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.)

Ray Ellison: On the Great Snowball Riot of 1954 (posted March 11, 2010)
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)

Ray Ellison: On the Great Snowball Riot of 1954 (posted March 11, 2010)

The text which follows is a transcript of a series of letters sent to his parents by Ray Ellison, TD '57, in January 1954, during our freshman year at Yale. He was living at 132 Welch Hall, Old Campus at the time. His parents were living in Maplewood, NJ. Ray has edited the originals for spelling, grammar, and narration flow and interpolated some comments for clarification.

January 15

Dear Folks,

Set yourselves up for a shock!! Your boy here at Yale is a fugitive from the law. Today, as you might expect after a snow flurry which provided packing snow, there was a gigantic snowball fight across Elm Street. I was there. Leaving out all the minor details my trouble occurred like this. There were at least seven hundred persons throwing snowballs across the street. The police finally arrived and collared some students who threw at them. I did not. Then we had some small fights across and on the same side of the street. The police left one cop behind, who was pelted with snowballs. I was in the act of throwing across the street at other Yalies and I stopped. The cop came over and said I was under arrest. "What for," I asked and tried to wrench away as he was holding my coat. He and I immediately scuffled and wrestled on the ground and in the street. I finally relented upon the arrival of another cop, a Yale campus cop, and a squad car of town police. They put me in the squad car and I opened the door on the other side and ran like fury to Calhoun. [The squad car was parked on the Old Campus side of Elm Street, and Calhoun College was immediately across the street.] No police pursued. That's it. I have abandoned my garb of the riot and have avoided the well frequented haunts of the police. Everyone, including Don Walker [Don Walker was a fellow at Calhoun College and took an interest in athletics. RE met him during a visit to Yale prior to making application for admission.] and Harry [Harry Burke was coach of the freshman swimming team. In 1954 freshmen were not allowed to compete with the varsity team.] knew it was me, but the cops haven't been here yet. I have heard everything from "You'll be expelled." to "No one will care." I am worried, as you can imagine. However, I have learned my lesson: I am stiff and felt lousy up at the pool [The practice swimming pool on the fourth floor of Payne Whitney Gymnasium.] this afternoon. I really regret my stupid actions, although most of the undergraduates consider me a hero. I wish I was famous in the pool instead of an infamous fool. Bruce [R. Bruce Wood, classmate from high school and RE's freshman year roommate. He did not return to Yale the next year.] says Don Walker gave him a look of disgust. Why did I have to be so foolish? Now to more pleasant stuff.

... I really am very sorry about today's mess.

Love, Ray

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January 16

Dear Folks,

This is a quick note before dinner. I see I made the Times. [The New York Times had an article about the snowball fight and had a picture of RE being put into the squad car.] Harry was rather pleased and Bob [Bob Kiphuth was the Head Coach of the Yale Varsity Swim Team and a legend in his own time.] was confident I was not really riotous. I worked out this morning and felt stiff,...

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January 17

Dear Folks,

....The affair Friday has been just about forgotten and I am in no danger. The boys who were caught will appear next week in court. They will probably be fined and perhaps suspended by the University.

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January 18

Dear Mom,

I hasten to assure you I am still free and that the chances of any repercussions are very remote. Everyone, Dave [David Armstrong '57, fellow classmate and teammate, prep school and college All-American swimmer.] and Phil [Philip Moriarity, assistant varsity swim coach at Yale, and head swim coach following Bob Kiphuth's retirement. Now lives in retirement in Florida.], take the whole thing as a wonderful experience. Harry is even a bit proud, I think. Don't worry all is fine.

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January 19

Dear Mom,

Where are the many questions and answers about my behavior last week? I am amazed you have not written something. Now the whole affair is just a joke. The whole school, Yale College, the engineering school, and Freshman Year-is on social probation for the Snowball Riot. This means that no one may have lady guests nor can any lady be escorted on University property with a Yalie. This of course gets me very effectively. [A lame attempt at irony! RE was not into dating the ladies, YET!]

POSTSCRIPT:

Does any one else remember the snowball fight? I recall a commercial truck, painted crimson with Harvard in its name drove up Elm Street, was really pelted, while a similar truck in blue, with Yale in its name, drove through unscathed.

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 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)

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.