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Here's where, for everyone's enjoyment and interest, you
can post reminiscences, stories, and photos of your part of
our four years as undergraduates. The intent of this page
is to help capture, for ourselves and the university's
history, our individual "takes" on everything from teachers
to buildings and places, events, organizations, and life in
general at Yale from the fall of 1953 through graduation in
1957. Send all proposed submissions to the corresponding
secretary.
It's suitable that we start with all of us as we looked at our matriculation in
September 1953. Click here to see the Yale
Freshman Register for the Class of 1957. (Note: Please be patient: the Register,
because of its many photos, loads slowly.)
Roland Machold: My Varsity Letter (posted December 14, 2008)
Jim Banner: In praise of Frank Baumer (posted July 29, 2006)
Otis Graham: Nonfaculty Professors (posted July 22, 2006)
Bob Rosefsky: The True History of Our BladderBall Games (posted July 22, 2006)
Dave Johnson: A Paean to Tom Bergin (posted March 3, 2006)
Roland Machold: My Varsity Letter (posted December 14, 2008)
By senior year it appeared that I would make it to graduation, and I
looked around for something to entertain me for my senior Spring. An ad
appeared in the Yale Daily News for candidates for the Yale cricket team.
To this day, if someone asks me in a challenging manner whether I ever
earned a varsity letter at Yale, I will say yes, without mentioning that
cricket was a club sport, and that the letter in question was a tiny "Y" on
our cricket caps. It turned out that the team was advertising for an
eleventh player, a player who may never come to bat, and, if he does, has
the role of defending the wicket passively so that the tenth and last batter
can bat aggressively. More importantly, the eleventh player had to have a
large house that could accommodate the team overnight when the team
went to the Philadelphia/Washington area to play its matches.
What fun we had! We had an odd assortment of Brits, Indians, Australians,
New Zealanders and Pakistanis, mostly graduate students, who loved the
game and were great company. I learned the rudiments of the game,
including how to bowl with a stiff arm. One of the teams we played was at
Haverford College, which was the only college that had a varsity cricket
team, a remnant of a cricket culture that flourished in Philadelphia in the
early 1900's and which is memorialized in the names of the Merion and
Philadelphia cricket clubs, where the former cricket pitches have been
converted to grass tennis courts. The American star of that era was
Christie Morris, a distant cousin of mine, who every year invited the
extended Morris family to his estate in Villanova at Christmas time to sing
carols. I went once with my mother and sister.
Anyway, it is the custom to open a cricket match with one of your least
accomplished bowlers, so that your opponent can judge the quality of the
pitch without undue risk, and at Haverford I was chosen to be the opening
bowler. Before starting, I asked our captain about the protocols of
bowling, which, in its simplest form, was to hurl the cricket ball on a
bounce towards the wicket that the opposing batsman was defending.
However, here it gets tricky, because the batsman must defend the wicket
with his bat and not his body, and if a ball hits the batsman, and the
referee believes that the ball would have hit the wicket, had not the
batsman blocked it with his leg, then the referee will call the batsman out
"leg before wicket," but only if he is challenged to do so by the bowler. As
one can imagine, this can be a difficult call, both for the bowler and the
referee, and particularly for a novice bowler, so my captain advised me to
challenge the referee whenever my ball hit the batsman in any manner
with a shout of "How's that?" Well, I took a running start and hurled the
ball towards the opposing batsman. However, I neglected to bounce the
ball before the opposing wicket, and the ball hit the opposing batsman full
toss on the top of his head, a horrendous breach of courtesy.
Nevertheless, mindful of my captain's instruction, I turned to the referee
and shouted "How's that?" while the batsman was reeling from the blow.
With a frozen face, the referee replied sotto voce "Not very good, I'm
afraid." That was the end of my career as a bowler.
On a beautiful warm and cloudless day, we played a match against one of
the British embassy teams at the estate of Commander Leander
McCormick Trueheart, an imposing Brit in a blue crested blazer and with
a magnificent walrus mustache. The great man appeared in person,
cradling his newest progeny in his arm. The estate had a manor house
overlooking a green sward that extended to the banks of the Potomac.
Boundaries had been marked, and tea tents were set up for both teams.
When the match was underway, it soon became apparent that we were
overmatched, and the embassy team batted and batted and batted, again
and again, with impunity from our bowlers. As it happened, I had brought
my Girl of the Moment to watch me, and to be impressed that I was part
of such an elegant scene. She had no interest or understanding of cricket
and read a book quietly under a tree in the distance, across the pitch. For
my part, I was glued to my post at the distant boundary retrieving and
keeping in play the occasional ball that was hit my way, and many were.
The sun rose high in the heavens and the British team batted, and batted
and batted, and again and again, and the score against us rose ever
higher. Then disaster struck. A bus load of visiting Cambridge students
arrived, full of frolic, and they noticed my Girl of the Moment. I was
helpless, pinned in the field, as they edged ever closer to her. There was
gaiety all around, and I could hear their distant laughter, as she
disappeared into the crowd of students. I never saw her again. And, we
lost the match handily. Still, I had my "varsity" letter.
Jim Banner: In praise of Frank Baumer (posted July 29, 2006)
The center of gravity of my undergraduate years was the
classroom. It was the site, or at least at the core, of my
intellectual awakening. My mind had been trained at school;
at Yale it was opened. Many of us look back on our college
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years ("bright college years") as a time of football games,
fraternity hijinks, friendships, and liberation from
parental supervision, and so with misty eyes they open our
pockets to alma mater in late-life gratitude. My gratitude
to the place springs from its gift to me of four years of
unrelieved intellectual excitement and discovery.
I had been in museums but knew nothing of the history of
art and architecture; for years I had played the piano and
attended concerts with my parents and grandfather but knew
little of the history of music. Plato and Aristotle? Yes,
I'd heard their names but never read them, nor Sophocles and
Euripedes, Aquinas and Kierkegaard, Homer and Milton. I may
earlier have scanned a line here and there of Coleridge or
Keats, but no one had led me to Dickinson or Whitman, Eliot
or Stevens, cummings or Pound. And where my schooling had
kept me hawsered to study hall desks in preparation for
tests and exams, in New Haven free-flowing, directionless,
all-night, and impractical discussions—serious ones—about
Luther and Calvin, Freud and Jung, Camus and Sartre,
McCarthy and Hiss, Reinhold Niebuhr and even Billy Graham
made me alive to ideas I'd never before encountered. It was
in college that I discovered that ideas need not be found
only in classrooms or books. They were to be found in the
air, in friends' heads, in debates, even in drink. It
should be no wonder (as it is no wonder to many who know me)
that I carry with me every day profound appreciation to my
alma mater for having awakened me to the adventure of ideas.
Above all, it was my teachers who led me on that
adventure. I recall them all. Most of them were good at
their craft. A few were brilliant. The one I'd like to
memorialize here, the one who, upon reflection, had the
greatest impact upon me, was the most formal and aloof of
them all. What's more, he flouted most of the conventional
tenets of instructional conduct that are now held up to be
eternally valid and unfailingly effective. He lectured. He
never smiled or told jokes. He held himself aloof and
appeared to be unapproachable. No friendly demeanor toward
undergraduates offered he. In fact, in the two senior-year
terms in which I sat at his feet—literally, directly below
the stage where he held forth at a lectern; remember that in
large courses we had assigned, alphabetized seats then, and
"proctors" took the roll—I never shook his hand or had a
single word with him; and though I later joined him in the
tribe of historians, I never met the man. Yet more than any
other single person, he made me a historian.
He was Franklin LeVan Baumer, and his year-long course
(History 59) covered the entire Western intellectual
tradition—from Plato to Camus. Tall, dark-haired, always
in dark three-piece suits, his piercing dark eyes covered in
dark horn-rimmed glasses, his entire aspect, in fact,
entirely dark and forbidding, Frank Baumer, presence and
gravitas personified, offered inimitable, full-bodied
introductions to the thought of single thinkers in 50-minute
lectures to a roomfull of 350 students in Harkness Hall. He
lectured with his left thumb hooked in his armpit, his right
hand extended palm down as if in benediction (or was it
warning?). Even though he never varied his manner, never
tried to adopt himself to the different ideas or
dispositions of his subjects, his genius was his ability to
make us think that the ideas of each thinker, from however
far in the past, were worthy of the deepest respect. And in
talking of them, he seemed to embody them. Hobbes and Locke
were no more, but no less, important than Hegel or
Nietzsche. Aristotle was as immediate to Frank Baumer as
Albert Camus. What seems additionally remarkable about
Baumer's course was that it met only twice a week for
lectures. No sections, no discussion. Yet those lectures
led to self-starting discussions among classmates late into
the night and set me on my own to reading serious, difficult
documents and books with excitement and pleasure. The
memory of those lectures remains with me to this day. I can
quickly summon the sensation of anticipation with which I
looked forward to them, the excitement of the discoveries
Frank Baumer never failed to open to me, the pleasure of the
struggles to wrestle some thinker's ideas to the ground and
master understanding of them. If this was what the past was
like, filled with such ideas and men (all men—although that
fact never crossed my mind at the time), then the past was
for me.
After I had graduated and was suffering through basic
training at Fort Dix, I wrote Frank Baumer a note of thanks.
I still possess his warm, appreciative reply. Once I had
become a practicing historian, I hoped to meet him at a
professional meeting but never did. I tried to arrange to
see him in New Haven, but it never could be worked out.
When I learned of his death some years ago, I was deeply
saddened and frustrated that our paths had never crossed.
But perhaps that's the way he meant it to be—that teacher
and student should not be familiar, even in later years, as
if to preserve the mystery of the original passage of
knowledge from one to the other. If so, that would have
been entirely in character.
May this be my public tribute to that unforgettable,
distinctive teacher of the young.
Otis Graham: Nonfaculty Professors (posted July 22, 2006)
Raised in the white suburbs of a small southern city,
much of what I learned at Yale came from what I call the
Nonfaculty Faculty, perhaps especially because of the raw
ethnicity I found in New Haven, even though I rarely
ventured far from the university. At St. Anthony Hall, Joe
Sauer, the big German (he spoke a sort of mixed German and
English) bartender was one of our uncles who stood for law
and order. The other was Armand Dupre, French-born, the
Maitre D who knew more about European music than most music
professors across the street, and who would fight the Second
World War over and over with Joe when we brothers came in
for morning coffee. My wrestling coach for four years was
the very Irish Catholic Johnny O'Donnell, who actually
wanted to know who my family was and how they were doing. My
two Spanish instructors were not "ladder faculty" but
temporary adjuncts, and wholly authentic foreign
imports—"Senor Previtali," the dynamic Argentine, and a
brilliant Spaniard whose name has slipped out of my elderly
head. My Thanksgiving weekend hosts (it was too far to go
home to Nashville just for a weekend) were a Jewish couple
in East Haven (I had known one Jew in my entire l8 years of
life when I arrived in New Haven, a thoroughly assimilated
guard on our football team) who kindly took me in lest I be
desolately lonely in my dorm room on that holiday and taught
me, among other things, that one could actually eat mashed
up goose liver and practice a religion in which Jesus Christ
was not the center. I learned a lot at Yale from Frank
Baumer and L. P. Curtis and David Potter, distinguished full
professors who spoke perfect English, but my education about
America's ethnically marbled large cities and that part of
the wider world that was Spanish-speaking came from warm and
extended contact with the only partly American, Non-Faculty
Faculty that Yale pulled into New Haven at much lower wages
than the scholars who were not very often in their
departmental offices. Sometimes, it really does take a village.
Bob Rosefsky: The True History of Our BladderBall Games (posted July 22, 2006)
Let me get the facts on the table before some twisted
propagandists start suggesting otherwise: The Yale Record
convincingly (overwhelmingly?) conquered its foes in the
only two games of BladderBall ever recorded in human
history.
Those games were played on Saturday mornings before
football games during the 1955 and 1956 football seasons in
the middle of the Old Campus to crowds of thousands. (Well,
okay, maybe hundreds.) In the center of a roughly 40 foot
square stood a gigantic ball, some six feet in diameter,
weighing perhaps 20-30 pounds and of unknown origin. On the
sides of the square stood the Combatants: The
(ever-triumphant) Yale Record team; the (puny) Yale Daily
News squad; the (intimidated) WYBC flunkies, and the
(completely-out-of-their-league) Yale Banner staffers.
At the whistle, all teams rushed to the ball which was
promptly airborne. The object was to not let the ball be
pushed over your line. The team with the fewest incursions
won. And what a sight! The throngs of sturdy athletes pushed
and heaved and jumped and gasped and belched. All the teams
were equal, but the Record team was a little bit more equal.
Their resolute defense won the day, sending the losers home
in shame.
Proof? You want proof? We would have solicited ESPN2 to
cover the games, but it hadn't yet been created. So we vowed
to REMEMBER WITH CRYSTAL CLARITY the outcomes. And gentlemen
can not doubt the memories of their colleagues. Proof
enough. Don't believe what others might tell you. Sour
grapes.
Dave Johnson: A Paean to Tom Bergin (posted March 3, 2006)
The division of Yale's residential life into colleges was an
inspired move. The result was the creation of communities
within a larger entity: Yale College, itself a subset of
the larger University. The college system was partly
modeled on Oxford and Cambridge colleges though less
monarchical and more egalitarian, i.e., all colleges were
created equal. For example, special endowments for colleges
were discouraged. But all colleges were not created equal.
My college, Timothy Dwight, was almost in the suburbs, we
thought in the 1950's, though it was said, we were the
closest college to Paris. But we of the class of 1957 were
privileged in another way: our master was the inestimable
Thomas G. Bergin. Now all colleges have and had their own
masters, all wonderful scholars and grand gentlemen (no
women then, of course.) But TGB was special. A great bear
of a man, jovial, erudite, he was Professor of Romance
Languages, and a fan of Yale football par excellence, having
himself played on the team in the '20's. He was a native
New Havenite and a good Democrat. In World War II he served
in the Army and was decorated by the Italian government for
services to Italian patrimony.
In those years I was a College Aide for the Master's
office— printer, photographer, and other tasks to help the
college along—a Bursary job, as they were called then. I
was also not at all interested in romance languages, having
got through the language requirement thanks to some good
French instruction in secondary school. But contact with
Bergin intrigued me and I enrolled in his Dante course. We
read the Commedia in English translation— his, of course—
one of the few written in Terza Rima, å la Dante.
Bergin was famous for writing "Keep off the Grass Signs"
in Latin or Italian Terza Rima. We still got the message.
His course turned me into an Italophile for life. When
later , in the military, I had a chance to learn Italian I
signed up for it, orders were written to get me to Italy and
thereafter I have never had enough exposure to this grand
country of humanism— and Machiavelli.
My point is simple. Yale offers serendipity—
serendipity to other students with different life
experiences and serendipity to faculty deeply committed to
the education of young people. My guess is we could all tell
stories such as this one— experiences which changed our
directions and paths. So, bravo, TGB— and thank you!
Grazie molto.
Site designed and maintained by Christopher
Bates. This Page Last Updated: December 14, 2008.
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