The view from the Musée d'Orsay clock, looking toward Sacré Coeur.
Keith Daniel '69: A snootful of tear gas and life-changing choices
"Eiffel Tower's brown (Eiffel Tower's brown),
The Arc de Triomphe's gray (Arc de Triomphe's gray),
I went for a walk
On the Champs Elysées" — sung to the tune of "California Dreamin'"
As our bus motored through northern Spain during that interim week between Biarritz and Paris, I strummed my ubiquitous guitar and we all sang the witty lyrics that (as I recall) Carl Waldman and Alan Lafley had appended to the Mamas and Papas hit. After six weeks in the sunny resort town near the Spanish border, we would be visiting Burgos, Toledo and Madrid before settling in Paris for the academic year. And what a year it would be.
I had signed onto the Junior Year in France program on a lark, having abruptly left the comfortable world of math and science midway through my sophomore year on the Hill, not knowing what I wanted to major in, much less what to do with my life. For me, conservative kid from a Nixon family, maybe heading off to Europe for a year wasn't a bad idea. We all quickly fell in love with our director, Franklin Hamlin, whose daughter was part of our group that year. I still remember his laconic stories, recited from the front of the bus or in the dining room at Reid Hall in Paris: "Vous savez, quand j'étais à Bowdoin ..." Frank guided us with kid gloves, and we responded by not getting into too much trouble (well, except for the time the bus was delayed because several students had been "detained" by Spanish police).
One of the reasons so many students wanted to go on the Hamilton program, and a reason that turned out to be fortuitous for me, was the freedom to take courses almost anywhere in Paris. I was able to study harmony at the prestigious Schola Cantorum, where Satie and d'Indy had been trained, and that allowed me finally to make the bold decision to major in music, in retrospect the most important decision of my life.
In April we heard, with the fresh perspective of foreigners, of King's assassination and Johnson's decision to "abdicate." Before we knew it, all of Paris had erupted in flames and protest. My roommate Langdon Brown and I went out one evening, ostensibly in support of our "brothers," the French students, but really just for a lark; we got ourselves a good snootful of tear gas.
As we all sat in a Reid Hall room taking a final exam, my Biarritz roommate and now lifelong friend, Howard Kessler, rose from his seat and said, in halting French, "I can't sit here and take a mundane exam while history is happening outside." To this day, I wish I'd had had the courage to join him in protest. Despite rumors that the "communists" had taken over our ship, we returned pretty much on schedule on the SS France. When I docked, my family told me that my cousin, a Green Beret, had been killed in Vietnam. What strange times, and what a year to be studying in France.
I look back now with fondness, remembering our vineyard visit in Bordeaux, where many of us sampled a bit too much of the product; remembering my Paris family, who hated everyone but the Parisians but who were so welcoming of us; remembering my weekly concerts by the ORTF Orchestra, which cost me something like six francs, and which ultimately made me decide to be a music teacher; remembering singing along at the tops of our lungs to the Beatles' "Your Mother Should Know" in the gardens of the Medici Palace in Florence during spring break; remembering the wonderful teachers who taught me and the kind man who directed the program. I will forever be indebted to the life-changing experience that was my Junior Year in France, 1967-68.
