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Volume CXXXII, Number 8 |
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Bowdoin's spirited campus
KID WONGSRICHANALAI
STAFF WRITER
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| President Casey Mills, during a visit to Kent Island. (Courtesy of wordwiseweb.com) |
In the twilight darkness the attackers moved swiftly into position. They knew the trees, the roads, the scattered buildings and for a full year now, they had been waiting for this opportunity. In early October, when the chill of autumn has not yet descended and the warmth of summer is all but passed, there is a stillness in the air that lingers in the breeze and hovers amongst the trees. On this night-the night of decision and action-the sleek armed bodies moved between this pre-fall weather and bore down onto the open field where, from yards away, they could clearly see the easy prey that had assembled there. The first attackers saw the mingling men-men who were new and uncertain as to what was happening yet still dangerous for they sensed the danger that was in the air. Whether they were stupid or courageous, or just plain excited, no one can really tell, for a man in motion, on the attack, exercising the primal human urge to hunt, is a formidable animal under any circumstances. Yet something restrained the first attackers on the field. They, who had waited so long for this moment, halted and aligned, checked their armaments, got into line, and all at once, with a mad screaming yell, charged.
The freshmen did not know what to think. In the dark, on the field beside Bowdoin's newly commissioned Pickard Field House, they were suddenly surrounded by yelling men with large quantities of stinking molasses. As the foul-smelling projectiles began to fly through the air, the two forces-the defending freshmen and the attacking sophomores-collided. But there was no anger in the air; instead there was terror, excitement, shock, and humor. Most of all, however, there was the great sense of accomplishment for both sides-this, after all, was tradition. It was called "Proc Night" when the two opposing classes met in mock battle. The freshmen-the Class of 1941-had started it this year by yelling insults at their upperclassman brothers. The sophomores, their archenemies, in the meantime, had been preparing for their late-night offensive at Whittier Field. The molasses was also tradition but woe to whomever was responsible for cleaning up the mess in the morning.
This was a rite of passage for the young men of Bowdoin in those years before the coming of the Second World War. Many traditions were observed and "Proc Night" was one of the first. For the freshmen, their first year would be one of humiliation and frustration-something that the College probably did not advertise when it sought to sell its old boys' school image to future students. For the sophomores, this was their chance to give back to their young brothers what the class before them had done. It was a part of becoming a Bowdoin man; it was part of the hazing tradition; but more importantly, according to an editorial in the Bowdoin Orient, "hazing is entertaining sport" and "hazing is fun."
Following the molasses bombardment the two classes began to strip each other-another fine male bonding experience. This last activity, however, quickly ended the festivities before the stroke of midnight. Freshmen and sophomores returned to their dorms on the Quad, via the Harpswell Road, or other paths towards the center of campus. Perhaps that reminder of winter air finally settled upon them as they retired towards their warm dorms and un-torn cloths.
The Class of 1941 was the largest in Bowdoin's history up to that time. 204 freshmen from 15 states joined the College in the fall of 1937. The fraternity system went to work immediately to recruit the youngsters; they received, in total, 179 pledges. The new students came from all walks of life and from all corners of the United States, with a majority coming from Massachusetts and 32 being sons of former Bowdoin men. The American experience up to that point in history was based greatly upon tradition. Among those traditions was to send their children to their parents' alma mater. When asked why he had chosen to attend Bowdoin College, Professor of Physics Emeritus Elroy O. LaCasce '44 commented simply, "I was sent here!" Indeed, the lyrics of the ever-popular "Bowdoin Beta" include the verse:
When manhood has found us,
And children surround us,
Our college days and friends we'll still recall.
With heartfelt emotions and deathless devotion,
We'll send our sons to Bowdoin in the Fall.
When the new sons of Bowdoin appeared on campus and filed into the first year brick dorms to begin their college days, they were met with a thriving campus, smug, strong, tenacious, and always independently minded. Here was the campus that had seen many generations of Bowdoin men-men who had stood up to the rigid rules and military discipline of President Joshua Chamberlain; men who had shoved the memorial flagpole into the Chapel as a sign of protest to the administration's plans of placing it in the center of the Quad. These rebellious activities, however, were sometimes without cause and were merely pranks at the expense of the College. In January 1938, a few of these pranksters got into the Chapel's bell tower and cut the rope, disabling the bell. The Sills administration was good humored about such happenings; Dean of the College, Paul Nixon laughed off the incident by noting on his bulletin board a day later: "cutting it [the bell rope] is always good for a laugh" but cautioned "don't monkey with the bell itself, boys. The last time that was done, the clapper, or something, fell out and just missed hitting the man below."
That year administration restarted a custom that had been retired for three decades: the signing of the matriculation book. In the ceremony the first years were personally greeted by President Sills before signing their names in the book which was last used in 1856 for this sort of event. Having completed this task, they were now bound to the College and it was a bond that many would cherish for the rest of their lives.
Whether these young men would be as wild and as bold as previous generations was yet to be determined. There was still much to learn and many more traditions to attend to; among them was one that was the major event of every fall week in the 1930s and 40s: football. Bowdoin started the football season in 1937 with a strong game, crushing Massachusetts State by 12-0. Leading the famed Polar Bears was football master Adam Walsh, a member of the College community since the mid-1930s. Under his guiding hand, the Polar Bears had a remarkable season, besting Wesleyan 13-0 in October and beating Colby 30-0 in the same month. Football matches drew huge crowds as students, faculty, and alumni met to cheer on Walsh's Polar Bears.
There were other sports too and while none of them had the allure of football, one of them did have a coach who was as equally as impressive as Adam Walsh: the track team's John "Jack" Magee. In 1938 Magee celebrated his twenty-fifth year coaching at Bowdoin. In that time he trained some of the College's finest athletes and earned the friendship of hundreds of students and administrators. Besides Walsh and Magee in athletics, there were also others like the Pulitzer Prize-winning poet and English professor Robert Peter Tristram Coffin (Bowdoin Class of 1915), Professor of English and Director of Dramatics George H. "Pat" Quinby (Bowdoin Class of 1923) whose interests included travel, football, and who was known as a master fencer. There was also the French instructor Arthur Gilligan who told his students, "Gentlemen, you're not going to like me, very few people do, but you're going to learn French!" Professor of Psychology Charles Theodore Burnett, History Professor Nathaniel Cooper Kendrick, and then there were the two masters of the Classics Department, the President and the Dean of the College, Kenneth Charles Morton Sills and Paul Nixon.
These were the men that the students would get to know, learn from, and respect. The resources of the College were also available to the undergraduates. Hubbard Hall's library stacks contained almost 200,000 books. Its collections were under the care of librarian Gerald G. Wilder and it included among its recent possessions the manuscript collections of former U.S. president Franklin Pierce (Bowdoin Class of 1823), and literary legends Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (both of the Class of 1825). An editorial in the Orient noted that few first years were aware of this facility and resource, estimating that not more than a sixth of the student body frequented the stacks. This was a problem and should be rectified, the editorial continued, noting that Hubbard was "the heart of the college".
Amidst the classes, the sports practices, and daily Chapel events, the freshmen were kept busy. Their lives continued to be complicated by their upper-class associates. In late October, the hazing continued with what was known as "Hell Week"-a series of events whereby each fraternity decided how to humiliate their first-year brothers. In the Fall of 1937 there were various activities: different houses had first-year plays, the Sigma Nu members dressed up like tin soldiers while the Zetes had their freshmen carry goldfish aquariums around campus (unfortunately for the fish, little care was observed and many ended up dead in their moving containers). According to the Orient, "new ways of eating" were invented as fraternity feasts went without silverware and "The A. T. O.'s can attest to the fact that eating spaghetti held behind their backs is rather inconvenient. … The Beta's are quite willing to refuse raw eggs the next time they are offered them; they contend also that steak is much better than dry bread and peppery soup."
As these fraternal and traditional bonding rituals continued amongst the students, the College administration was looking on with grave concern. Kenneth Charles Morton Sills, who had seen the horror of a campus during wartime twenty years earlier, felt uneasy. While he had lived with the College's tradition of hazing for most of his life, he felt that its practices were quickly becoming obsolete. Sills also realized early on that there was trouble in the world, the likes of which had never before been witnessed. In Germany, thousands of miles away, Adolph Hitler had been appointed chancellor in 1933 and continued his meteoric rise through coercion and violence. New laws had been created to suppress Jews and other minorities while the German army and navy began to grow again despite the Treaty of Versailles' limitations on its armed forces. Elsewhere, in the Far East the Japanese Imperial armies were massing for a strike against Nanking and continuing their conquest of Mainland China. An incident on the Yangtze River may have alarmed the President even further when the U.S. gunship Panay was sunk by Japanese bombers in December of 1937. The peace that had been bought with millions of lives not more than two decades earlier was quickly falling apart. Even before the Panay's sinking, Sills had been troubled by world events and warned his students in the year's opening Chapel:
No sober minded person can look abroad at the present moment without realizing how deep-seated is the lawlessness of the times. From countries where crime has been prevalent the disregard of law has spread to nations dealing with one another. It is no exaggeration to assert that on at least three continents international gunmen are at work. If the civilized nations of the world cannot by persuasion or power control this lawlessness, civilization itself is in very gravedanger [sic]. You may ask what this all has to do with us. But it seems to a good many of us clear that if during the period of youth there is no respect for law and reasonable order, it is going to be hard for later generations to insist on the value of law and order and their relations one with another. Here at Bowdoin we have very few rules and regulations; it is sometimes said that there are no rules until you break them; but if in your college course you do not learn the great social lesson of abiding by reasonable restrictions and obeying reasonable regulations, you are going yourself to contribute to the general lawlessness of the times.
While lack of awareness in world affairs was one of the reasons that Sills was troubled, there was also the issue of hazing itself that he did not entirely agree with. "To some degree or other we are all of us hypocrites," the President declared at a Sunday Chapel in December 1937. There were elements in the College, he went on, which decried the despotism of other nations but continued to tolerate racial prejudice and fraternal abuses at home. "You believe in racial tolerance, in social services, in honesty, in working for peach and against war-of course," the President added, "But are you willing to pay the price if such a position actually costs you something?" Sills continued to hammer at this point throughout the year. Calling the hazing spirit "the kid brother of the militaristic spirit" the President listed his objections to the fraternity system, hinting at its hierarchical spirit: "We sometimes hear that claim made that our college is one of the most democratic in the country. I hope that we can justify that claim. But hazing is not democratic; exclusion is not democratic…" This last comment was likely aimed at the exclusion of African-Americans and Jewish students from fraternities. It was with this spirit of democracy and fairness in mind that Sills helped students in forming "the Thorndike Club" for non-fraternity men. While Bowdoin of the 1930s and 40s was a homogenous community, there were those who were not welcome into fraternities, which had in their charters, expressly stated that their members should be Christians only.
The Orient weighed in on the issue early in 1938. Opposed to the recklessness and irresponsible behavior of many students during "Rising Day"-a day in spring when freshmen "rise" against their long time tormentors-the College's newspaper placed part of the blame on the administration, which it accused of "encouraging" vandalism and hazing "by refusing to abolish" the activities. "Tradition", the Orient continued, "has a stronger hold on the average Bowdoin underclassman than sentiment and respect for hallowed college property." Despite these attacks against their system and practices, the fraternities continued their activities long into the future-albeit later on at a smaller scale.
Many students probably questioned the President's attack on their way of life but they also probably understood what concerned him in these times of uncertainty. While house parties and gala events lighted up the Maine nights on Bowdoin's campus, there was trouble in the wind from across the seas and the continents. Those sons who did not remember the outside world were given a taste of it when, on November 11, 1937, as part of the College's long standing tradition, the members of the different classes gathered solemnly in the Chapel. Casey Sills rose as the doors closed, walked swiftly to the podium as he had done for decades, looked upon the innocent young faces before him, led them in song, and began to read the long roll of names-the names of Bowdoin's sons, his own friends and students, who had, in the previous world war, sacrificed their lives in the name of freedom and democracy. "Warren Eastman Robinson, Harold Sumner Small, Roland Hiram Waitt…" Two minutes of silence ended the proceedings. As the students filed out to go to class or onto their various activities Sills must have wondered for a split second about how many of these young men, this generation, would have to go to war and how many of them would pay the ultimate price in the end.
Those days of suffering and separation, however, were in the future-not far in the future but in the future nonetheless. In the meantime there was still the busy business of living. Bowdoin played host to its annual house parties that cold Maine winter by inviting to campus some of the prettiest girls on the eastern seaboards. Along to provide entertainment was Artie Shaw and his band. As the undergraduates danced and celebrated life in the chilly night there was happiness and enthusiasm in the air. In the town of Brunswick there was also celebration that Christmas season as Bowdoin fraternities donated $140 for holiday dinners and gifts-feeding up to 230 Brunswick citizens.
For the Class of 1941, the daily routine of Bowdoin life slowly became habit. They went to Chapel, they went to classes, ate in the Moulton Union, served at the whim of their upper-class brothers, debated issues, practiced sports, and generally tried to enjoy their time at Bowdoin. In many ways life was simpler and easier. Rail communications with Boston and Portland were established and the railroad station was a quick walk away. Laundry was even easier; all a student had to do (if he lived within a few states of Maine) was to drop his dirty cloths in a basket, send it down by rail to his parents and wait for it to be returned. So successful was this operation that the Railway Express could afford to print an ad, complete with photograph, in the student paper. "Whether it's send collect or prepaid" the ad read, "your laundry always arrives quickly, safely, by Railway Express-the favorite laundry route of generations of college men and women." Young Everett Parker Pope from North Quincy, Massachusetts, a member of the Class of 1941, was one such individual who enjoyed this service. "We used to send [the laundry] home to my mother and that had some advantages," he remembers-these advantages being brownies or other such treats in the laundry basket when it returned.
The young men of Bowdoin could thus concentrate on their work and fun. In the spring of 1938, almost a year after the Class of 1941 had come to the campus, they began to try out for Walsh's Polar Bear Football team. 84 reported to the coach, including a handsome fullback named Andrew Haldane. As the flowers began to bloom, the freshmen rose to fight once more with their tormentors, the sophomores, in a frenzy of rotten fruit and spraying water. The Orient proclaimed it "one of the wildest, fruit slingin' water dousin', panel breakin', clothes strippin' scraps that has met the eyes of Bowdoin men in several years." With these fights and other dreaded events-such as finals-the academic year ended in June of 1938. The seniors graduated into an uncertain world, still trying to disbelieve the obvious truth that another war was swiftly coming. In China the Japanese armies entered, destroyed, and massacred thousands of innocent civilians in what was known as the Rape of Nanking. In Europe indecision amongst the allied powers aided rather than prevented Hitler's armies from marching into Austria and uniting it with the growing German nation. Be aware of international events, Sills warned graduates and returning students alike:
If you think the question of international affairs has nothing to do with you, go out someday and read the names of your older brothers inscribed on the memorial flagstaff. A score of years ago or so, the undergraduates of Bowdoin did not think what was happening in Europe was any concern of theirs.
The generation that Sills alluded to in his speech were on campus later that year. Members of the Class of 1912, feeling that they should give something back to their alma mater returned to donate a 20-ton Westerly White granite polar bear statue. Sculpted by the famed F. G. R. Roth of New Jersey-the same man who created Columbia University's Lion and Princeton University's Tigers-the 11 foot monument was a gift and as Henry A. Shorey, a member of the Class of 1941 and Orient correspondent put it, "The doners hope, of course, that Bowdoin men past, present, and future will take the Bear to their hearts and look upon it as a definite expression to them of much that Bowdoin means."
The members of the Class of 1941 survived their first year virtually intact. They were no longer the youngest members of the College community and thus with their embarrassing and fond memories of their first years behind them, they went on vacation, knowing that their best moments at Bowdoin College were yet to come.
Elsewhere, men and tanks were moving and a depressed world crept ever closer to full-scale war.
To Be Continued.
Next Time: Down The Road To War.