Dr. Bob and the Good Oldtimers. Anonymous
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where there is an unaccountable degree of immorality and vice” were those periodically admonished in the school paper for wearing sweaters, “which cover a multitude of sins,” to church and dinner.
Joe P., an Akron A.A. who went to Dartmouth several years after Bob, recalled, “Dartmouth was the drinkingest of the Ivy League schools when I went there. New Hampshire was dry and you couldn’t get whiskey, so you’d take the train down to a little town in Massachusetts. Everybody ran over and loaded up, then drank all the way back home. Sometimes, we’d go up to Canada for liquor—or have the brakemen on the trains bring it back to us.
“The natives would have hard cider. Every window in Dartmouth had a jug of hard cider sitting on it. On those horribly cold days, they’d drill down through the ice and take the alcohol out. A cupful would knock the hat right off your head.
“It was a school way up in the mountains, and there was nothing else to do. There were about six girls in town who were waitresses at the Hanover Inn. We were known as the Dartmouth animals, and we tried to act the part. You were supposed to be rough. There was no way to get rid of your exuberance, except when you finally got to go down to Smith, or to Wellesley down near Boston.”
Bob’s first discovery in his search for the facts of campus life probably did not come about by accident. More likely, it was exactly what he hoped to find: that drinking seemed to be the major extracurricular activity.
“Almost everyone seemed to do it,” Bob said, using the time-honored words that “almost everyone” uses to justify heavy drinking in a particular place, profession, or society. So, with a combination of dedication, perseverance, and natural ability, he set out to become a winner in this new sport.
In the beginning, he drank for the sheer fun of it and suffered little or no ill effects. “I seemed to be able to snap back the next morning better than most of my fellow drinkers, who were cursed (or perhaps blessed) with a great deal of morning-after nausea,” he said. “Never once in my life have I had a headache, which fact leads me to believe that I was an alcoholic almost from the start.”
At Dartmouth, the oncoming illness was no more apparent to classmates than it was to Bob himself. E. B. Watson, who was president of Bob’s class of 1902, later became a professor at the college. Still later, as a professor emeritus, he commented in a letter that Bob had been friendly and well liked at Dartmouth for his frank and unpretentious ways of speech. “Although he indulged somewhat excessively in beer (the only beverage then obtainable in New Hampshire), he did not become a slave to alcohol until his graduate schooling.”
“I roomed with him in my junior year,” recalled Dr. Philip P. Thompson. “I remember him as a tall, lanky gentleman, a little bit abrupt in manner. He was restless. I have no recollection of ever seeing him study, although he was always up in his classes.”
Dr. Thompson described his roommate as “rather quick-spoken,” remembering a Saturday when several members of the class were having a seemingly endless discussion about where they would go and what they would do that afternoon. Evidently, alcohol was mentioned a time or two, for Bob said, “Well, if we’re going to get drunk, why don’t we get at it?”
In that junior year, Dr. Thompson noted, Bob was devoting more and more of his time to playing billiards and drinking beer. “He told me he had liked the taste of liquor ever since he had had some hard cider as a small boy,” Dr. Thompson said, noting that Bob could drink liquor in quantities “that the rest of us could not stand.”
In addition to learning his way around a billiard table at Dartmouth, it was probably there that Bob started to attain his eventual high proficiency with a deck of cards—whether bridge, poker, or gin rummy. In these and any other games, Dr. Bob was highly competitive and always played to win.
He even learned to pitch horseshoes somewhere along the line. One of the pioneer members in Akron A.A., Ernie G., recalled that a number of A.A.’s including Dr. Bob used to go up to a Minnesota fishing camp in the early 1940’s.
“You couldn’t get him in a boat to go fishing,” Ernie remembered. “I’d say, ‘You ought to get away from that card table.’ Then I said, ‘I’ll beat you in a game of horseshoes.’ He said, ‘Okay, we’ll just see about that. How much are we going to play for?’
“I said, ‘I won’t make it tough on you. Let’s make it a quarter.’ Hell, I didn’t know he was a horseshoe pitcher. He could throw ringers like nobody’s business. I thought I was pretty good, too, but he took me two out of three. If he had been in practice, I wouldn’t’ve stood a chance.”
Smitty often remarked jokingly that his father’s skill at pool, cards, and other games of chance was the result of a misspent youth. Dr. Bob would just smile and say nothing.
Another trick Bob picked up along the way was an ability to chugalug a bottle of beer without any apparent movement of his Adam’s apple. “We said he had a patent or open throat,” said Dr. Thompson.
Dr. Bob never lost the knack of not swallowing, a bar-room trick that must have been good for a free shot or two here and there in his drinking years. In his sober years, he would take a day’s supply of vitamins or medicines and toss them down his open throat all at one time, without water. “What’s the difference?” he’d say. “They all go the same place.”
In addition to describing Bob’s proficiency at chugalugging, Dr. Thompson told of two incidents, with a significant detail that foreshadowed the future.
“Bob and I liked to take long walks. One day, we walked to White River Junction. As we approached through the rail yard, a voice came out of a freight car: ‘Hey, Bub, get me a sandwich, will you?’
“It was dusk and we couldn’t see who it was, but we went into the restaurant and bought a couple of sandwiches, which we put in the car door. ‘Thank you,’ said the voice. We asked him where he was going, and he said Portland, Maine.
“Later that year, Admiral Dewey returned from Manila to his home state of Vermont, and there was to be a great reception for him in Montpelier. Bob had the idea of going up there and said that since we didn’t have any money, we should try to hop a freight the way that tramp did.
“We found a car with an open door and jumped in, not knowing whether the train was going to Montreal or Boston, upriver or down. Fortunately, it went up the Connecticut River, stopping at every little station along the way as it got colder and darker.
“We made it to Montpelier the next day. When we arrived, covered with straw and somewhat disheveled, Bob decided we needed a few beers, though it was only around breakfast time.
“Going out into the street, we met a Dartmouth man whose father happened to be Governor of Vermont. When we told him we had come to see Admiral Dewey, he invited us to view the parade with the Governor at the State House. So, in spite of our appearance, we were honored by sitting with the Governor (in the background, of course) and watching the procession in real state.”
On the whole, that seems to be a harmless escapade; a youngster who would flout his parents’ five-o’clock curfew by sneaking out of the house might be expected to grow up into a young man who would hop a freight on impulse.
But the boy who savored a first taste of hard cider, on the sly, had also grown up into a man who considered “a few beers” to be perfectly sensible refreshment at breakfast time.
Dr. Bob spent his last years at Dartmouth doing, by his own account, “what I wanted to do, without regard for the rights, wishes, or privileges of others, a state of mind which became more and more predominant as the years passed.”
He was graduated in 1902— “‘summa cum laude’ in the eyes of the drinking fraternity,” in his own words, but with a somewhat lower estimate from the dean. (More formally, he was a member of Kappa Kappa Kappa.)
In most Dartmouth classmates’ recollections of Bob, there was a notable gap of almost 35 years—for reasons that eventually became obvious.
The Alumni Magazine of November 1936 included this brief note: “Some of you fellows