I entered Yale from a large public high school in Tulsa, Oklahoma, so my initiation into Ivy League culture and prep school peculiarities was an unusual experience for me. My roommates Freshman year were from Deerfield and St. Paul’s, and they were neighbors in New Canaan, so you can see what I encountered right off the bat.
My roomies were kind and helpful, but they sensed that I didn’t quite speak their language nor know my way around prep schools. One example was when I asked why a classmate was wearing his Andover letter sweater inside out. They patiently explained that he didn’t want to show off his achievement. I thought that rather odd since the fabric of the “A” showed so clearly through the sweater anyway.
During those first days in McClellan Hall, a St. Paul’s classmate stuck his head in the window and while bantering with his buddies from New Canaan glanced over at me and asked, “who’s that?” When told I was their new roommate from Oklahoma the St. Paulian said, “does he speak English?”
Later that year I was somehow invited to a fancy ball at Tuxedo Park and put on the dance card of a girl I’d never met, and indeed never met at the ball. It was my first time wearing a white tie outfit, which I rented from a New Haven shop. Of course, I didn’t know who Lester Lanin was until somebody informed me that if I had never danced to Lester Lanin, I must be some kind of a rube.
Gradually making my way into the world of prep schoolgirls, I was introduced to the sister of my roommate’s girlfriend from Sewickley, who was a Freshman at Vassar. She was very attractive and had gone to Farmington. There again, I didn’t know that prep schools took on the name of their location, so that Miss Porter’s was really known as Farmington. Anyway, not knowing what to say to this beauty I told her my life’s ambition was to be a rancher on the Oklahoma prairie, and that was the last time she ever went out with me. Years later I found her wedding announcement in the NY Times to a Harvard lawyer.
Little things like coffee took some adjustment. I ordered regular coffee, but when it came it had cream in it. The somewhat surly waiter informed me that was regular coffee, not the black version I expected. And bagels and blintzes were largely unknown in my previous life. I was introduced to them by the proprietor of a great deli on Elm Street called “My Brother’s Place.” He delighted in pointing me out to other customers as the “new kid from Oklahoma.”
But learning my way around Yale culturally was trivial compared to the vast new horizons that this great university presented over the next four years. One course, History of Art and Architecture with Vincent Scully changed my life forever, as did many of the English literature courses I took in my major. Yale was a rich place for an Oklahoma boy to explore and I am grateful for the opportunity.