— By Carl Walter '66

I have been unable to get over the shock I felt when I discovered last fall that Van's had become the Academy Bookstore's Computer Annex. Spic and span, with bright autumn sun shining in through crystal-clean windows and shelves chock-full of high-tech gadgets: was this building really once the hidey hole for some of the Academy's biggest punters from the mid-1960s? After asking around school, I discovered that no one had ever heard of Van's Coffee Shop, a.k.a. the Spa, or its proprietor, Adrianus van Hoojidonk. My guess is that the majority of you reading this also don't know who, or what, I am writing about.

Anyone visiting today's Exeter has no inkling that the "negos" of yesteryear existed; many may not even recognize the term, which the Dictionary of Exeter Language once defined as "any Exonian who has adopted the apathetic attitude of most old boys who have seen no change and expect to see none; a cynic." They have since vanished into dim memory best represented, strangely enough, by the stern portraits of past Academy administrators hanging in the Assembly Hall and exemplified by the legendary Dean of Students Robert Kesler. Now that the Academy is fully coed, now that dorms have phone and computer hookups in every room and sparkling kitchens in the basement, now that the campus boasts a science center that puts most colleges to shame, Exonians today are unlikely to understand the attraction of Van's. Only Mr. Morante is there to vouch for the story I want to tell.

We didn't have any of these things. But what many did have, especially in winter term, was a grinding nego attitude and a desire to demonstrate it to the administration, that is, to Dean Kesler. The focus of passive resistance was the buttroom located in each dorm's basement. These dank cells straight out of the Lubyanka were the only sanctioned places on campus a person could have a smoke (that is, of course, with written parental permission to the dean). And smoking was the sole permitted activity that could be considered rebellious.

The school was then, as now, balkanized between the dorms of the north and south campus. Van's was the daytime locus of the legendary Webster and Dunbar buttrooms, whose membership was strictly limited. But "membership" at Van's was open to anyone who cared to pay 15 cents for eyedropper-sized thimbles of Coke (10 cents if you also bought food). For this you could sit all day in Van's famous backroom, smoke cigarettes, shoot the breeze and play bridge with people you would otherwise never have met. Some people were only friends inside Van's, not outside. And you could meet non-Exie pals there too, like Bunny and The Dipper. If the place was empty, Van was more than willing to trounce you at Casino for as long as you could take it. He was a formidable player.

Nobody really liked Van personally: we resented him for making us buy things and he resented us for being so cheap. Nonetheless he was a good friend to Exies with attitude. He would physically confront any faculty member who tried to come in and take names-and some did. In particular, he had a thing about Dean Kesler, stemming from who knows what sort of confrontations, all no doubt centering around the Academy's smoking policy: the Spa was not sanctioned. On the other hand, had Dean Kesler wanted to bust the joint, it would have happened. But no one ever got put on restricts for hanging out at Van's between classes or dorm check-ins.

Van's was no Me & Ollie's. It was a dump with institutional green walls coated with a thin layer of grease. The floors were wood planks painted gray. You'd enter into the lower part of a two-level room, the second level being two or three steps up. But the ceiling did not rise correspondingly with the floor, making the backroom and its small booths a safe bolthole. Of course, there was no ventilation. If there had been windows, they most certainly would not have been clean enough to let in the bleak winter sun. Anyway, clean windows would have invited prying eyes. Around the table in class you could always smell a guy who had been to the Spa.

On the right side of the front door was a small counter with stools and behind it a Coke machine, a grill and Van. A menu board hung over the grill advertising the usual. All these years later, one habitué still remembers the breakfast menu: "Two Eggs and Bacon, $1.25, One Egg and Bacon, 95 cents." And scrawled across the one-egg option in Van's hand were the words "ALL OUT." And none of us are ever likely to forget the greaseburger served with MUSTA'RELISH. People didn't go to Van's to eat.

But things change, and southern New Hampshire has boomed so much it isn't even New Hampshire anymore. And the Academy has prospered and changed so much only the buildings stand witness. It's too much to expect a memorial to the Spa, that's for sure, but it's ironic that it should have become a Computer Annex. So let this brief note testify to what was an important cultural icon of the Academy at a time when life there was far more stern than tender, and probably a whole lot simpler.

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