Every February, Middlebury gets as New England as it can possibly get — we eat sugar on snow while watching ski races, build ice sculptures, and can watch our peers compete in snowshoe races. But the carnival is never exactly the same year to year, and it’s changed a lot over the years. This year, the event hearkened back to carnivals of winters past, but do most of us really know what that means?
The 1920’s marked the beginning of Middlebury’s Winter Carnival tradition. Although the first modern Winter Carnival did not occur until 1934, the early 1920s saw winter sporting events held around town and on campus. Students partook in obstacle races, snowshoe races along Storrs Avenue, cross-country and alpine ski races around campus and ski jumping competitions. This interest in winter sports marked a new era for Middlebury; David Stameshkin wrote in his Middlebury history, The Strength of the Hills, 1996, that, “before World War I, Middlebury students apparently did not, at least in any organized way, take advantage of the snow that blanketed the Champlain Valley and Green Mountains for months each winter.”
This change was prompted almost entirely by the Middlebury Outing Club, which formed in 1917. These outdoor enthusiasts recognized the need for more Middlebury sports competitions, even encouraging young men to attend Dartmouth College’s administration-run Winter Carnival in order to “bring Middlebury to the front of New England,” according to a Jan. 24, 1917 article in The Campus. Men competed in dashes, cross-country skiing, and obstacle races.
The college inaugurated the event as “Winter Holiday” in 1920, and it proved a great success. The students were so smitten with the idea of a winter celebration that The Campus predicted optimistically, “Next year, with a little more work and more enthusiasm, we might turn the snow and cold of the winter months into advantage for the whole college.”
A small percentage of Middlebury students continued to compete enthusiastically in sporting events around New England. In 1922, The Campus reported that Middlebury men had proven themselves, “the foremost collegiate snowshoers in the country” after a race at McGill. Finally having picked up some athletic steam, Middlebury christened the Winter Holiday “Winter Carnival” that same year.
Even though ski carnivals were increasingly common in New England, no one was sure that Middlebury’s event would catch on. The Campus appeared especially concerned that Winter Carnival become a tradition, arguing that, “If the Winter Carnival is established as an annual fixture in Middlebury’s program of college activities, it will aid in developing spirit and, we hope, will speedily place the Outing Club’s teams on par with those of our New England and Canadian neighbors.”
The Middlebury student body, however, remained fairly disinterested. There was very little student interest in sports besides hockey, and from 1924-1934, the Winter Carnival remained relatively small.
A piqued interest in skiing was what ultimately sparked lasting Winter Carnival enthusiasm. The ski program was lackluster through the 1920’s; the ski coach hired in 1926, for example, evidently had no experience in skiing. However, the 1932 Winter Olympics at Lake Placid drew students’ attention, and interest in skiing took off. As W.C. Heinz commented in a column in The Campus in 1936: “Yes sir. Middlebury, it seems, has truly taken the time off to keep abreast of the time and go ski-crazy. An hour after the snow stops falling, Chapel Hill and all surrounding slopes are a maze of crisscross tracks and odd patterns… So it goes — Middlebury eats, breathes, walks, talks and lives skiing.”
The Mountain Club took the reigns on organizing the first recognizable Winter Carnival in 1934, which they modeled after Dartmouth’s successful established one. The Carnival included as one of its most popular events a 27-meter ski jump on Chipman Hill.
Skiing helped launch the first Winter Carnival, and the Winter Carnival’s success likewise helped promulgate interest in skiing; the ski team enjoyed its first paid coach in 1937 (presumably one that knew about the sport), and even hired a coach from Europe. In 1939, Middlebury won its first Carnival.
Although the Carnival remained relatively sedate — though ever popular— through the 40s, 50s and 60s, “the 70s and 80s was a pretty wild scene,” said Dean of Cook Commons and Assistant Professor of American Studies Karl Lindholm ’67. With only one Public Safety officer on campus, “students ran the campus,” Lindholm remembers. Middlebury’s Winter Carnival was an event attracting students from all over New England. Although it did not compare in size to Dartmouth’s Winter Carnival, which attracted national attention and even a visit from F. Scott Fitzgerald, Lindholm, who also served as Dean of Students from 1976-91, remembers having to send out notes to other schools asking them to discourage their students from coming. The event was getting too big and too rowdy.
Although the raucousness of the Carnival varied through the years, one consistent characteristic of the event was that it was always sure to see many new faces on campus; in addition to visiting friends, students were required to invite a date. Often, these dates came from other schools.
Friends and dates were attracted to the event because of the wide array of organized events, school-sponsored and otherwise. One of the most popular school-sponsored events was the Klondike Rush, a Sunday event held after the Winter Ball that featured a band, games, dancing, and a bar. The event historically attracted some big name live music performers; The Shirelles, The Kingsmen (whose hit song was “Louie Louie”), The Simon sisters (before Carly Simon hit it big), the legendary Dizzy Gillespie and even B.B. King all made appearances.
This year, Middlebury College Activities Board (MCAB) revived the Klondike Rush tradition as part of its effort to create a 2011 Winter Carnival that hearkened back to the olden days. MCAB Traditions Chair Liz Gay ’11 said that she came up with the idea of recreating the once-popular event after looking through old programs in the library archives, where the Klondike Rush always seemed to be advertised.
“We knew we couldn’t do it as a Sunday event on that large of a scale, so we modified it and wanted to bring it back and do something new,” Gay said.
This year, the Klondike Rush included a live student band and Two Brothers Tavern catering in Pearsons lounge, with students playing parlor games and roasting marshmallows. Although MCAB was unsure of how successful the event would be, they were happily surprised: there was a consistently long bar line, the lounge was full, and the event brought more students into the Winter Carnival fold.
“It was really nice because Orange Crush seems to be kind of a lot of underclassmen and the Klondike Rush was a lot of upperclassmen so it was a nice way to balance that,” Gay said. “Everyone I talked to really seemed to enjoy it.”
Although some of the other traditions MCAB brought back as part of its tribute to Winter Carnivals past may not continue next year, MCAB will probably work to, “reinstate [the Klondike Rush] as a tradition,” said Gay.
The Winter Carnival king and queen, another tradition revived this year, was a favorite tradition through most of Winter Carnival’s history. However, like the ball, this tradition lost steam in the late 1960s. Lindholm, who was on the court in ’66 and ’67, felt that, “That was about when [the tradition] was petering out, to be honest. We were beginning to develop the skepticism of the late 60s and 70s, and it seemed a little bogus to us. I have a feeling that the Winter Carnival king and queen was more of a concept of the 50s.”
The Winter Ball also fizzled in the 1960s alongside the king and queen concept. Much of the ball’s struggle to survive in the past may have been related to the fact that eleven fraternities on campus would throw their own parties; throwing a formal ball “wouldn’t have worked,” Lindholm said, with the amount of other social options on campus. Now, perhaps, without fraternities to throw reliable parties, the popularity of the event has increased; it is now one of the most anticipated items on today’s Winter Carnival program, representing one of Middlebury’s largest ticketed events and selling about 1,500 tickets each year.
Throughout the 40s, 50s and 60s, “almost literally, all the men were in frats,” Lindholm said. However, with the outlawing of fraternities in 1991, the MCAB had to create other social opportunities for students.
“[The changes were] a function of the new fragmented infrastructure,” Lindholm said. “Student activities tried to find a much more varied social calendar, even at Winter Carnival.”
The revival of the Ball was a product of this effort, and in order to keep the ball popular, MCAB has continued to innovate. One more recent idea has been to, “get more interesting music for the ball, trying to incorporate a concert sort of aspect to it to draw people who might not just want to go to a dance but might want to go to a concert,” Gay said.
Another product of MCAB’s expanded role in Winter Carnival planning has been Orange Crush. Seven years ago, Middlebury booked Orange Crush for its Thursday night slot, and they have since become such a fixture that the event has sold out every year.
“We were actually talking to Orange Crush this year and they said, ‘You wouldn’t believe how many Middlebury weddings we perform at,’’ said Gay. “It’s their biggest performance of the year.”
An event in which Middlebury student interest appears to be waning, however, is ski racing. Student interest in skiing has been historically strong; Lindholm remembers that since, “ski racing was huge,” a line of 10 full buses would drop students off at the Snow Bowl each day of Winter Carnival. However, attendance at ski races is undeniably lower than it has been in the past, and Lindholm sees this fact as a natural progression as Middlebury students have become more diverse.
“I think what’s happened at Middlebury is heterogeneity,” Lindholm said. “It’s hard to find a single galvanizing event at the college socially. There are people who contend that Middlebury is not nearly diverse enough and that may be right, but it’s a relative term. It’s a heck of a lot more diverse than it was 20 years ago.”
Other changes may have been due to evolving attitudes during the Vietnam era, during which, “students wanted to get rid of the hundred years of conventions,” Lindholm said. “People argued during Vietnam, everything that was had to go. I think Winter Carnival was probably affected by that great disillusionment among students.”
Ultimately, although different events have come in and out of fashion and Winter Carnival has morphed throughout the years, Lindholm finds the changes understandable.
“It doesn’t seem to me a central social galvanizing event that it once was, but that’s okay,” he said. “It’s what it was in many ways, but it’s inevitably different.”
As far as being a single unifying event, Gay has found that MCAB has had some success in motivating participation the last few years.
“It’s about] really motivating people to go to the ski races and inspiring that kind of spirit on campus and that’s something hard to do,” Gay said. “But I think we’re getting there … people seem to be pleased with the events so far.
Like Lindholm, Gay recognizes the importance of a unifying event for the student body and the changes Winter Carnival has undergone through the years. She sees the theme this year, however, as one way to draw attention to the value of traditions.
“I think it’s just sort of that it is an aim to really unify the student body and because there really aren’t a lot of events like that at Middlebury,” she said. “We’re obviously a really old school and a really established school, but our traditions aren’t really that deep-rooted; students don’t know a lot about our traditions and a lot have kind of fizzled. This [revival of traditions] was an effort to sort of remind everyone of an older Middlebury, which is just sort of a nice idea.”
For fun facts about past winter carnivals click here.
Frozen in Time: Inspired by this year’s Winter carnival theme of Traditions, The Campus takes a closer look at carnivals past
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