The Student of History

It was also a bit of a surprise.

In the summer of 1964, the Lafley family took a bit of a detour on the way back to Chicago from a visit to New Hampshire. It was time for the oldest sibling to scout colleges. The priests back at Fenwick High School had presumed that the basketball letterman/National Honor Society honoree naturally would want to further his education at a Notre Dame or a University of Michigan, or maybe some remote place such as Georgetown or Boston College.

On the road back to the Midwest from New England, the Lafleys visited Harvard, Dartmouth, Williams, Cornell. And Hamilton.

"It was a beautiful June day. It was sunny and the Hill looked great. [Dean of Admissions] Sidney Bennett walked me around the campus. He took a real interest in me -- that made an enormous difference. Moreover, Hamilton looked like college was supposed to look.

"I went back to school and told them I had made up my mind and I wanted to attend Hamilton. I think they were genuinely annoyed, but they only had two questions: What was Hamilton and how had I ever heard of it?"

When he arrived in Clinton, he found life almost as alien as the priests had expected it would be. "I came from Chicago. I missed noise, the street life. I had a tough freshman year because I didn't think there was anything to do."

And there were not a lot of people like him -- graduates of large, urban parochial high schools. Instead he found himself surrounded by students who came, by and large, from New York state, "with a bunch of guys from New England prep schools and a couple of people from places like Colorado Springs and Denver.

"It was all very new to me. But I quickly came to appreciate it. I was in a lot of small classes -- there were 12 of us in a first-year English class. Eight in math. I was in a three-person rhetoric course where there was real, practical emphasis on argumentation, discussion and debate. Every week there was an oral presentation. You simply couldn't blow through any of it. And the smallness forced us to get to know each other. You had an assignment, you had to think about it. I found I was doing better work because I had the time to reflect. It was really good for me to be forced to do that sort of thing. The low teacher/student ratio worked to my strengths. I honestly believed the professors cared about us.

"Freshman year, I remember the card games with Bill Kinner '69, Tom Kondrk '69 and Mac Abbey '69. Playing cards was mostly about having fun and socializing with friends . . . Having said that, I'm sure that I loved the competition. I used to race down the Hill to get in front of the Psi U television set at noon and compete in the daily Jeopardy game. And, who knows, I may have even learned something about strategy or tactics or human nature while I played."

That first year also was about snow "and the incredible storm that covered the first floor of Dunham. We had Olympic diving contests from the second floor of the dorm. Some guys went up to the third and some even figured out how to climb up and jump from the roof. Down below, we had catchers who helped pull us out of the snow.

"Sophomore year, I remember houseparty weekends and defending the honor of the houseparty tradition against [Associate Dean of Students] Hadley DePuy. Junior year was one of the best of my life; I made a snap decision to join the Hamilton Junior Year in France program. I learned a lot, traveled a lot and grew up a lot. Every weekend I was in Les Halles, the big market, getting on a truck going somewhere. Chartres. Chateaus. The Louvre. I saw it for free. I went to a film festival and saw 16 dubbed Paul Newman movies in 16 days.

"Senior year I spent with close friends, with women on the campus for the first time. It was a completely different place than the one I had entered as a freshman. The war in Vietnam brought an intensity to everything that went on. On the positive side, coeducation made Hamilton a stronger college and a saner place to spend four years.

"For me, to go to Hamilton was a big deal. I loved it."