The Maverick
My father, Richard Stevenson ’47, roomed with Bing Russell ’47, Tu’48 [“In a League of His Own,” November/December 2016], in Zeta Psi and was a lifelong friend. I grew up listening to the tales of old along with Bing’s cameos on early television. But nothing prepared me for the larger-than-life persona that was Bing Russell. In early August of 1967 I was playing in an all-star football game in Massachusetts. The Russell family detoured on their way to Maine to visit with my family during this time. Bing had decided that he wanted to try skydiving while he was visiting, so at 6 a.m., after my night game, Bing, daughter Jill, son Kurt and I headed out to Orange, Massachusetts, where he had located a school for beginners.

Understand that today it is considered an unusual hobby. Then it was considered very weird. My father was way too smart to get caught up in yet another of Bing’s escapades, but I enrolled in the three-hour course with the Russells and we were all free-falling before noon. Afterward the Russells headed to Maine for their annual visit, and within weeks I was in Hanover for four years of Dartmouth and football. To me this was a memory of a lifetime. To Bing and the Russells, another day in the life.

Mark Stevenson ’71
Montgomery Village, Maryland

As a Portland, Oregon, native, freshman baseball player and lifelong fan, I am your reader most likely to have seen the most Portland Mavericks games. I recall being amazed to learn of owner Bing Russell’s Dartmouth connection during my Sophomore Summer while watching the Joe Garagiola show one Monday evening in the Sigma Nu TV room.

Upon my return home at the end of the term, I presented myself at the Mavericks office in order to meet Bing. He greeted me enthusiastically, introduced me to son Kurt, whom I knew as a ballplayer—not as a movie star—and told me several profane Dartmouth baseball stories. He was an absolute character.

John P. Crowell ’77
Lake Oswego, Oregon

Equal Opportunity
I share Mary Smoyer’s moral outrage [“Your Turn,” November/December 2016] at the kind of work done by defense lawyers such as Tom Green ’62, who was profiled in “The Fixer” [July/August 2016]. Still, I wish to differ with her on three points.

First, Tom Green is, I believe, emblematic (or symptomatic) of the Dartmouth College culture. Second, DAM’s candor in publishing the article is, in a way, a breath of fresh air vis-a-vis the College’s usual way of not exposing its faults.

Third, Ms. Smoyer’s association of Green’s doings with “white male privilege” appears to come out of nowhere. It is difficult to imagine, for this Dartmouth grad, anyway, that after all these many years of coeducation, Dartmouth has not produced its share of women, even women of color, who share Green’s and Dartmouth’s too-often-wayward standards of success.

Hal Litoff ’65
Bellingham, Washington

Love Affair
Here in my apartment in Philadelphia I am avoiding Wharton finals and decided to pick up a DAM I have from March/April 2016 [“101 Reasons to Love Dartmouth”].

Sweet memories of people and places I loved: Tower Room, hammocks from Sophomore Summer, lunch with professors. Then there are the brand-new initiatives that make me wish I could do it all over again: “Intro to Human-Computer Interaction,” Dartmouth Entrepreneurial Network, Peak Performance. The list goes on.

Massive compliments to photographer John Sherman, illustrator Marcellus Hall, your art director and writers for bringing such an incredible institution to life—and for distracting me from my second-to-last set of finals. 

Allie Miller ’10
Philadelphia