From the Archives:
My First Week at Dartmouth (1950)
As a new academic year begins, we’re firing up the projector and looking back at a film from the College archives that reminds us how much (and how little!) has changed with each turning of the academic calendar. Featured today is My First Week at Dartmouth (1950), a 20-minute narrative tale of a fictional freshman’s first week in Hanover. In it, we enjoy a stylized look at some of the rituals of the return, from arrival to orientation to moving in and meeting your first roommate. The story is timeless, and this particular retelling of it is very personable and admirably produced.
The film stars Henry “Buck” Zuckerman ’52 (later known as Buck Henry, the Emmy-winning writer and actor behind The Graduate, Get Smart, and Saturday Night Live) as Peter, a wide-eyed freshman making his first rounds through campus life. Its creative direction came from Maurice Rapf ’35, a Hollywood screenwriter and Dartmouth professor who transformed the project from a routine admissions reel into a story with characters and dramatic pacing. Behind the camera was Adrian Bouchard, the College’s longtime photographer, whose lens defined Dartmouth imagery for decades.
The Hanover Inn makes its first appearance in the opening scene, when an alumnus sets down his newspaper on the porch to watch students flood out of Webster Hall after matriculation ceremonies. From there, the film unfolds in 3,000 feet of brilliant Kodachrome: trains pulling into White River Junction, buses carrying new students across the river, the purchase of freshman beanies (a tradition long gone), a tour through Robinson Hall’s club offices—shot in quick vignettes that feel unexpectedly modern—and a sequence in Baker Library where our freshman protagonist studies card catalogs and Orozco’s murals. Our favorite moment is the move-in tableau, with trunks, furniture, and freight being hauled this way and that across campus, rugs beaten out of windows, and bargaining with shopkeepers on Main Street. The Hanover Inn makes its second appearance here, as a newly acquired couch is carried across Main Street towards a dorm.
Director Maurice Rapf later recalled in the Dartmouth Alumni Magazine that he pushed the film to be more than the uninspired plan which was initially on the drawing board, going as far as to enlist the help of Tuck students and professors to collect data to improve the quality of the message and optimize it for the purposes of the Admissions Office:
My First Week at Dartmouth will probably do the job it was meant to do in the recruiting field. Historically speaking, it started in the minds of the Alumni Film Committee and its chairman, Orton Hicks '21. For a while it was annoyingly regarded as "A Guided Tour of the College" and meant to supplement the film Dartmouth Outdoors with a picture of the college plant and facilities. Since no creative effort is possible without science these days, we relied on Professor Al Frey’s marketing class at Tuck School to poll the then freshmen on what factors had influenced their choice of Dartmouth, a most successful move since, like most polls, it told us what we already wanted to believe.
— Dartmouth Alumni Magazine, January 1951
The quality of the production holds up, even seventy-plus years on. It speaks to the professionalism of the college's film department. The college's early legacy with film production is storied and well documented, so it's no wonder that this Kodachrome jewelbox impresses with the quality of its production. Dartmouth’s involvement in film stretches back at least to the 1930s, when the College produced documentary-style reels about campus life and regional culture. Over the following decades, alumni, professors, and students collaborated to create everything from promotional films to artistic projects, building a tradition that made the College unusually adept at using film as both an institutional tool and a creative outlet.
“We tried to show Dartmouth not merely as a collection of buildings and facilities, but as a place where men live and learn together, a community with traditions and spirit.”
— Dartmouth Alumni Magazine, January 1951
The making of the film was nothing short of a local triumph. As Rapf reflected, “When you consider that everything […] was conceived and executed in Hanover by members of the college staff, students, alumni and faculty […] with no motor-driven camera, no synchronous recording equipment, no studio ‘set,’ no auxiliary generator for lighting interiors—then you can recognize the ingenuity of the technical achievement.” That spirit of cooperation extended even to Hanovarians: “the stationmaster in White River Junction detaining a locomotive to provide a symphony of bells and whistles for our tape recorder; Ives Atherton ’24 protecting the flowers in his garden with a blanket when a frost came the night before we intended to photograph them … All this was cooperation in big letters.”
And the story holds up too. Though the details have evolved, the fundamental experience of arriving as a newcomer to Hanover, NH remains very much the same today as it was in 1950. New students still step off buses and trains with a mix of excitement and nerves, still find themselves navigating unfamiliar dorms and forming lifelong friendships in those first weeks. Orientation traditions may look different, and the technology at their fingertips is worlds away from card catalogs and postcards, yet the essential rhythm of arrival— the sense of becoming part of something larger— hasn’t changed. What this film captures, and what continues to resonate, is the feeling of Dartmouth as both a destination and a beginning.
We wish the incoming classes a warm welcome as they move into their new spaces and places around campus, and without further ado, please enjoy My First Week at Dartmouth (1950), courtesy of the Rauner Library: