Great Leap Forward
“The Hopkins Center—the College’s manifest investment in the arts—was one of my primary reasons for attending Dartmouth. As a student I spent innumerable hours in its classrooms and theaters, and four decades later I find the friendships and lessons I acquired there provided an excellent preparation for a life in the arts. I tip my hat to the Hopkins Center on its 50th anniversary, for without the Hop, we in Pilobolus Dance Theater might not be celebrating our own 40th.”
—Michael Tracy ’73, artistic director of Pilobolus, Washington Depot, Connecticut

No Hesitation
“The Hop opened in my senior year at Dartmouth, and I jumped in with both feet. I performed in the first production in the Moore Theater, Georg Büchner’s Danton’s Death. It was very heavy stuff. I ran the lighting board for JB—more heavy stuff—and appeared in Threepenny Opera as police chief Jackie Brown—heavy stuff with music. I couldn’t get enough of the place. That spring I adapted, wrote and directed a play for the interfraternity play contest, a chapter from Winnie the Pooh, ‘In Which Kanga and Baby Roo Come to the Forest and Piglet Gets a Bath.’ There were my fraternity brothers, hale and hearty good fellows all, parading around with names like Pooh, Eeyore and Piglet. To paraphrase e.e. cummings: ‘A host of pent-up desires began to break jail’ when the Hop opened its doors to me. Did it influence my career path? Does Geico sell auto insurance?”
—Paul Binder ’63, founder and artistic director of Big Apple Circus, New York City

Cabin Fever
“The Hopkins woodshop was the only thing that kept me sane during the Hanover winters. Freshman year I built a bookcase/stereo/album rack for my 203 Gile dorm room. Sophomore year I built a library table from solid oak. My biggest undertaking was the Phi Delt tiger-maple bar top that lived until the recent fire.”
—William Scoville ’83, program manager at Shaw Group, Cincinnati, Ohio

Sheltered
“The Hop was a sanctuary, a place that was at first blush logically and clearly laid out. Closer inspection revealed complexity and contradiction. At some point I thought I could probably just move into the Hop and stop paying rent. I knew the place better than its janitors did. It was the unique, messy and vibrant cultural heart of the campus. A home away from home.”
—Michael Arad ’91, architect and designer of the World Trade Center Memorial, New York City

Letterman
“I was one of the Hop monitors. This was a work-study job, which, among other things, involved changing the sign on the balcony. It could be an odious task in the cold, dark winter months, manipulating the heavy, inflexible letters into their rightful places, upside down and backward with a spotlight shining in your eyes. But it was a labor of love and a privilege to be a part of one of Dartmouth’s most visually recognizable landmarks.”
—Jonathan Sullivan ’90, director of electronic marketing at Learning Tree International, Washington, D.C.

Piano Man
“One afternoon in the early fall of 1973 I was studying calculus on the upper floor of the Hop, overlooking the Green. A guy stopped playing the grand piano and walked by. Observing that I was studying multivariable calculus, which he had completed the year before, he asked if I needed any help. For him it was meant as an opening line, but I was absorbed in my studies. Given that I already had decided to be a math major and understood the material, I said no. He sat down to talk anyway. His persistence paid off. After several more chance encounters we dated throughout my Dartmouth career. A few years after graduation, we married.”
—Leslie (Kenney) Finertie ’77, senior consultant at MyVal Center, Orinda, California

Theatrics
“I have so many memories: The first play I ever directed was in the Bentley—my ultra-pretentious, self-translated version of Ionesco’s Les Chaises with a set that had tilting walls. Tearing the crotch of my restoration britches just before taking stage on opening night of Sheridan’s The Duenna. Rigging lights at 4 a.m. for the production of Eugene O’Neill’s Hughie done by Joe Sutton ’75. Playing a soldier in Botticelli directed by Bruce Coughlin ’75 and a petty criminal in Threepenny Opera as staged by Mark Arnott ’72. As Feste, twisting my ankle in Twelfth Night and getting to boot (with my other foot) Professor Saccio around as assistant clown. All those Aires rehearsals in every corner of the music department. Every Sunday working as a Hop monitor in the lobby. Coming back as an alum to revise a Broadway flop called Working. For me the Hop was, and still is, Dartmouth.”
—Paul Lazarus ’76, director, producer, writer, Los Angeles

Art Haven
“I spent most of my senior year in the printmaking studio downstairs. I remember entire days and nights there, blasting my music and dancing along as I worked on my projects. It was my favorite place on campus, and I miss it so much.”
—Julissa Llosa ’10, high school teacher, Brooklyn, New York

Vintage Boss
“I remember my all-time favorite Hopkins Center concert. It was October 1974, and for the first time in more than a decade the Dartmouth-Harvard game was being played in Hanover. An upperclassman invited me to usher a big Bruce Springsteen concert. I have seen him in concert several times in the past decades, but nothing will compare with the intimacy of 900-seat Spaulding Auditorium rocking to the Boss and his band playing ‘Rosalita.’ Little did we know then that he would become one of the great performers of our generation.”
—Barbara “Barbie” (Snyder) Martinez ’78, territory manager, InfoPrint Solutions, Boston

Early Decision
“It was the fall of 1968. My brother Pat ’72 was an incoming freshman. I was a freshman at Stamford (Connecticut) High School. The Mattimore family, including my dad, class of 1938, had made the four-hour drive from Stamford in our Plymouth station wagon to drop Pat off. We unloaded his stuff at his dorm and walked up to the Green. As we approached Hopkins Center I saw two upperclassmen leaning over the wrought iron railing of the Hop’s second-floor balcony. Attached to the railing was a large sign, made of individual cardboard letters and numbers, which spelled out the greeting: ‘Welcome Class of ’72.’ I watched as the two upperclassmen, all the time laughing, removed the C and the L from the sign. It was at that moment that I decided, if I got in, there’d be no choice. I’d be going to Dartmouth.”
—Bryan Mattimore ’76, owner of Growth Engine, Norwalk, Connecticut

Chow Time
“Early mornings the Hop was always open and operating, cheerfully serving fresh food. I will never forget tasting a Billy Bob sandwich—and fresh waffle—for the first time after an exhausting crew practice.”
—Evan Greulich ’10, assistant instructor at Lebanese American University, Beirut, Lebanon

What A Pane
“Several of us were playing poker in South Fayer when one of us got an urge for something from the snack bar in the Hop. In a hurry to get back to the table, he ran at full speed from the dorm to the Hop lobby without slowing for the closed—and all-glass—main door. The glass shattered, and this friend sustained a leg wound that neither he nor any of us in the game noticed until after he returned, when the campus cops arrived 10 minutes later. They had followed the trail of blood. The poker champ got stitches, and the Hop got a set of eye-level decals on the glass of its main doors.”
—Ed Gray ’67, editor and writer, Lyme, New Hampshire

Blind Luck
“It was Winter Carnival 1965. I was a premed sophomore with a blind date. I took her to the Hop to see Warner Bentley’s production of the musical Wonderful Town—and it changed my life forever. Now, 45 years later, I am a director of Broadway plays and musicals. It all started at the Hop. And I’m forever grateful.”
—Jerry Zaks ’67, Tony Award-winning director and actor, New York City

Free Shows
“I would try to sneak into every musical and most dramatic performances after intermission—when they stopped collecting tickets. These performances were extraordinary balm for an overworked engineering student. I missed the hop when I left.”
—Mark Samuel Tuttle ’65, Th’66, board member of  Apelon, Orinda, California

X-Rated?
“I took upright bass lessons at the Hop for years and joined a bluegrass band. Music still plays an important extracurricular role in my life. I’m grateful to the Hop for helping students make music. One of my favorite memories: pretending to be a music journalist to get into concerts for free. Most awkward moment? My friends and me running into my sociology professor at the Film Society’s rather sardonic screening of, um, an adult movie.”
—Kate Gilbert ’05, student at the University of Michigan Law School, Ann Arbor

A Kind of Hush
“The Hop was more of a home to me as a theater major than any of the dorms I lived in or even my Greek house. I don’t think there’s an inch of that building I haven’t been in—the workshops, the performance spaces, the lighting cages, the costuming department, set storage, green rooms, lighting booths, orchestra pits. And, of course, I ate so very many meals at the Courtyard Café. Some of my favorite memories are rubbing the nose on the Warner Bentley bust for good luck every time I passed, late-night hang-and-focus sessions in the black box and main stages, helping to move pianos out of storage and into a performance space with the other student workers, and hanging out on the catwalks during a performance when spotlights needed to be run. The professional shows I saw broadened my experience and taught me to love new things: modern dance, bunraku puppetry, unusual performance. The shows I worked on taught me even more. I remember dozens of opening nights and the hush of anticipation between the house lights going down and the stage lights going up. Even close to 20 years later so many performances are fresh in my memory. They remain some of the best days and nights of my life.”
—Stephanie Crowley ’91, communications specialist, Syracuse, New York

Starting Early
“My mother (being an active and passionate alumna) always talked about the Hopkins Center when I was younger. Her devotion to this arts center in particular was so moving that I decided to donate a week’s worth of allowance when I was 8—three dollars. I am glad for this appreciation of performing arts now more than ever, because the Hop has made such high-quality performers accessible to students. Nowhere else in my life will I be encouraged and recruited to pay only $10 to see a performance of award-winning artists. I wish I spent more time there. Ironically, being in the Dartmouth Dance Theater Ensemble has kept me so busy that I’ve missed some of the great musicians and actors who visit our stage. However, I never miss the dance pieces. With the likes of Bill T. Jones, Pilobolus and Merce Cunningham, it would be an absurd waste. I feel very lucky to enjoy such a fruitful arts environment in a rural and isolated setting.” 
—Elizabeth Hoffman ’13, women and gender studies major

The Magic Phone
“Recently, at the Aires’ 63rd reunion, I wandered through the Hop. It always has an emotional impact on me, because I probably spent more hours there than in any college building other than my dorm. What amazes me is how little it has changed since 1975. Faulkner is exactly the same, and the acoustics bring back memories when ringing ‘with the songs we love so well.’ One thing that has changed is that the magic phone is gone. This was a pay phone under the back stairway going down to the back door of the Hop from the auditorium. Not that I’d know personally, but I hear that when you made a long distance phone call, entering your change after the operator asked you to ‘Please deposit 75 cents…,’ a bent paper clip pushed through the hole carefully drilled in the phone by some enterprising engineering student would return your money to you.” 
—Robin Felix ’75, principal systems engineering manager at SAIC, Arlington, Virginia

Back Stage
“The Hop has been a fixture in my life since my freshman fall, when I started working in the costume shop as an assistant, doing everything from hemming pants and looking through vast costume stock for a papal cape to dressing the actors backstage for theater shows. It’s something I never imagined I would do at Dartmouth and now something I can’t imagine my Dartmouth experience without.”
—Christian Brandt ’12, anthropology major

Creative Stain
“The 24-hour drawing marathons hosted by the studio arts department have been just about my most favorite thing at Dartmouth. I specifically remember my freshman year learning to squeeze black walnut husks at midnight with Paul Bowen, my sculpture professor from the previous term. He had brought a paper bag full of rotted husks from his own tree, and the dark brown stain remained on my hands for weeks. The ink we produced became one of my favorite drawing materials. Coincidentally my family grows black walnut trees and I now always go to the orchard in early summer to collect the husks that stain my hands and pull my creativity out.”
—Sarah Jewett ’12, engineering and studio art major

Singing and Soul
“Whether performing one of my spoken-word poetry pieces with Soul Scribes at the Top of the Hop or singing my heart out with the Gospel Choir in Spaulding Auditorium, my passion for being on the stage and the equally rewarding experience of sitting in the audience has played a major role in my creative growth.”
—Joan Leslie ’12, government and African-American studies major

Boyish Behavior
“It was the very beginning of my freshman fall in 1978 and I was going to the Hop to register for classes. As we walked across the plaza upperclassmen on the balcony held numerical signs over it, rating the girls as they passed as if it were an Olympic competition—a ‘tradition’ that I sincerely hope has been abandoned.” 
—Lydia Lazar ’81, associate dean at the University of Chicago Harris School of Public Policy, Chicago

Furnishing a Future
“Freshman year I discovered the Hop’s workshops after a friend told me about them. I built the requisite dorm furniture: book case, lamp, even a Lazy Boy-style footstool sort of thing that clamped onto one of those horrible light-green vinyl chairs in our room. My most ambitious project was a beautiful walnut case for a Heath kit stereo amplifier I had built the summer after high school. Senior year I shared an apartment off campus, but owned virtually no furniture. I realized that this would be my opportunity to build some functional pieces: A tiger-maple coffee table made with Mexican tiles I brought back from my language study abroad, several lamps on which I learned to use a turning lathe, a mahogany end table, a large oversized chair that, thankfully, disappeared and several other pieces. Now I have again begun to build furniture. I feel very fortunate to have found the workshops. To me it was a place to use my hands along with my mind and to escape from the competitive classrooms.”
—Rob Manegold ’75, member of the Hopkins Center board of overseers and VP/treasurer of Four-Four Foundation Inc., Chenequa, Wisconsin

Love and Marriage
“I always loved the Hop. It had great shows and movies and the cafe had the best ice cream—who can forget mix-ins? The Hinman boxes were there, so it was a daily stop, and the upstairs lounge was a great place to study. But the best thing was that my husband, Peter, and I met while working there. He was a senior and head of security. I was a junior and a head usher. We started dating as undergrads, then eight years later we got married."
—Carolyn Salsgiver Kobsa ’88, senior vice president, planning and marketing, at Yale New Haven Health System/Bridgeport Hospital, New Haven, Connecticut

A Teaching Legacy
“The Hopkins Center opened just a year after I had graduated from Dartmouth. I was proud to see the groundbreaking of the center, but did not see the finished Hopkins Center until I returned some years later to teach at Dartmouth and to direct and act in Richard the III on the Moore Stage. What an extraordinary resource it had become for Dartmouth and the community. Central to the liberal arts mission of the College, it embodied ideas, ideals and passions taught by the great teachers I had known at Dartmouth. I found a vibrant theater with passionate students and their work. I found an extraordinary performing arts program with a season of major artists in dance, in music, in theater—a program in the performing arts that is the envy of many arts centers in the country. The Hopkins Center has become a central mission of my class, creating the Class of 1961 Legacy: The American Tradition in Performance Fund. I think in so many ways the Hopkins Center has been an important part of my life, extending my own love of the great works of the theater, of great performance. So much of what I eventually owned as central to me and to my work I first learned to love at Dartmouth.” 
—David Birney ’61, award-winning actor/director, Santa Monica, California

A Career Coming Out of the Woodwork
“I had the privilege of spending a great deal of time in the woodshop during my Dartmouth career. I remember thinking to myself, during my junior year, that in two short years I would be graduating from college and that I would soon be out on my own and renting my first apartment. I realized that along with renting an apartment I would need to buy furniture. I decided to utilize the resources at my disposal. I started small, with a Shaker bedside table in maple. Once that was done I decided that I needed a bed to go with it, so I sketched out a design for a queen-sized, four-poster canopy bed. I was ambitious and I decided that I wanted to build the bed out of logs cut from the forest around Dartmouth. The College forester told me to send him a list of what I needed, and he proceeded to cut the trees out of the woods at the Grant and deliver them to me on campus. Over Thanksgiving break I stationed myself in the common room at my fraternity and proceeded to strip the bark from these logs by hand using a draw knife. A month later I had my bed. I then fleshed out my furniture collection with a solid-oak desk; a walnut-and-birch coffee table; an oak side table using wood I found down at A-lot; a chestnut banquet table; a second, queen-sized bed; and finally a 12-person solid-cherry dining room table. After I graduated I worked in consulting and finance for eight years until the collapsing financial markets left me without a job. I took a hard look at my life and decided that I had been going about things all wrong, working in an industry that I saw only as a means to an end instead of following my passions. I decided that what I really wanted to do was design and build furniture, so in 2008 I founded Broken Line Design with an architect friend. I am proud to say that the Hopkins Center and the time that I spent in the woodshop influenced me to start my own company, which has brought me great success and personal satisfaction.”
—Drew Lambert ’02, founder of Drew Lambert Designs, Stamford, Connecticut