Tonight on New Hampshire Crossroads.

We'll watch brave amateur Highlanders compete on Loon Mountain.

And we'll visit a living classroom on Squam Lake in Hanover.

We ll commemorate the work of a controversial artist and we ll join pre-schoolers in Rye as they perfect the art of creative movement.

Hello, I'm Eloise Daniels, your host for this, the fourth season of New Hampshire Crossroads.

Theme Music Our first story of the evening and of the season is an appropriately colorful one.

It takes place on Loon Mountain in Lincoln, New Hampshire, where the ninth annual Highland Games were held September 15th and 16th.

Amateurs from all over New England, and in fact, from all walks of life, attempted to compete at these Scottish Athletic events, Let the games begin!

Bagpipe Music The background and history of the athletic part of Highland games goes way back to Michael Canmore, early Scottish king in the 12th century.

My name is Evelyn Murray.

I'm president of the board of directors who sponsors these games and chairman of the games committee this year.

The amateur competitors will come from local, mostly of them probably from New Hampshire maybe Massashusetts people Vermont, maybe, or Maine.

My name is John McDonald, and I'm from Bridgeport, New York.

The clan Douglas, of Syracuse.

They hold games there.

I picked it up there through a friend.

A lot of the games do not cater to the amateurs because there is one day.

Fortunately, here we have two days, and we run an open one day and an amateur another.

And the amateurs do everything that the open division did the previous day.

And, and what we try to do is, you know, spawn new athletes through, through this effort of running the amateur events to generate new interest.

Good throw!

Your name is?

Paul (inaudible) Paul, what do you what do you do for a living?

Construction Have you ever done this before?

No, I ve never done any of these events before.

Never even in rehearsal?

No, no, this is it.

It's a good competition out here.

Dave Caster, (inaudible) schoolteacher from Kingston, New Hampshire.

(Inaudible name) I'm a computer programmer.

I m from Readfield, Maine.

My name is Bob Jackson.

I m a chiropractor, and I'm from Littleton, Massachusetts.

What are you gentlemen doing here today, throwing stones and rocks.

I found something I could be somewhat competitive.

Yeah, it's just, just the old competitive spirit in us.

I guess we can't do some of the sports we used to do.

So this, this here gives us a, you know, a nice outlet for, and it's something new.

This is my second year doing it, so.

Have you ever done this before?

Last year we did it, Dave and I did.

And you were here, too.

We were there last year.

And one, one thing about the caber toss.

If you can flip the thing, it doesn't matter whether the guys beside you is 4 or 5 times stronger than you, you can both win.

You know, you have an equal chance.

Once the caber s flipped to get a good throw.

The caber, of course, is the, well, you can compare it to a telephone pole.

It is not a distance throw.

It is thrown for accuracy.

If you could visualize a clock, you're standing on 6 and your optimum throw would be at 12:00.

Music Audience Cheers Music It was a perfect throw, ladies and gentlemen!

12:00 high!

This is how they did it in Scotland centuries ago.

Once upon a time, they would actually do battle, and they would maim each other and with, with, swords.

And that's to determine who is the strongest and who should lead the clan.

But it, they were losing so many good men, they determined, that this would be much better to do it this way and have athletic competition.

I've been doing it now for, going on, I believe, 16 years.

You know, someday we're going to we're out, and we need someone to, to come in behind us and, keep this thing going.

Bagpipe and drum music The countryside around Squam Lake is some of the most spectacular in New Hampshire.

There are lush forests and meadows and, of course, the famous Golden Pond itself.

But Holderness is more than just another pretty place.

It's also a living science laboratory and the home of the Science Center of New Hampshire.

Remember your school days?

They were probably pretty much alike, especially science class.

A textbook here, maybe a wall map of the moon there.

And if you were lucky, a couple of frogs in jars of formaldehyde.

Pretty standard fare.

Well, for an ever growing number of New Hampshire youngsters, that traditional classroom scenario is being enhanced by this scenario.

A 200 acre classroom, the likes of which most people have not had the good fortune to experience.

This is the Science Center of New Hampshire, located in Holderness next to Squam Lake.

Each year, approximately 20,000 schoolchildren from kindergarten through the 12th grade take advantage of the unique educational opportunities provided by the Science Center.

Doctor Richard Ashley, director of the Science Center, explains its purpose.

Well, the mission of the Science Center is basically to teach people about plants and animals that are native to New Hampshire.

We're very lucky in having five different kinds of plant and animal communities right here on this particular site, namely the forest, the field, the pond, the marsh and the stream.

And we use all of those to give mostly school youngsters an opportunity to go right outside and study what's native to their state.

They might spend an hour in the field here investigating insects, or they might collect aquatic life in the pond, or go into the mountains and study the forest and the birds and mammals that live there.

And indeed, a big part of that experience is the wildlife found along the exhibit trail at the science center.

There, the visitor will encounter owls and deer, bobcats and raccoons, and everyone's favorites, the black bears.

Well the black bears the only bear you re ever likely to encounter in the state of New Hampshire.

And this particular enclosure contains an adult male and an adult female bear, both of which have been at the Science Center since they were cubs.

We obtained the male bear when a hunter crawled into the, to its mother's den in February and killed the mother, and that was in 1973.

So Bert, or the male bear, has been with us just a little over ten years.

The female bear in this enclosure, Winnie, as she's called, came to us because she was abandoned by the parent bear, probably because she had an infection.

And so she came also as a cub, and they both spent their entire lives here at the Science Center.

However, these are not the only animals to be found at the Science Center.

Approximately one half of the 40 animals owned by the Science Center are kept behind the scenes and used as teaching animals, either in the Center's auditorium or at various schools around the state.

And of course, if you've spent any time at all outdoors, you know that no wildlife lesson would be complete without a study of, you guessed it, insects.

Glass cases of beetles, caterpillars and water bugs are part of an exhibit capped off by a working beehive.

Probably the most spectacular part of the exhibit is an observation beehive.

It's also the easiest one to take care of, because the bees freely come and go to the outside of the building and collect their own nectar and their own pollen.

And they've been raising brood all summer, and we're hoping to get them through the winter by insulating the observation hive.

Much in the same way these busy bees provide a service to their insect community, the students at the Science Center also provide a service to their community that surrounds Squam Lake.

This 28ft long pontoon boat provides the youngsters a floating classroom from which they conduct experiments testing the quality of water in Squam Lake and thus providing the residents around the lake with invaluable environmental data.

The program s meant to be completely educational, although a real valuable spin-off from it is the data that we bring back after each trip.

This data directly reflects on the quality of Squam Lake and in fact, our coliform equipment the equipment we use for measuring the amount of bacteria in the water, that was all purchased for the Science Center by the Squam Lake Association, which is made up of landowners that live all around Squam Lake.

And they wanted someone actively to be looking after the quality of the water.

And so far our data has been totally positive.

Squam Lake is definitely a class A lake, with the coliform count and all of the other measurements indicate that the water quality is very good.

Yet the research and educational opportunities available to the youngsters are not the only attractions of the Science Center.

Doctor Ashley notes that the Center is also a big hit with tourists and nature lovers of all ages.

A lot of our drop-in visitors really get excited with seeing a bear in an enclosure or a deer, but for every 10 such visitors, there's always 2 or 3 that would that would much rather take a quiet walk in the woods or study the flowers in this field.

There's always the birdwatcher, the flower buff, or the insect collector.

And for those people, the best lesson is to be learned right in the community as it's preserved naturally.

We like to take groups of schoolkids out into the field here and let them observe what the insects are doing, rather than looking at a specimen or in a museum, actually see who's eating who and which insects are pollinators and which ones are predators.

And to me, that's the real essence of our educational mission at the Science Center.

It's nice to be able to see animals a close hand like the black bear, but it's also nice to see how nature operates and how everything fits together in each one of these separate communities.

The Science Center, by the way, has a new edition.

It's called The Goodhue Collection, a sampling of stuffed birds and animals native to New Hampshire.

It's particularly interesting because some of the species it contains are now extinct.

And oh yes, the Science Center is also the location of the award winning Channel 11 series, Up Close and Natural.

Storytelling is a New England tradition, and we'd like to introduce you to our resident humorist, Kendall Morse.

Hello, I'm Kendall Morse.

You know, a lot of people think that Maine humor is the only humor in this part of the country.

But the fact is, so-called Maine humor lives all over the New England states.

And we have our share of characters, no matter where we are in the Northeast.

Now, over in Madison, there's a dump-tender by the name of Tom.

And he was standing there one day tending the dump, making sure it didn't spread to the town.

And this tourist lady who had been here all summer came up with a whole big load of trash in the station wagon, and she started unloading it.

I guess she thought that Tom should help her, but he never made any offer to, so she unloaded the whole thing all by herself and getting more and more huffy about it all the time.

Well, she finally got all the trash unloaded and thrown down over the dump.

She got back into her car and she couldn't leave without taking a shot at him.

She says, you know, Mister, there's an awful lot of funny-acting people in this part of the country.

He says, yeah, yeah, there is.

But come Labor Day, they're all gone.

Our third story this evening takes us to Hanover, to the walls of the Dartmouth College Library.

There in 1934, a Mexican artist named José Clemente Orozco completed a series of frescoes.

The murals are called Epic of American Civilization and are filled with haunting and powerful images depicting the forces that shaped our continent.

50 years later, Orozco s frescos are still as compelling and as controversial as they were when first painted.

Music The images are intense and powerful, almost overwhelming.

They speak loudly of epic chapters in the story of man.

Here his brutality and baseness, here his spiritual triumph.

They are the vision of Mexican muralist José Clemente Orozco, who set them into these walls a half century ago.

They are part of a series of murals that span some 3000ft of wall space at Baker Library on the campus of Dartmouth College, a work that is now recognized as perhaps one of Orozco's greatest efforts.

Orozco came to the United States in 1927 after becoming dissatisfied with the artistic climate of post-revolutionary Mexico.

Two years later, the story of the mural began.

Churchill P. Lathrop, now a professor of art and Director of Galleries Emeritus at Dartmouth, was there at the beginning.

The art department had a brand new building in 1929, and we wanted to have some murals in it.

We had been thinking about murals as the building was constructed.

So, the way that, the way we got Orozco here was to get in touch with him.

We knew where he was in this country.

He had left Mexico and we found out that he was willing to come, but we didn't have any money.

The, the president had agreed to let us build it here, to have a mural in the new building.

But that was in the spring of 29.

And in the fall of 29, the great market crash came and we, we were asked to put it on on the back burner for a while.

Well, the project was to remain on the back burner for three years.

Finally, in 1932, President Hopkins agreed to bring Orozco to Dartmouth for a lecture demonstration about mural painting.

The lecture demonstration, and resulting mural, entitled Man Released From The Mechanistic, was well-received by the student community, thus fueling the drive to have a larger work done.

We were thinking, we always have a mural in the new art building, and we had, definite plans.

He picked out a place where he would do it, and the sample was to be part of the of the completion of a (inaudible) or mural.

But, we took him one day through Baker Library, where the mural now is, and was this large study hall that had been left unfinished.

He just stopped dead in his tracks, and he said, what a place for a mural.

He said, this is, this is where I d like to do my, my masterpiece.

He said, I've had a, a theme for a long while, and that I wanted to do, but I never had a wall large enough to do it on.

And this is great.

But although President Hopkins approved of the idea, he still could not justify the expense.

But then we came up with, what I think was a brilliant idea of our own in the art department.

We said, this is educational.

We proved that already.

Why don't we give him a position on the art faculty?

We're not, we're not buying an expensive mural.

And, lets appoint him a Visiting Professor of Art, Artist in Residence.

It'll take about two years to do this big project, he says.

And, during that time, he will lecture visually instead of verbally.

And so in 1932, visiting Professor of Art José Clemente Orozco began work on his masterpiece.

The very first panel he did was the the visualization of the prophecy that, Quetzalcoatl would return, returning as in the prophecy, in the panel he s returning as the Spanish soldiers, with the cross and and with, in the background, symbols of European civilization.

He did that first, I think, probably because he knew that would appeal to everybody, and that wasn't controversial.

But as the work progressed, questions were raised both in the college family and in the conservative art world, already feeling the effects of the Great Depression.

There were a few said, what's this guy doing to our library?

It was a pretty attractive building upstairs, you know, nice 18th century decor.

And although the library was only 2 or 3 years old, a lot of people really had a feeling that it was the great, 18th century tradition of Dartmouth that some of the alumni really thought it was, that we were desecrating an 18th century building with this violent, modern art.

And the, the conservative American painters in New York were very outraged by it.

And they got together and issued a document, a regret list with, with Dartmouth, the number one on the list for for patronizing foreign artists when American artists were out of work.

But despite the firestorm of controversy, the work progressed.

And on February 13th, 1934, Orozco completed his epic masterpiece.

Today, those debates are largely forgotten or ignored by the students who come to the Baker Library to study physics or sociology.

There are perhaps more important matters to attend to, but in the silence of this place of learning, the images shout from the walls around them.

They cannot be ignored, and the man who created them cannot be forgotten.

Music Perhaps the name José Clemente Orozco does not immediately leap to mind when one thinks of the giants of Modern Art, yet despite this, Orozco has been compared with the great Picasso.

For Churchill Lathrop, the comparison may be deserved.

The comparison between Orozco and Picasso, I think, is fair.

I personally wouldn t have said it myself, but Orozco says so many important things in his work, about man and about civilization.

He, for for this hemisphere, at least, he could turn out to be a more important figure.

Dartmouth has been celebrating the 50th anniversary of Orozco s murals for the past year, now.

It'll be capping off the festivities with a major international symposium on Orozco and his work October 12th and 13th.

The public is cordially invited to attend all sessions.

If you had to teach your child how to be self-confident and self-assured, how to be happy with being a unique individual, how would you go about doing it?

Well, Rae Pica of Barrington, New Hampshire, believes the answer is creative movement.

Her program, called Moving and Learning, is being taught in preschools and childcare centers throughout the country.

Music Moving and Learning been in existence for, this is its fifth school year.

I started as a dancer and then I just, fell into teaching dance to children.

And the more I taught dance, the more I realized that movement was what young children needed.

The challenges the children are presented with in Moving and Learning are they leave very little room for error.

They're asked to make themselves very small and to stretch as though they were putting something on a high shelf.

I mean, there's there's really very little room for error in that.

And they find out also that there are many different ways of becoming small and becoming large and getting wide or round or crooked, you know, and, that way individuality was really emphasized.

They find out it's okay to be an individual and to do things your own way.

Can you make yourself very, very, very small?

So, so small, even smaller, so small I can hardly see you?

I was spending a lot of money on music and not always getting what I wanted, and it suddenly occurred to me that I had this live-in composer that I ought to be making use of.

I didn't know how he'd feel about writing children's music, but, once he started, it was great.

I loved it, it was a challenge.

Ray would tell me what she needed, what movement activity, And I was to come up with, not only a song or a tune, but, but a song or tune that would have sounds in it that would convey the movement.

Something like that?

Yeah.

Oh, yeah.

Show me you can shake it high Don t get dizzy!

Show me you can shake it low Shake, shake it in the middle and away we go My name is Jo Haskell and I teach art music at Sunshine and Buttercups.

I think the program differs from what I've taught in the past, in that it involves the child's physical ability completely, and it allows them to really focus on their own body movement and to really respond completely, rather than just singing or using rhythm sticks or musical instruments.

It allows them to explore an entire environment.

Beyond all the physical development, social awareness, the self-confidence that they develop, I think they're having fun.

And I think that's that's really very important for young children to have fun and to develop good, good attitudes about school and life.

I think that a lot of educators and parents tend to think of movement in terms of bouncing off the wall, rather than the kind of exploration that actually, you know, the movement exploration that actually takes place.

I am all in favor of this.

I think it's terrific.

And my daughter Rebecca attends school here at Sunshine and Buttercups, and she's five and a half.

It's something where she gets to use her own imagination.

Instead of being told what to do, they are given a situation and they're able to interpret that for themselves.

And she really comes alive when that kind of thing goes on.

Even seeing her here this morning was really good, because I thought that she really got into it and really had a good time.

I think the most important benefit of movement is the ability to express oneself.

I know so many adults who cannot express themselves, and I think that if they had, had a part in a program like Moving and Learning early in life, if that had been emphasized that that potential wouldn't be lost.

Terrific job.

That was fun.

Give yourselves a big hand.

You're good shakers.

Well, that completes the first New Hampshire Crossroads show of the season.

I'm Eloise Daniels, and I hope you'll join me next week when we travel to Hudson for the Kerouac family reunion, and we go up north in search of the not-so-elusive moose.

These stories and much more next week on New Hampshire Crossroads.

Music That was a perfect throw, ladies and gentlemen!