Eric “Bolo” Olin ’78

Eric “Bolo” Olin ’78 died in Connecticut on June 4, 2022, due to complications from cardio-vascular disease “that were deepened by a penchant for cigars and Diet Coke,” according to his brother, Dirk ’81. Eric was from a Dartmouth family—his father was a ’50—and he came to Dartmouth from Mendham, New Jersey, and lived in Lord his first year. He was a history major, active in the Dartmouth Forensic Union, and a member of Phi Sigma Psi. “He was a wildly funny man whose humor tended to the absurd,” says Tom Jeffrey ’78. His favorite outfit was a “National Review T-shirt and an Australian bush hat.” Geoffrey Crew ’78, who also went to high school with Eric, says he was “always interesting, funny, argumentative, or difficult, depending on some random generator somewhere. And he was Dartmouth to the core: He registered his first car in New Hampshire and got ‘GREEN’ for a license plate.” Adds Dirk: “His nickname, derived from his sometime neckwear, became synonymous with his playful wit. He was a fierce debater and a serious goof. He loved T.S. Eliot and the Marx brothers—and quoted both at length. After graduation he bounced around a bit but found a community through his work selling antiquarian books. He was also an avid gamer long before that went mainstream. Hamlet would have nailed it: We shall not see his like again.”