Time.
Its passage colored many of our experiences at Yale, and especially in memory of them. We lived in old buildings with features typical of their histories. As a freshman I lived in Farnam Hall, one of the older structures, next to Battell Chapel with its bells marking 15-minute intervals. We all had rigid daily schedules of classes and meals, and never enough time to meet them comfortably. Never an early riser, I remember my alarm waking me to cold dark mornings.
The end of Freshman year was marked for me by ceremonially destroying a clock with three friends our last evening before leaving for summer vacation. We pulverized a wind-up clock that had tormented its owner all year. A symbolic revenge on time. John Blanpied, Bill Kunz, Chad Dilley, and I gathered that night, dressed in bed-sheets simulating Roman togas, drank too much bad wine, and chanted poetry while we destroyed the little clock with an alarm bell on its head. We pounded it with a small hammer, each taking turns, until gears and sprockets flew about the room. To finish the job we burned it on a pyre of moth balls and lighter fluid. When the room filled with black smoke someone emptied a fire extinguisher on the clock, sending it down the stairs on a river of foam. The smoke triggered an alarm and brought the campus police. The authorities did not approve, but they had a procedure for such emergencies. Someone, not one of us, cleaned up the mess and the practical implications of our evening were managed.
I have a short formal letter on Dean’s office stationery, signed by a lesser dean and addressed to the Chief of campus Police. Dean Arleigh D. Richardson III told the Chief he had personally reprimanded Dilley and Kunz but Blanpied and Riddle had already left town. He began: “Dear Jack, I am writing with reference to your letter of May 31 on which four freshmen participated in setting fire to alarm clocks, etc.” We were to pay the cost of refilling the fire extinguisher. My share was five dollars; it was money well-spent.
Yale stepped up to its responsibility in loco parentis, and we rising Sophomores learned a lesson while having a little revenge on a symbol of our dimly perceived entrapment in time. Sixty seven years later that evening lives on in memory.