane’ persons living in state institutions.

Many state laws targeted the mentally ill, the intellectually disabled, the epileptic, the deaf, the blind and the physically deformed. But at the time, many women deemed ‘feeble-minded’ went to state institutions. In reality, they had had sex or gotten pregnant outside of marriage.

In 1936, a publication of the American Neurological Association reported data on sterilizations in the New England states. Vermont had the lowest disparity between men and women, with 65 women sterilized and 32 men. Connecticut had the worst disparity, sterilizing 372 women, but only 19 men. Maine sterilized 78 women and seven men, while New Hampshire sterilized 170 women and 29 men.

Map showing the Vermont eugenics survey wasn’t the only perpetrator of forced sterilization.

A Bad Name

But eugenics was losing steam in the 1930s. Hitler’s rise to power gave eugenics a bad name, and scientists began to think environment played a large role in human development.

Then in 1942, another U.S. Supreme Court case, Skinner v. Oklahoma, raised legal questions about the practice and discouraged further sterilization. Vermont, however, continued sterilizing its people until 1963. In the end, Vermont sterilized more than 250 people it deemed degenerate — mostly women.

Though Henry Farnham Perkins identified alcoholism as a degenerate trait, he died of liver failure, a bedridden alcoholic, in 1956.

Images: Chester, Vt., By Kenneth C. Zirkel – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=61935149. Two cretins By https://wellcomeimages.org/indexplus/obf_images/63/91/55df9a057497dbe426d95a9fd0bb.jpgGallery: https://wellcomeimages.org/indexplus/image/L0013872.htmlWellcome Collection gallery (2018-03-21): https://wellcomecollection.org/works/v2un3ra7 CC-BY-4.0, CC BY 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=35966587. This story was updated in 2023.

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Six Epic College Pranks

College pranks have been part of the college experience since at least the 13^th century, when Oxford students sent a prostitute to the cardinal in residence. The tradition of college pranks came to North America with the Puritans.

In the early 1800s, Harvard students thought it amusing to ring the bell in Memorial Hall during the wee hours of the morning. But at Brown, students preferred to muffle the college bell.

Over the years, college pranks have involved putting farm animals in inappropriate places. Pranksters often victimized prominent statues as well. Dartmouth students painted the statue of Harvard’s John Harvard green, Yale students painted him blue and others put him in women’s underwear.

Here we bring you six historic college pranks performed at New England institutions of higher learning. If you know of any other college pranks, please include them in the comments section.

College Pranks, Animal House Style

The Gardner Dow Field at Connecticut State, where students first paraded the ramnapped Ulysses.

There’s nothing like a sports rivalry to inspire college pranks, and the University of Connecticut and the University of Rhode Island, not 60 miles apart, are no exception.

In 1933, Connecticut State Agricultural College changed its name to Connecticut State College, and renamed its football team the Statesman rather than the Aggies.

It didn’t help the team. In 1934, the Connecticut Statesmen lost six out of their first seven games, while their opponents shut them out five times. Their final home game against the Rhode Island State Rams was likely to end badly for Connecticut.

Then Connecticut students learned that Rhode Island students planned to taunt them by bringing Ulysses, their ram mascot, to the game.

The Connecticut students stole Ulysses. During the 1934 game, Connecticut fans paraded Ulysses on the field accompanied by the marching band. As expected, Connecticut lost 18-0, Rhody fans tore down the goal posts and a fight broke out.

The next month, Connecticut chose as its mascot the Husky, a less kidnappable animal than the ram. For years afterward, Connecticut students ramnapped Ulysses and his successors. And for years afterward, the winner of the UConn-Rhode Island football game took home Ramnapping Trophy. When Rhode Island quit using live rams as mascots in 1974, the trophy was moved to the J. Robert Donnelly Husky Heritage Sports Museum on the UConn campus.

Streaking in Winter

University of Maine at Orono

College pranks took the form of streaking on college campuses starting in the early 1970s. Defined as running naked through a public place, streaking started out with solitary males running across campus or at sporting events. Women soon joined in the fun and streakers began running around en masse.

Some historians peg the beginning of the craze after newspapers began reported streakers at Florida State in January 1974. Despite the New England winter, University of Maine students quickly took up the sport at Orono.

The student government in March called a meeting at Memorial Hall to discuss how to handle the streaking epidemic. One streaker couldn’t resist temptation, and he streaked the meeting.

The state of Maine ended up enacting a law against streaking, but it proved ineffective. On Nov. 2, 2002, a police officer arrested two University of Maine undergraduate women for jogging naked through downtown Orono. A prosecutor charged them with indecent conduct. One of the women asked the police officer if he saw her genitals. He said no. The judge ruled a woman naked in the street is not an indecent act under Maine law because a woman’s genitals are primarily internal.

MIT Masters College Pranks

Smoot mark 364.4 on the Cambridge end of the Harvard Bridge. It says “+ 1 ear”, not “± 1 ear”, as it should.

The geeks at MIT have so perfected college pranks over the centuries that the MIT Museum once featured a Hall of Hacks.

The college pranks at MIT often display technical aptitude, something you’d expect at a university that teaches technology. MIT students once put a campus police car on top of the Great Dome, its lights flashing and its dummy inhabitant enjoying coffee and donuts.

Later, they put a subway car on the Great Dome and got it moving.

In the 1930s, Ken Wadleigh and four other MIT students welded a streetcar to its rails. They distracted the motorman and then set off thermite bombs to weld the wheels. Wadleigh became a dean at MIT.

In 1958, MIT students used undergraduate Oliver R. Smoot to measure the length of the Harvard Bridge. They marked the bridge at every Smoot, and measured it as 364.4 Smoots, plus or minus an ear. When the bridge was renovated in 1964, the markings were restored, and they remain today.

Not all pranks involve technology. MIT students dressed the John Harvard statue as the Unabomber after the arrest of that Harvard alumni.

Cow-centric College Pranks

Thompson Hall at UNH

University of New Hampshire students have long taken to heart the admonition, “If at all possible, involve a cow.”

Students at UNH, a land-grant college, have access to farm animals for their college pranks. Over the years, students put pigs and sheep in places where pigs and sheep don’t belong.

In the 1930s, Alpha Gamma Rho brothers managed to haul a cow into the Thompson Hall tower. Somehow they got the cow down as well.

In 1951, students replicated the college prank by stashing a cow in the second floor of Ballard Hall. A poem written by the night watchman, Pop Marshall, recounts the episode:

“Now I’m willing to guard your property / And watch your buildings fine, / But teaching music to a cow / Is a little out of my line.”

Years later, UNH would be victimized by a more serious college prank of sorts when popular physics professor Kevin Yates turned out to be a college dropout named Marvin Hewitt. Read Hewitt’s extraordinary story here.

Messing With Messer

In the annals of Brown University, perhaps no administrator was so victimized by college pranks as Asa Messer. He became president in 1804, just when Nicholas Brown gave $5,000 to the College of Rhode Island and renamed it Brown. Under Messer’s tenure, the student body grew, but Brown’s bequest wasn’t quite enough to run the college to the student’s liking.

Asa Messer

Beloved tutors left Brown for other colleges, but Messer couldn’t afford to hire enough replacements to keep class size down.

Early in his presidency, students played harmless college pranks such as painting Messer’s horse or stabling it in his third-floor office.

Then the students’ pranks turned dangerous. They built a hut of kindling and set it on fire next to University Hall, endangering the building’s roof and Messer’s barn. Students damaged dormitories in University Hall and broke windows and doors of Hope College’s new chapel.

University Hall in 1792

Messer didn’t believe in sparing the rod and spoiling the undergraduate. He punished pranksters by rusticating them – sending them off to work on a farm. They called him a tyrant.

Messer believed the students aimed their vandalism at him personally, and he resigned.

Samuel Gridley Howe had attended Brown during those troubled times, and had once led Dr. Messer’s horse into the belfry. He also put hot ashes in his tutor’s bed.

After he founded the Perkins School for the Blind, Howe went to visit Dr. Messer. He apologized for his wayward youthful behavior. Messer replied, “Howe, I am afraid of you now. I am afraid there will be a torpedo under my chair before I know it.”

Panty Raid To End All Panty Raids

Vermont College of Fine Arts today

On the evening of May 24, 1963, carloads of cadets from Norwich University led a panty raid against the women of Vermont College (now the Vermont College of Fine Arts).

Vermont’s faculty and staff had an inkling something would happen that evening. A local store clerk said he’d sold out of women’s underwear that day. Vermont Dean Pauline Collins told her students she’d received a call from Gen. Ernest Harmon, who headed of Norwich Academy, warning about the panty raid. She told them to cancel their dates, return to the dormitory by 7:00 p.m., turn out the lights when the panty raid began and let no one into the building.

At dusk, cars carrying 300 Norwich cadets began to arrive, followed by the police and fire department. A hose truck stopped in front of the dorm, and the firefighters jumped out to hook up the hoses. A Norwich cadet commandeered the fire truck and drove it into a fountain. Girls shouted from the windows, “Come on Norwich! We want Norwich!” Firefighters then turned their hoses on the students in the windows.

Fighting broke out between police and cadets. Police Chief George Connor said, “We were knocked down, kicked, and trampled upon. It’s a miracle that no one was killed.”

In the end, Vermont’s president issued a denial that his students had participated at all in the hijinks.

Images: Smoot, By Denimadept – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=6792703; Streaker, By Alex Kehr – originally posted to Flickr as #367, CC BY 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=3953923Thompson Hall at UNH By AcrossTheAtlantic – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=63031225. Vermont College By Hannahmorris – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=24295961.

This story about college pranks was updated in 2022.

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Six Historic Movie Sets in New England

So many New England places have served as historic movie sets that we found it hard to choose one for each state. Filmmakers over the years have set scenes in the mansions of Newport, along the colonial seaports and at college and prep school campuses – to name just a few.

Take, for example, the 1987 film Mystic Pizza. It features the Connecticut towns of Stonington, Mystic, New London, Pawcatuck, Groton, Watch Hill and Westerly, along with the Yale campus and Watch Hill and Westerly in Rhode Island.

The historic districts of Providence and Boston have starred in many, many films. Even Connecticut’s famous Glass House has been cited as the inspiration for the architecture in Batman vs. Superman.

We did manage, however, to come up with representative historic movie sets in each New England state. If you know of others, please include them in the comments section.

Mystic Seaport

Mystic Seaport, one of several historic movie sets used in Amistad

We decided to go with Amistad because of its historic theme. Amistad, of course, told the story of the slaves who rebelled aboard the ship of the same name. They went to trial and won their case with the help of John Quincy Adams.

Steven Spielberg used several historic movie setes for the 1997 film, including both the Massachusetts and Rhode Island statehouses, Mystic Seaport and several Newport, R.I., mansions.

Surprisingly, Amistad was the first film to use the seaport since the television movie A Man Without a Country 25 years earlier.

Acadia National Park

Though Pet Sematary didn’t have a historic theme, Acadia National Park provided a historic movie set

Acadia National Park serves as a historic movie set for Pet Sematary because the Antiquities Act protects it from development. The 1906 Act gives the president the right to create national monuments from federal lands, and Pet Sematary is one of a number of blockbuster movies shot on land protected by the Act.

Mainer Stephen King, appropriately, wrote the horror novel on which the 1989 film is based. The story about a haunted pet cemetery takes place in Ludlow, Maine, a real town in Aroostook County. But he actually shot the film in a number of Maine towns: Hancock, Bucksport, Ellsworth and Bangor.

The film boasts the tag line, “Sometimes dead is better,” and features a soundtrack by the Ramones.

The Crane Estate

The Crane Estate, used several times as a historic movie set

Witches of Eastwick, based on the novel by Boston North Shore resident John Updike, features the Crane Estate in Ipswich. David Adler designed the Tudor Revival mansion for the Robert Crane family on a 2,100-acre estate. The Trustees of Reservations now own the estate and offer public programs and beach access during the summer.

In the 1987 film, the Crane Estate is the home of the eccentric millionaire Daryl Van Horne, played by Jack Nicholson. Other historic movie sets in Witches include Abbot Hall in Marblehead and Milton Academy in Milton, both in Massachusetts.

The Crane Estate also served as a historic movie set for Flowers in the Attic (1987), Ghosts of Girlfriends Past (2009) and The Equalizer (2014).

Philips Exeter Academy

A view of Philips Exeter Academy

Philips Exeter Academy in Exeter, N.H., provided the historic movie set for A Separate Peace, the coming-of-age novel every Baby Boomer read in school. The 1972 film starring a 20-year-old Parker Stevenson took place during World War II.

John Knowles published the novel 15 years after attending Philips Exeter as a boarder from West Virginia. He fell in love with the place, later writing, “The great trees, the thick clinging ivy, the expanses of playing fields, the winding black-water river, the pure air all began to sort of intoxicate me.”

Historic Exeter, N.H., is also featured in the A Separate Peace, as is New Hampshire’s Salisbury Beach. The nearby towns of Portsmouth and Dover, N.H., also appeared in another sort of coming-of-age film: the 1962 production of Lolita.

A later made-for-TV version of A Separate Peace was filmed in Toronto, Canada.

The Blithewold Mansion

The Blithewold Mansion, used for weddings and historic movie sets

We already gave Amistad to Connecticut, so we decided to select Mr. North as Rhode Island’s historic movie set. Thornton Wilder wrote the novel on which the 1988 film is based. Mr. North starred Anthony Edwards, Robert Mitchum and Lauren Bacall.

When the main character arrives in Newport, R.I., rumors about his healing powers start to spread. Director Danny Huston filmed it not in Newport, but at The Blithewold Mansion in Bristol. Coal baron Augustus Van Sickle built the English manor-style house, which features 33 acres full of rare and unusual plantings. The nomination for the National Register of Historic Places describes Blithewold as having outstanding landscaping, gardens and arboretums. Popular for weddings, Blithewold is now run as a house museum.

If you’re wondering about which Newport mansions served as historic movie sets, the Colony House appeared in Amistad as the appellate court. Marble House served as Queen Isabella’s palace, and Rosecliff Mansion appeared as the White House dining room.

The University Green Historic District

UVM’s University Green

The University Green Historic District, a central part of the University of Vermont campus, stars as the historic movie set in What Lies Beneath. The horror film starring Harrison Ford and Michelle Pfeiffer has a stock plot. Claire Spencer, the wife of a university scientist, believes her lakeside Vermont home is haunted – or else she’s going mad.

The film features other Vermont locales, but the University Green is easily the most historic. It dates to 1801 and has some of the school’s oldest and most architecturally significant buildings surrounding it. The National Register of Historic Places added it to its list in 1976.

Images: Mystic Seaport, By Stan Shebs, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=115477; Acadia By Chandra Hari – Wikimedia file, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=64743138; Crane Estate, By Djmcrenn – Own work, CC BY 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=4520123; University Green of Vermont, By Mfwills – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=8670114. This story about historic movie sets in New England was updated in 2022.

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The First Black Phi Beta Kappas of New England

The Phi Beta Kappa Society, established at the College of William and Mary in 1776, is America’s oldest and most prestigious honor society. Its goal is promoting excellence in the liberal arts and sciences. Almost 100 years after its founding, after the Civil War, black Phi Beta Kappas began appearing in the society’s ranks. The first five black Phi Beta Kappas came from New England colleges. Here are their stories.

George Washington Henderson, University of Vermont

Born in 1850, George Washington Henderson started out life as a slave. He was most likely befriended by Union soldiers during the Civil War and came to Vermont at the war’s end. He was illiterate when arriving in Vermont but soon corrected that. By 1870 he was a student at the University of Vermont and graduated in 1877 at the head of his class.

George Washington Henderson

Henderson’s career included stints as a school principal in Vermont. He was ordained a minister, and his studies took him as far as Berlin, Germany. He became a college dean at Fisk University in Nashville, Tenn. He ended his career in Xenia, Ohio as a professor of foreign languages.

Winfield Scott Montgomery, Dartmouth College

Winfield Scott Montgomery

Born in Mississippi in 1853, Winfield Scott Montgomery’s family moved to New Orleans where he lived until he was 10 years old. A one-time slave, Montgomery was swept up by the spirit of the Civil War and followed Union troops north. The young run-away was befriended by Vermont troops who saw he attended Leland and Gray Seminary in Townsend, Vt. He taught school and attended college part time. He detoured to Washington, D.C. to teach school there before returning to Dartmouth College. He graduated in 1878 and became a professor of ancient and modern languages at Alcorn University in Rodney, Mississippi.

In 1882, however, Montgomery returned to Washington, D.C. to return to his calling as a progressive principal in the city’s public schools. He never abandoned learning, however, earning a medical degree from Howard University.

Wiley Lane, Amherst College

Wiley Lane was born in North Carolina in 1852. His brilliance was apparent from a young age, and he attended Howard University’s prep school program. After three years studying at Howard, Lane moved north to Amherst College, where he graduated in 1876 — with his second bachelor’s degree — and he was admitted to the Phi Beta Kappa society.

Howard University lured Lane back as a tutor, and granted him a chair in the Greek studies department. To strengthen his Modern Greek, in which he needed further study, Lane enrolled in the American College of Modern Greek in Athens. He planned a tour of Europe following his course work. Lane’s career was cut tragically short, however, when he contracted pneumonia and died before he could depart on his travels.

James Major Colson Jr., Dartmouth College

James Major Colson Jr. came from a free black family in Petersburg, Va. As a young man he assisted his father in his work as a shoemaker, but his mother’s academic bent — she was a poet and opened a private school in Petersburg — showed the stronger pull on his future.

James Major Colson Jr

Colson traveled north at the age of 21 to be trained for college at the Middleboro, Mass. high school. He attended Dartmouth College and graduated in 1883. Returning to Virginia he became chair of science at the Virginia Normal and Collegiate Institute. He ended his career as principal of the Jon A. Dix Agricultural and Industrial School, and was an active member of his community. He helped establish a YMCA, was frequently published and took up the study of weather.

Edward Alexander Bouchet,Yale University

Edward Alexander Bouchet‘s journey to college required little travel. He was born in New Haven, Conn. in 1852. His father was a janitor at Yale University and his mother did laundry for students. They encouraged their son’s studies from an early age, and Bouchet entered Yale in 1870. He graduated in 1874, Yale’s first black graduate.

Edward Alexander Bouchet

Bouchet’s academic focus was physics and mathematics, and he spent the bulk of his career as a teacher at the Institute for Colored Youth in Pennsylvania. When the institute closed its college-prep programs in 1902, Bouchet’s career took several twists and turns. He worked as a hospital administrator and customs agent before returning to teach at high schools in Lawrenceville, Va. and Gallipolis, Ohio. He ended his career on the faculty of Bishop College in Marshall, Texas. He returned to New Haven and died in 1918. Bouchet also might fairly claim to be the first black member of the Phi Beta Kappa Society. Yale’s society had disbanded at the time he graduated in 1874, and he was admitted some 10 years later when the society was revived and began filling the roles from the years when it was dormant. So while he graduated in 1874, his admission didn’t come until 1884.

Thanks to The Earliest Black Members of Phi Beta Kappa, by Caldwell Titcolm (Journal of African Americans in Higher Education). This story updated in 2022.

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Six of the Oldest Hospitals in New England, From Wine to Women

New England’s oldest hospitals are all younger than such venerable institutions as schools, banks, businesses and taverns.

Religious orders had run hospitals for centuries to care for the poor, not just the sick. They evolved during the 18^th century into places for the practice and teaching of medicine by trained professionals. Nurses, like Louisa May Alcott, for a long time had little or no formal training.

Over time, hospitals became centers of medical innovation and research. They developed specialties and affiliated with medical schools. During the 19^th century, lunatic asylums sprang up to take care of mentally ill people outside the family.

After the Civil War, the number of hospitals grew rapidly in the United States, to 4,400 by 1910. They got larger, cleaner and more professional.

New England’s oldest hospitals reflect that evolution. One early hospital gave wine to poor people. One took in the insane. A woman who also wrote hymns started one. And one of the oldest hospitals has a unit named after a woman who gave birth to a president in another of the oldest hospitals.

Here, then, are six of the oldest hospitals in New England, one in each state.

State Hospital, New Haven

The State Hospital by Ithiel Town

The old State Hospital is Connecticut’s first and boasts many other firsts. It published the first nursing textbook in 1879, produced the first x-ray in the United States in 1896 and used chemotherapy as a cancer treatment for the first time ever in 1942. It also, for the first time in the U.S., allowed healthy newborns to stay in their mothers’ rooms in 1946. Barbara Bush, by the way, gave birth there to future U.S. President George W. Bush that year. In 1975, Lyme disease was identified and named at Yale-New Haven Hospital.

Now called Yale-New Haven Hospital, it was founded in 1826 by the General Hospital Society of Connecticut. It opened in rented quarters, but founders raised enough money by 1833 to build the 13-bed State Hospital designed by Ithiel Town. East and west wings were added.

During the Civil War, the U.S. government leased the building for use as a military hospital. Fifteen hundred beds were set up in the building and in tents on the grounds to treat 25,000 U.S. Army soldiers during the war. Yale-New Haven Hospital has been designated a military hospital in every subsequent war.

The Yale-New Haven Hospital is not only one of the oldest hospitals in the country, it is one of the biggest. Today it has a 1,541-bed hospital, the 168-bed Smilow Cancer Hospital, the 201-bed Yale New Haven Children’s Hospital and the 76-bed Yale New Haven Psychiatric Hospital. It also serves as the teaching hospital for Yale School of Medicine and Yale School of Nursing.

Maine General Hospital

Now Maine Medical Center, once Maine General Hospital

Maine Medical Center in Portland is now the largest hospital in Northern New England. It has 637 beds serving Maine, parts of Vermont and New Hampshire. It was founded as the Maine General Hospital through the efforts of the Maine Medical Society and the state Legislature. Now it serves as a teaching hospital affiliated with four university medical schools.

Doctors founded the Maine Medical Association 20 years earlier to quash the practice of homeopathic and alternative medicines. The group also had concerns about the lack of a general hospital in Maine. The Legislature granted land and funds for the institution, which opened its doors in 1874.

Maine’s doctors had lobbied for the Maine General Hospital. A Maine Medical Association founder, Dr. Gilman Davies, pronounced, ‘the Maine General Hospital is the child of the Maine Medical Association.’

Like the Yale-New Haven Hospital, the Maine Medical Center has a connection to the Bush family: the Barbara Bush Children’s Hospital. Once the teaching hospital for Bowdoin College, it now has affiliations with Dartmouth, St. Joseph’s, Tufts and the University of Southern Maine medical schools.

The Boston Dispensary

The Boston Dispensary

One of the five oldest hospitals in the country, the Boston Dispensary was founded in 1796, 60 years after the start of Bellevue Hospital in New York and Charity Hospital in New Orleans.

The Dispensary was New England’s first hospital, and it took care of poor people. It was founded by Boston’s civic leaders, including Paul Revere and Sam Adams. Oliver Wendell Holmes received his medical training there, as did other prominent physicians such as James Jackson and Henry Bowditch.

Doctors took care of patients at the Dispensary in Boston’s South End or in their homes, and gave them medicine and wine, if they felt it necessary. Clinics were established throughout the city, and eventually so was an evening clinic for the working poor, which was partially funded by employers.

Subscribers supported the Dispensary by paying $5 a year for a ticket, which entitled them to recommend two patients to its care. The Massachusetts Historical Society has a ticket signed by Paul Revere.

The Boston Dispensary over the years affiliated with other medical institutions, including Boston’s Floating Hospital for Children, Tufts University’s medical and dental schools and the Pratt Diagnostic Clinic. In 1968 those affiliations became formal in a merger resulting in Tufts New England Medical Center, now Tufts Medical Center.

Portsmouth Cottage Hospital

The Thomas Bailey Aldrich House, once the Portsmouth Cottage Hospital

Portsmouth Cottage Hospital admitted its first patients in 1884, nearly a century after the Dartmouth Hitchcock Medical School opened its doors in 1797.

Harriet Kimball, the daughter of a Portsmouth pharmacist, provided the drive to start Portsmouth Cottage Hospital. She also published poetry and hymns. Kimball founded the hospital as a charity, with some funding from the City of Portsmouth.

The hospital opened in the large house in which a famous writer, Thomas Bailey Aldrich, once lived. That house now belongs to the Strawbery Banke Museum complex.

In 1989, five years after Portsmouth Cottage Hospital opened, fundraising for a proper hospital building began. A 2-1/2 story brick building opened in 1895 and expanded until 1962. That year, the hospital moved to a new building next door.

In 1983, the for-profit hospital chain Health Corporation of America bought it and opened a new campus. HCA renamed it Portsmouth Regional Hospital. HCA since settled fraud charges with the U.S. government totaling $2 billion, then the largest fraud settlement in history.

Concord Hospital, also founded in 1884, still serves as a charitable hospital. It started with a gift of $60,000 from George Pillsbury, father of Pillsbury Co. co-founder Charles Pillsbury. George named it Mary Pillsbury Hospital as a 50^th wedding anniversary gift to his wife. It admitted its first patients in 1891.

Butler Hospital, Providence

Butler Hospital

Rhode Island’s first hospital has the unusual distinction of being a psychiatric hospital. Butler Hospital for the Insane was founded in 1844 with a donation from industrialist Cyrus Butler. It also received financial support from Nicholas Brown, Jr.

The hospital’s first superintendent, Dr. Isaac Ray, toured the asylums of Europe before Butler received its first patients in 1847. Ray reported his findings in Europe in the American Journal of Insanity. People now consider him a founder of forensic psychiatry.

Today, Butler Hospital is affiliated with Brown’s Warren Alpert Medical School. It also serves as the flagship of the university’s acclaimed department of psychiatry.

If you thought Rhode Island’s first general hospital would be a philanthropic project of the Brown family, you would be right. Rhode Island Hospital started with a bequest from Nicholas Brown, Jr.’s nephew, Moses Brown Ives.

The hospital was officially dedicated on Oct. 1, 1868.

Mary Fletcher Hospital, Burlington, Vt.

Mary Fletcher Hospital

The first hospital in Vermont opened its doors in 1879 in Burlington, thanks to the generosity of Mary Fletcher.

Mary was born in Jericho, Vt., to Thadeus and Mary Fletcher in 1830. Thadeus was a successful businessman who left a fortune when he died. Young Mary was the last of the family’s five children, and by 1876 she had outlived her siblings and her parents. Though she suffered from tuberculosis, Mary, who was never married, worked to complete the philanthropic dreams of her parents.

Deploying the family’s wealth she established the Fletcher Free Library and the Mary Fletcher Training School for Nurses. Working with her doctor, Walter Carpenter, she spent more than $200,000 buying land and constructing and equipping the Mary Fletcher Hospital, which she named after her mother. She would die in the hospital, in 1885.

The hospital has merged with other institutions over the years, but part of the original hospital is still working today as part of the University of Vermont Medical Center.

This story was updated in 2022.

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