2019: SpringContest: Campus Close-Up

By my estimate, you traversed the campus about 2,000 times as a student. But most of those times you were probably talking with a friend, racing to class or lost in thought.

Surely on some days, though, you dawdled. Noticed. Appreciated the tawny granite of Stearns Steeple or the steam vents outside South dorm, welded like the sun’s rays. The graceful arrows chiseled on the War Memorial. The oxidized green cape on the statue of Henry Ward Beecher, class of 1834.

Those are just some of the details that render the College so beautiful. This contest celebrates those details. All you have to do is look closely at these photos, consider the hints and tell us what you see. We hope this delivers delight. After all, as Beecher said: “The art of being happy lies in the power of extracting happiness from common things.”

Your Challenge:

Examine these photos, taken around campus. Each is a tight close-up on an exterior or interior visual detail. Using our hints, your memory and your powers of detection, identify the images.

Send your answers to magazine@ amherst.edu or Amherst Magazine, Box 5000, Amherst, MA 01002. Anyone with three correct identifications will be entered to win an Amherst T-shirt.

1. The face of Convocation?

2. As an Amherst student,
too, he was known for being quiet.

3. When he put his best foot forward, was it iambic?

Photos by: Jiayi Liu

Sanderson Smith ’60 challenged readers to create words out of the letters in Amherst, using no letter more than once and with each word containing at least five letters. With 50 entries, this was our most popular contest ever.

Entries came from students, alumni, parents and one emeritus professor. One contestant credited emeritus English professor Howell Chickering with teaching her the word tharm, which means “intestine.” Another sent a recording of himself writing the list, so we’d know he hadn’t cheated. And a prospective student wrote that the contest “reminded me of an anagram generator I coded up last summer to prove to my friend that my name had more anagrams than hers.”

To determine the winner, we excluded proper nouns. Coming out on top is Julie Steinberg Stetson ’88, with 66 accepted words. Her list was one of only two that exceeded 60 words. (The other was from Edward Dermon ’65.)

Stetson will receive an Amherst T-shirt. Here’s her list:

armet, ashet, aster, earth, earths, eschar, hames, hamster, harem, harems, hares, harms, harts, haste, hater, hates, hears, heart, hearts, heats, mares, marse, marsh, marts, masher, master, mater, maters, mates, maths, meats, rames, ramet, ramets, rates, rathe, reams, remash, remast, rheas, satem, shame, shamer, share, shear, shmear, smart, smear, smeath, stare, steam, stream, tahrs, tamer, tamers, tames, tares, taser, teams, tears, terms, thema, therm, therms, trams, trash.