Snow & Ice

At Dartmouth, in 1908, the groups huddled around fraternity-house fireplaces had two subjects for disgruntled conversation: the cold weather and an eccentric sophomore named Fred Harris who went outdoors every afternoon to slide down the New Hampshire hills on two long sticks. Of Dartmouth's many alumni, distinguished and otherwise, none has served his alma mater more effectively than Skier Harris. From his odd idea of entertainment developed the Dartmouth Outing Club, the legend of a "college on skis" that made last week's 25th annual Winter Carnival one of the brightest happenings on the calendar of U. S. winter sports. There were dances, two nights in a row. At each of the fraternity houses, where nearly 1,000 girls who had come up for the week-end were staying, three chaperones tried to keep track of what was happening. The campus was decorated with statues made of ice and snowmen twelve feet high. The first night of the Carnival, the Outing Club gave its pageant--"Jottunheimer Eiskorneval"--a preposterous affair about Norwegian snow gods and a fancy-skating maiden. A committee chose Pauline Webster of Detroit, a pretty blonde girl who works on the Detroit News, Queen of the Snows, but no one could find the silver cup on which the Queen's name is annually engraved. A freshman, Richard Durrance, was crowned King.

To Durrance went also the somewhat more substantial satisfaction of winning two of the skiing events that are the Carnival's backbone. A Floridian who learned to ski in Germany, considered by Dartmouth's grizzled Coach Otto Schniebs the best amateur downhill skier in the U. S., Durrance won the downhill race--a precipitous mile down a mountain slide--in 58.8 seconds. In the slalom--zig-zag down a course outlined by pennants in the snow --he wasted three seconds going back to round a marker he had missed, and finished third. At jumping, judges thought his teammate Henry S. Woods showed a shade better style. When it looked as if Dartmouth would win its own carnival, one of the four men skiing the third leg of the 12-mi. relay race, last event on the program, cut a corner and got his team disqualified. That gave New Hampshire University, with 511 points to McGill's 490, first place, with Dartmouth third.

At New Haven. Fifteen-year-old Robin Lee has been reared as carefully as a violin prodigy or a Dionne. His father, a St. Paul, Minn, figure-skating teacher, noticed his son's talent when Robin was 7, promptly made his first pair of skates. By the time he was 10, Robin Lee had mastered all the rudimentary figures that take adults many years to learn. Now a freshman at Erasmus Hall High School in Brooklyn, N. Y., he rides an hour on the subway every afternoon to do his daily stuff. Proficiency at a pastime which, if he were less expert, might be considered sissyish has encouraged Robin Lee to take up other sports. He is an expert swimmer, won the junior golf championship of St. Paul three years ago. But these accomplishments bring him no more satisfaction than Yehudi Menuhin might get from tootling on a piccolo. That Robin Lee was a figure-skating genius he demonstrated a year ago when he was runner-up to Roger Turner, 32-year-old Boston lawyer, for the U. S. championship. Last week at New Haven, while Maribel Vinson of Boston was reclaiming the women's title she did not bother to defend a year ago, a crowd of 4,000, most of them well versed in the esthetics of the sport, saw Lee and Turner matched again.

Turner, precise, methodical, almost flawless in his execution, went through the school figures with his usual authority, gave a creditable exhibition in the free-skating, in which each competitor has the right to choose his own maneuvers. Small (5 ft.), slender, dressed in woolly blue breeches, Robin Lee spun through the school figures in parabolas of smooth perfection. The next evening, while the band played "Wild Flower" and "Song of the Vagabonds," he executed a series of dance steps around the arena, whirled like a top in a Jackson Haynes. When he finished, with a flourish called the Boeckl Jump, named for his New York instructor, the judges gave him a title that may well last a lifetime.

At Lake Placid, where their father owned a hotel, the Stevens brothers, Hubert, Paul, Curtis and Raymond, always enjoyed coasting in a quiet way. They found other pastimes--baseball at Yale, big-game hunting, flying--stodgy by comparison, went home and stuck to sliding. Five years ago the Olympic Winter Games Committee built a mile-and-a-half ice-lined bob-sled run down the side of nearby Mt. Van Hoevenberg and the Stevens brothers, grown seasoned and immensely expert, reaped the rewards of their vocation. They became the most famed coasters in the U. S., won the two-man title in the Olympic Games.

Last week final tryouts for the 1936 Olympic bob-sled team started at Mt. Van Hoevenberg. Eager to coast down the hill at Garmisch-Partenkirchen next year, the Stevens brothers entered two sleds. Before the trials were one day old a two-man New York team, with Gilbert Colgate steering, had broken Hubert's record for the run. Next day a sled steered by Ivan Brown, Keene Valley truck driver, broke Colgate's record and won first place in the two-man tryouts. Four-man tryouts went to record-breaking Donna Fox of The Bronx, with Curtis Stevens third.

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