HANOVER — In 1963, Dartmouth College President John Sloan Dickey gave an important assignment to a young associate dean of the college.
Spurred on by President John F. Kennedy’s call to pay “special attention” to increasing educational opportunities for all Americans, Dickey asked Charles Dey to create a program that would prepare promising students from disadvantaged backgrounds to attend prep school and college, including an aim to better integrate the Ivy League.
They called it “A Better Chance” — Dickey said he didn’t want to overpromise on results — and it started with a summer program on the Dartmouth campus in 1964 with 55 male teens (girls would have their own program the following summer at Mount Holyoke).
“This is your spring training, and that’s where pennants and world championships are won,” baseball great Jackie Robinson told the ABC students, most of them people of color, during a Hanover visit that summer.
Dey, who died on April 16, 2020, at his home in Walpole, N.H., at 89, traveled around the country to recruit students and encourage schools and communities to join ABC. The program soon expanded beyond prep schools and some towns, including Hanover, had an ABC house, where the students lived and attended the local public high school.
Dartmouth students served as tutors at the East Wheelock Street house, which in the early years was run by the late Tom Mikula, who lived there with his family.
Some 16,000 students have participated in ABC, including former Massachusetts Gov. Deval Patrick, who grew up on the South Side of Chicago. Mikula went on to become headmaster at Kimball Union Academy, and ABC students continue to attend the Meriden school.
Tom Dey, a director in Los Angeles and the youngest of Dey’s four children, said his father, with whom he was making a documentary on the ABC program, “was proud to have made an impact” in the lives of the many students who succeeded.
“This idea of fairness was really important to him, and (asking) why should we have these privileges when other people don’t,” he said.
Jesse Spikes, the son of a sharecropper in Georgia who attended Hanover High through ABC, recalled Dey as a soft-spoken man who “spoke in paragraphs” and helped him overcome homesickness. Spikes stuck it out, graduated from Hanover High in 1968 and Dartmouth in 1972, and became a Rhodes scholar and prominent corporate lawyer in Atlanta.
“It changed the trajectory of my life,” said Spikes, who also noted that ABC had an impact on the host communities.
The sentiment was shared by Lu Martin, who with her husband and four children were a host family for ABC students on weekends.
“I think it helped this community become broader in its understanding of the world,” said Martin, who served as special assistant to four Dartmouth presidents.
Dey, pronounced “dye,” himself had come from a middle-class background. The son of a green grocer in New Jersey, he had movie-star looks, a size 18 neck and played football and tennis at Dartmouth, where he graduated in 1952. Friends called him “Doc,” a childhood nickname after someone said he had the hands of a surgeon.
He served a three-year stint in the Navy, met his wife Phoebe on a blind date while on shore leave in 1955, and earned a graduate degree in education at Harvard. After teaching at Andover for four years, he returned to Dartmouth.
Besides launching ABC, Dey also served as dean of Dartmouth’s Tucker Foundation, an important center for social action, and created internships serving disadvantaged areas around the country.
“He was involved in a lot of social projects,” Martin said.
In 1973, Dey and his family moved to Wallingford, Conn., where he was headmaster at Choate Rosemary Hall, a top prep school, until retiring in 1991.
Ever the teacher, he stayed active. Dey’s college roommate, Alan Reich, who became a quadriplegic after a diving accident in 1962 and created the National Organization on Disability, asked him to help the disabled community. Recognizing the importance of a first job, Dey launched “Start on Success,” where high school students with disabilities could get job training at a local hospital or other business.
“Anyone who has worked in education knows that the right kind of adults can have enormous influence on young people,” Dey said. “But the adults must be there continuously, not in and out, to develop a trusting relationship.”
For that work, in 2006 he received The Purpose Prize, a national award for older adults who have made a difference.
But there was also to be one critical finding from his past work as a school administrator. Like some other elite private schools, Choate failed over several decades to report to authorities allegations of sexual misconduct and abuse by teachers there, choosing to handle the matters “internally and quietly,” according to a 2017 report commissioned by the school.
Among the issues during Dey’s tenure, the report found, two teachers were allowed to resign effective the end of the school year, rather than being immediately fired, and a Choate dean even wrote a recommendation that may have helped one land another teaching job.
In the wake of the report, Dey and his successor as headmaster resigned as “life trustees” at Choate in what the school described as “important steps as part of our community’s healing process.”
Dey, by then 86, told the New York Times he was “proud of the school, in terms of what they have done and the way they have approached it.”
And Tom Dey recalled that his father’s favorite phrase — “how could we have done this better?” — applied here as well.
“That phrase was so indicative of who he was,” Tom Dey said, his voice breaking. “It showed he was always a student, but also that he was always a teacher.”
John P. Gregg can be reached at jgregg@vnews.com or 603-727-3217.