By Barrett Seaman '67
At a recent celebratory gathering of alumni in New York, Hamilton trustee and former Time magazine editor Barry Seaman '67 reflected on a vitally important time for the College and the country. His eloquent remarks captured the essence of a special generation of Hamiltonians ... and their legacy.
(Delivered at the 9th Annual New York City Gala dinner at the Metropolitan Pavilion, December 1, 2006)
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| Barry Seaman '67 |
One of the perks of being a Hamilton trustee is getting to go to Reunions -- all of them, because they coincide with our June board meetings. While it's true that I've never met a college party I didn't like, the real reason I cherish this opportunity is that I get to hear the Class Annalist's Letter, presented by a member of the 50th reunion class. For me, that Saturday morning tradition is the highlight of each Reunion Weekend. These letters -- speeches, really -- offer a glimpse into the past, typically accompanied by some comparative observations about life at Hamilton, then and now.
I've never heard a bad one. More often than not, they bring tears to my eyes. Of course, my wife Laura will tell you that I cry at the least sentimental provocation. It's true. Sing me the last verse of Carissima, or play me the last 30 seconds of the 1980 USA-Russia Olympic hockey game, the "Miracle on Ice," and nine times out of ten, the floodgates will open.
But there is something special about those letters. And there is something particularly special about the ones delivered from the late Eighties through the early part of this decade -- fifty years after the graduation of members of the classes that surrounded World War Two. These included the so-called "Crazy Mixed-Up Years" in which students went off to war and, if they were lucky, came back to graduate with others who might have been in grade school when they originally started college -- or vice versa.
These men were from a generation that was born into the Roaring Twenties, steeled in the cauldron of the Great Depression, swept up into global war -- a generation which then emerged to put the nation and the world back together. Tom Brokaw called them "The Greatest Generation." Among them were Hamilton men who were both the products of -- and in part the architects of -- what Henry Luce dubbed "The American Century." And their experiences -- at Hamilton and in their lives afterwards -- exemplify much of what is great about our small college.
In preparation for this evening, I went back and re-read many of those letters and have culled from them a picture of Hamilton and the generation of its graduates we honor tonight. Those of you who have had the privilege of listening to one or more of these will recognize the material. It is all theirs, not mine, though I will attribute personal quotes to the Annalists themselves.
First of all, in terms of basic comforts, these guys had it tough. If any of you younger graduates think that Hamilton College is in the middle of nowhere now, you should have seen it then. Even as late as 1950, as Charlie Bates of the Class of '53 reported, "when a student came here, he was here. There were classes on Saturday morning and no junior semester or full-year programs away from the Hill. The New York State Thruway had not yet been completed, no more than fifty or so students had cars, and travels away from campus, except for movie runs into Utica or the occasional weekend forays to Skidmore or Vassar, were not a regular feature of our life."
The chapel bell, not the automobile or the computer or the cell phone, ruled daily life. There was a 12-stroke countdown for every class period and for chapel (which, by the way, was compulsory three times a week until well after the war ended). "If you didn't get there by the twelfth bell," recalled Delancey Jones, Class of '38, "you couldn't get in and were marked absent" --by designated attendance takers sitting in the balcony.
Hamilton, of course, was all male then. Females came but three times a year to house parties, which were formal dances at which the women dressed in elegant gowns and the men wore tuxedoes. Well in advance of the weekend, the name of every student's date was published in Hamilton Life, the student newspaper then. Random hook-ups were not common in those days.
The student body was remarkably homogeneous. The vast majority of students came from New York State -- largely from small towns. Those from surrounding states, or further a-field, were considered exotics. "For all intents and purposes, there were only two major political parties represented on campus," quipped Paul Langa, Annalist for the Class of '48: "Republican and Republican."
John Backus, Class of '46, said: "We were mostly WASPs and included no African-Americans, no Hispanics and relatively few members from the Catholic and Jewish faiths." But homogeneity had a dark side. Many of the fraternities shunned minorities, including Jews and sometimes Catholics. "Our classmate Bob Linowes said he ‘never felt so alienated' as he did following the first orientation meeting," Bill Ringle stated forthrightly in his Class of '44 Letter. "At home he'd been popular. Here, in all the fraternity rushing that was going on, he was kind of a non-person." To his everlasting credit, Campbell Dickson, then the newly arrived Dean of Students, invited Linowes home for dinner and told him: "If you or I walk away from this, we'll never beat it." With help of post-war veterans who returned to campus with a worldlier view, they did. But more on the vets later.
Discrimination of a healthier kind was applied to freshmen. They were required to wear beanies, or "slimers" as they were called. They had to greet upperclassmen they encountered on the open campus. They could not carry canes (I guess that was a cool thing to do), and they couldn't wear corduroys or knickers. Life got easier if they managed to beat the sophomores at Capture the Flag or Tug-o-War, but not much.
With so little to do socially and no place to go, they engaged in pranks a lot. Using their freshman home -- South Dorm -- as a laboratory, new students, recalled Charlie Bates, "engaged in ingenious explorations into the various governing principles of gravity, hydraulics and pyrotechnics -- sometimes with dramatic results."
In the late forties, a cabal of upperclassmen conspired to set off four simultaneous fire alarms and used the ensuing distraction to steal the college's Model A fire truck, which they rolled down College Hill until a night cap-clad Dean -- "Squintin' Winton Tolles -- caught up and scattered them into the adjacent woods. (More on Dean Tolles in a bit.)
In all this there was some humor -- even sophisticated humor. Bill Ringle recalled one roué at a Carnegie beer party pronouncing on "the three best things in life: a Martini before and a nap afterward." My guess is that few present had actually experienced any of those, except the nap.
Fortunately, Hamilton men did not take themselves too seriously in those days -- particularly in athletics. In the 1940s, the campus publication "Our Hamilton" advised: "While Hamilton's men like to ring the college bell after victories, there is a strong presumption that even though a dropkick goes a couple of yards to the south, the sun will probably rise the next day."
Indeed it did, and sometimes even to the peel of victory. Under the coaching of Tom Harmon's Michigan teammate, Forest Eveshevski, Hamilton running back "Mercury Milt" Jannone '43 was mentioned in the national press as "the secret All-American." Frenchman Jean Gelas, who was said to be able to do one-armed chin-ups well into his late sixties, coached Hamilton's fencers into national contention. Albert Ira Prettyman not only produced winning Hamilton teams in the Sage Rink, he also coached the U.S. Olympic hockey team that competed in Munich in 1936.
To match this level of prowess, students strived to produce a suitable band that could at least form a marching H on Steuben Field. "In our freshman year," recounted Harvard professor William Hutchison '51, "we acquired a drum majorette in the person of Miss Joan Judlowski, champion twirler from the Polish Legion of American Veterans in Utica." Her presence was, alas, insufficient: during Dr. Hutchison's four years on the Hill, Hamilton won eight games -- total.
One Annalist noted that when the war began, the Chapel bell was designated as the College's warning system in case of an enemy air raid, thus ending the tradition of ringing it after football victories. It was wryly noted at the time that the odds of either happening were equally slim.
Contrary to the widespread view that Hamilton has been forever a well-kept secret, the College actually enjoyed moments of renown in those years. I found two articles about the College in the archives of Time Magazine. In the Thirties, Alexander Woollcott ‘09 persuaded his friend Thornton Wilder to insert two references to Hamilton into his play, "Our Town."
Among the guest speakers on campus in those years were Eleanor Roosevelt, Norman Thomas, Allen Tate, Bennett Cerf and Reinhold Niebuhr. In those years, the choir performed on NBC and CBS nationally broadcast radio stations and on Rudy Vallee's Variety Hour.
The main excitement in Charlie Bates' senior year was the visit of a writer/photographer team from LIFE Magazine, resulting in a generous spread on the College titled "Pure Liberal Arts" that ran in the April 27, 1953 issue.
By far the biggest thing to hit Hamilton in these years, however, was the war. When Clarence Aldridge's Class of 1945 arrived in the fall of 1942, they numbered 130. By Christmas vacation, two-thirds of Hamilton's 400 students had been sworn into one of the military services, and about 100 would be called into the Army by the end of the semester that January. "If we were to define the Class of 1945 as only those who received their diplomas at the 135th Commencement in June 1945," said Aldridge, "we would include only eight people."
So it was for most classes during the war years. All of the College's dorms, save one, were given over to military training units for Army and Air Force officers. By 1945, there were barely sixty undergraduates on College Hill, comfortably situated in South Dormitory with its capacious rooms and working fireplaces.
Incidentally, it's clear to me that Hamilton owes its very survival to the foresight of the president at that time, William Cowley, who assiduously pursued government contracts to use campus facilities at a time when keeping a liberal arts college afloat would have been next to impossible.
No Class Annalist in this period neglected to mention their classmates who did not return from the war to College Hill -- often in poignant, personal terms. Dick Butler erstwhile '46 was killed by sniper fire in January 1945 while going forward to aid another soldier -- an action for which he was posthumously awarded a Silver Star. Jonah Reeves, who would have been in the Class of 1944, died on July 4, 1943, when his RAF bomber was shot down. He was 22. Art Scott, a machine-gun platoon leader, died on March 14, 1945 on what would have been his next to last day on Iwo Jima -- three months shy of his 25th birthday. Dave Hastings was on his 33rd mission as a B-17 pilot when he was shot down over Leipzig on April 6th, 1945. He was almost 23.
All told, more than 1,800 sons of Hamilton served in the Armed Forces during the Second World War, reported Milt Kayle. Fifty did not return. Dwight Lindley '42, who taught me English two decades later, quoted a line from a poem by his classmate, Tom Pryor, who eventually died of malaria contracted in North Africa: Time spent (at Hamilton), he wrote, becomes "a candle in one's heart."
Enrollment didn't go back up again until 1946 when it soared to 582. Many of the returnees were veterans, and a number of them were by then married and with children. Carnegie was made over into family apartments, but ultimately the college had to build new housing -- a series of Quonset Huts erected behind AD and DU (now Eells and Ferguson), known as the North, or G.I. Village. Veterans' wives started playing female roles in Charlatan productions and otherwise changing the gender-landscape of Hamilton well before Kirkland or co-education was a gleam in trustees' eyes. In April 1946, then-President Worcester issued a G.I. Wives Bill of Rights, which included permission to "vagabond" (or audit) classes, but receive no credit.
The GIs had an enormous impact on campus life. Thomas McCabe '49 described them as "cynical, serious, somewhat scared and in a hurry." Jim Nickel, Class of 1952, recalls: "When you were a raw freshman watching vets wearing leather flight jackets with American flags and Chinese writing on their backs, you learned your place in a hurry." That's a sentiment I bet Gene Romano, who was a stripling student in those days, can well attest to.
The vets also had little patience for some of the more insular "traditions," like freshman beanies, and more importantly the national fraternity charters that excluded Jews and blacks. They also didn't like compulsory chapel in the old Presbyterian Church. Dressed in their army fatigues, they swaggered into, naturally enough, the Chapel to launch a strike -- one of whose leaders was the actor Peter Falk.
I said I would return to the subject of Dean Winton Tolles, whose daughter Trix is with us tonight. As the post-war bubble of veterans waned and G.I. Village lapsed into disuse, a couple of students took to setting harmless bonfires on the uninhabited porches and steps of the soon-to be-razed buildings. Somehow figuring out who the perpetrators were, Dean Tolles summoned them in. "Is it true that you and Boynton have been burning up the porches in North Village?" he asked Greene Fentley.
Answer: "Yes, sir."
Tolles: "Stop."
It is a scenario I could easily have assigned to Sidney Wertimer, who shared with his friend and colleague Win Tolles a fundamental belief that if you treat young people as adults, there is a fair chance they may act like adults. Sid was a contemporary, and a keeper of the flame, of the values this generation represents.
Whether they were hardened vets or callow high school lads from small town, New York, the Hamilton men of this generation above all cherished the relationships they had with their teachers. Class Annalists spanning more than a decade delivered the same message: As Charlie Bates put it, "Our close and warm relationships to our professors -- our faculty, all men, who were simultaneously our mentors, counselors and friends."
They knew them intimately, foibles and all: Bunny, Chubby, Stink, Mumbles, Spoolie, Digger, Rocksy, Bobo and Fifi, among others. Many of them were still here when I arrived in the Fall of 1963: George, "The Nez," Nesbitt who according to Jim Nickel, "once after a second thimble of sherry asked to be called "Nez-babe"; Robert Barnes "Bobo" Rudd, who would sometimes weep as he read moving passages to his students, also carried his own bottle of Ballantine's scotch to parties at the Psi U house; Otto Liedke, who threw Jim Backus out of class for not being prepared, but also carried lessons beyond the classroom by teaching his students German drinking songs over a stein of beer at Peg's Tavern downtown, now Don's Rok.
But make no mistake: they were tough taskmasters. "In some courses, we were regularly on our guard, if not regularly in a state of low grade terror," admitted Bill Hutchison. "We were expected to do the work day by day," said Dwight Lindley. "We had frequent quizzes and sometimes exceedingly difficult final exams. We were graded severely, and if we failed we were dismissed."
Milt Kayle's Annalist Letter quoted his classmate, Bill Archibald, as saying that he remembers Dean Frank "Chubby" Rastine as telling the incoming class: "Look at the man on your left, and the one on your right. One of them will not be here when you graduate." Maurice Clifford said "the Class of '41 lost 30% of its membership in the freshman year. By the time the survivors reached Commencement, 12 more had left our number." Their grades, opposite their names, were published on typewritten sheets hung on bulletin boards in the library vestibule.
Strangely, no one protested this practice, which today would be considered a violation of privacy. No one from this generation argued that retention was more important than standards. They persevered. They attributed their successes in later life to the rigor Hamilton demanded. And they have repaid the College with an unprecedented sense of loyalty and affection.
Long before there was a Bristol Campus Center or a Bristol Pool, there was a Mac Bristol '43, football teammate of the aforementioned Milt Jannone and former chairman of the board of trustees. Long before there was a Schambach Center for Music and the Performing Arts, there was a Hans Schambach, originally of the Class of 1943 but forced to move to an internment camp because he was a native German. Long before there was a Couper Hall, there was a Dick Couper, Class of '44, who went on serve as Acting President of the College and later head of the New York Public Library. Long before there was a Fillius Events Barn, there was a Milt Fillius, '44, who has enriched the College so much through his connections with the world of Jazz. Long before there was an Anderson-Connell Alumni Center, there was a Joe Anderson '44.
I could go on: There is Ralph Hansmann '40, whom Jeff talked about, and Carter Bacot, whose class was just beyond the Crazy Mixed-Up Years but whose name and legacy and progeny will be forever part of Hamilton. John Root, whose family is almost synonymous with the College, for years chaired the Visual Arts advisory committee.
And so, to you, gentlemen, those who are here with us tonight and those who are absent, for all you have done for this country and particularly for this College, we salute you.
