Mt. Moosilauke (1921) - Moosilauke Diary
Outstanding experiences
in the summer of '21:
1. Commotion in outhouse.
2. Sliding down rock into bobcat.
3. Falling into nest of hornets.
4. Holding chimney when lightning struck.
Good or Bad Luck?
". . . My uncle, Rowland Barnes French '19, was a member of the second Summit Crew in 1921, joining Jack Titcomb '23, the hutmaster, and John Farnham '23. The 1923 Aegis noted: 'Over 1900 people visited the Moosilauke Summit Camp during the 1921 season; of these some seven hundred stayed over night and were fed supper and breakfast by the caretaker and his assistants, all of whom were undergraduate members of the Club.'
My uncle, whose name was the same as mine (in fact my father had told me that I was the seventeenth Rowland B. French - which I found was not completely true) and Doc (Rolf) Syvertsen '18, who was later Dean of the Medical School at Dartmouth, both worked at the summit hotel that summer. They had been over in France during the First World War, together I had thought. Later I found that Dr. Syvertsen had been with the Quartermaster department, and my uncle according to his daughter was laying miles of wire for the Signal Corps. So my uncle only saw Doc when he came back from the front to get new clothes.
My uncle told me of a time when Doc Syvertsen was working on the roof of the Summit Camp when it was struck by lightning. The roofer was not to be found. Later, my uncle determined that he had fallen into the cistern, an occurrence which, for some reason, my uncle thought was hilarious. . . ."
From Rowland B. French D'41.
