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A Salute to a Generation of HamiltoniansBy 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)
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. |
Latest NewsHamilton Exceeds Capital Campaign GoalsHamilton has exceeded its $175 million capital campaign goal six months before the fundraising effort is scheduled to conclude. "Excelsior: The Campaign for Hamilton" reached this goal in the last week of December 2007. The campaign will continue through its planned close on June 30.More ... Hamilton Receives $800,000 Grant from Mellon FoundationHamilton has received a four-year grant totaling $800,000 from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation to create five postdoctoral fellowship positions in the arts and humanities. More ... |
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