by Wim Ilmanen, '54 Arch.
wilmanen@silcom.com

Old Chairman stood up, swilled the Cutty Sark
reflectively around his glass, blinked his eyes to
rid them of the moisture, and cleared his throat.

A certain elegance conveyed in that sentence, don't you think? That was the Old Owl in the opening paragraph of A Jigger of Wry in a bygone era of The Yale Record. The moisture in his eyes is explained by his comment, "Gentlemen, we have come to the twilight of our college lives and it is time for us to fade away into the night". Not even a hint of a modern soundbite, there. But then, it was 1951, just a few weeks before commencement.

The decade preceding was when The New Yorker magazine was in its prime, when aspiring writers wanted to be like James Thurber and cartoonists looked to Peter Arno whose characters dressed for dinner and hated Roosevelt. If any magazine was worth emulating, The New Yorker certainly was. So one didn't view too harshly The Yale Record for subtly borrowing some of that great style, or Julien Dedman, whose cartoons clearly paid homage to the great New Yorker cartoonist Peter Arno. But then The Yale Record died. I think it was in 1972. Various reasons were given for its demise, but the fact is that The Yale Record was absent for about a quarter of a century.

I have always felt that Julien Dedman had a cartoon style which was distinctive, never mind that it owed some to Peter Arno; so it was with delight that I saw the old Dedman masthead making its appearance in in the newly resurrected all-new Yale Record in 1997. But the Dedman masthead only exposes the fact that this is not The Yale Record of the 1950s, and it doesn't include The New Yorker in its lineage.

Ah yes, those golden years at Yale- when the colleges were still fresh, and you bought your white bucks at Frank Brothers and the only women undergraduates on campus were the weekend dates from Smith and Vassar. So naturally The Yale Record jokes tended to be about women and innocent about sexual harassment. Remember this one?
"You've been a stenographer for about all the big guys in
tis office building, haven't you?"
"Yes, I guess I'm about on my last lap now"

Or this one? "Horace was over to my house last night and asked me
to wear his pin, when he was getting ready to leave.
I told him I couldn't wear it until I knew him better."
"But you're wearing it now."
"Well, he didn't leave right then."

These two could be the beginnings of a whole "Those Were the Days" game. I might be tempted, but must remember that I'm no longer a sophomore. Then I think of Andy Rooney of Sixty Minutes' fame; I admire his knack for finding much that is funny right around us today, and the temptation is gone. It must be Rooney's white hair that gives him the insight and courage to reveal it.

The Yale Record of the 'nineties puts together a pretty good mix of shock treatment and humor such as the paired stories Christmas is a Stupid Holiday and ...But Chanukah is Stupider! That not is much off limits today is reflected in these two irreverent stories that blend sophomoric wit, ethnic custom and political personae in a brew that must be tasteful only to the present day undergraduate. What's so great about The Game anyway is a story born of the plethora of entertainment options available, including today's television. This story would have been inconceivable some forty years ago when a limited supply of the stuff made Yale football a major event and sanctioned dates in the colleges. Straight stories in the new Yale Record, such as one on Xerox Hacking, makes sense if you're comfortable with searching the Internet. If not, your college-aged child or grandchild will be glad to translate.

Reflecting the stressed pace of the 'nineties are the sparse cartoons: stick-like and linear in shape. Just as today's comic strip compares to the soundbite, the art of Dick Tracy or Li'l Abner could only exist in the measured pace of the era around the 'fifties.

I must confess that as I feel more comfortable with the language of John Updike than with Tom Wolfe, I prefer the simple and predictable stories in The Yale Record of the 'fifties over the present ones. Never mind that Tom was inspired by my era of the Yale Architecure School in his From Bauhaus to Our House. Besides, we knew how to spell what we wrote. I also prefer Al Capp and Walt Kelly to most ofthe modern stuff in the papers. Indisputably, the caroons that we drew for "our" Yale Record were better art than the minimalist product seen in the Record half a century later. The message may not have been as good, but the media was decidedly better.

The New Yorker made the mistake of sticking to a format no longer suitable, but was reinvented and thus rescued from demise. I like to think grandly that a new ascendant Yale Record will perhaps turn the tables on The New Yorker and show the style of the future. Alas, even with a 125-year history, The Yale Record's success as an undergraduate magazine depends solely on how well a select few students, armed only with pens, can wield them so well that their very bright and critical fellow undergraduates take delight in their consummate skills. A very tall order.