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From the Archives Dwight
Hall had its origins as the Yale Christian society, when a group
of students petitioned the Reverend Noah Porter, President of the
University, for the right to worship on their own instead of attending
compulsory chapel. The students began a huge Sunday school movement,
riding horse-drawn carriages to area churches each week, where they
would conduct classes or direct church choirs. Many
faculty members, when innocently asked "where are you going for
your vacation?" are apt to snarl back "what vacation?" The University
has adopted a sort of shift system by which every faculty member
is to get one of every three summers off. One professor predicted
the other day that after the war the faculty might refuse to teach:
"I'm going to lie on my back for ten years and live on breadfruit
and pickles. The hell with European history; I want peace and quiet."
The release he got from saying these heretical things was enough
to carry him on for a week. As
you probably know, the Yale and Harvard Clubs of Paris traditionally
meet at separate dinners in the same or adjoining restaurants the
Saturday night of the Yale-Harvard game, the further tradition being
that when the results of the game are known, the loser buys champagne
for the winner. Saturday morning, the day after the assassination
[of John F. Kennedy], when those in charge called the restaurant
to say that the dinners would have to be canceled for that night,
they were told at once that the dinners would be canceled without
any charge whatsoever. So many of our compatriots tend to look upon
the French as taking all fair and unfair advantage of Americans
in France that I am glad to report this most friendly story. Iwas
six years old when I overheard my older sister Marie discussing
what to give a certain boy for his birthday. My sister suggested
a book. Her friend exclaimed: "But he has a book already!" At that
time, I owned six or seven books, and I thought how miserable that
boy must be to have only one, and how strange of my sister's friend
to think that only one book was enough. Now I probably have 6,000
books in my private library, and I am considerably less happy than
when I owned just six or seven. |
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Yale
Alumni Magazine, PO Box 1905, New Haven, CT 06509-1905. USA.
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