A Few Random Memories –
The farewell day we wished all a good life – today a good after life.
A classmate reflecting on the value of his Yale education saying “When I came I thought ‘Moby Dick’ was a social disease.
Professor Sewell’s wildly popular “English 61” course on Tragedy – and the “Help Stamp Out Tragedy” message we found one day on the blackboard, which the professor stamped out, with an eraser.
Bill Coffin’s garage where we stored our “illegal” motorcycles – and his irreverent wife who despised the “lies” children were taught in Sunday School.
Driving my cycle at night lights out (the generator wasn’t generating) from Cambridge to New Haven after a Big Game weekend.
Brilliant Johnny Weiss in Professor Bernstein’s philosophy seminar and his father, Paul, traveling to Greenwich Village to learn what artists meant when they said “I want to paint until all the green is out of me.”
A motorcycle ride from Yale Darien with a beautiful young lady in back surrounding me with her arms. She told me the best thing about being a [famous name] was you didn’t have to marry one. I didn’t.
Sneaking another young lady out a lower court rear window long after curfew.
The hush following Odetta’s surprise entry to the funky beer hall behind Davenport, all hoping she might honor us with “I been ‘buked, I been scorned…” No luck, just dropping by.
Working with Karl Robinson to convince the Seniors at DKE to resign after a brother blackballed my roommate, saying he could not face family and friends if Raleigh Davenport were admitted.
Seeing 1956 Democratic Presidential candidate Adlai Stevenson quiet jeering students in the street outside Woolsey Hall.
Outside the Yale Dramat hanging out with Bart and future wife Toni, who teasingly told Austen Pendleton (later the fired stuttering defense attorney in the film “Cousin Vinny”) “You make me think of pile drivers.”
The fun I had teaching wrestling to boys in a New Haven half-way house, especially when I pinned an over muscular “Mr. Connecticut” to their delight.
My loveable roommate Howard Whitmore III, whose folksy dad, Mayor of Newton, Mass would sneak him under the tent when the circus was in town. “Howie” once let fly a lugee as he rounded the entrance to Davenport, just missing the headmaster. Not always “couth” we were the first to break the Davenport legacy as the residence of the fine mannered and condescending.
Working with Bill Coffin to start Yale Men Abroad, which morphed into the Peace Corps. Then I only knew Bill as a fearless and articulate thinker and knew nothing of his tragic past with the C.I.A. unknowingly sending scores of young Russian men to their death as spies.
Rock climbing on the Shawanagunk Ridge with Amish in their buggies underneath politely asking we refrain from harsh words – also where I learned a charmless limerick about a doctor from Long Beach.
And last, wrestling a stuffed baby elephant out of the window of the Peabody Museum to save it from the indignity of being sent to the Republican Convention.