Here's where, for everyone's enjoyment and interest, you can post reminiscences, stories, and photos of your part of our four years as undergraduates. The intent of this page is to help capture, for ourselves and the university's history, our individual "takes" on everything from teachers to buildings and places, events, organizations, and life in general at Yale from the fall of 1953 through graduation in 1957. Send all proposed submissions to the corresponding secretary.

It's suitable that we start with all of us as we looked at our matriculation in September 1953. Click here to see the Yale Freshman Register for the Class of 1957. (Note: Please be patient: the Register, because of its many photos, loads slowly.)

Jim Banner: In praise of Frank Baumer (posted July 29, 2006)
Otis Graham: Nonfaculty Professors (posted July 22, 2006)
Bob Rosefsky: The True History of Our BladderBall Games (posted July 22, 2006)
Dave Johnson: A Paean to Tom Bergin (posted March 3, 2006)

Jim Banner: In praise of Frank Baumer (posted July 29, 2006)

The center of gravity of my undergraduate years was the classroom. It was the site, or at least at the core, of my intellectual awakening. My mind had been trained at school; at Yale it was opened. Many of us look back on our college years ("bright college years") as a time of football games, fraternity hijinks, friendships, and liberation from parental supervision, and so with misty eyes they open our pockets to alma mater in late-life gratitude. My gratitude to the place springs from its gift to me of four years of unrelieved intellectual excitement and discovery.

I had been in museums but knew nothing of the history of art and architecture; for years I had played the piano and attended concerts with my parents and grandfather but knew little of the history of music. Plato and Aristotle? Yes, I'd heard their names but never read them, nor Sophocles and Euripedes, Aquinas and Kierkegaard, Homer and Milton. I may earlier have scanned a line here and there of Coleridge or Keats, but no one had led me to Dickinson or Whitman, Eliot or Stevens, cummings or Pound. And where my schooling had kept me hawsered to study hall desks in preparation for tests and exams, in New Haven free-flowing, directionless, all-night, and impractical discussions—serious ones—about Luther and Calvin, Freud and Jung, Camus and Sartre, McCarthy and Hiss, Reinhold Niebuhr and even Billy Graham made me alive to ideas I'd never before encountered. It was in college that I discovered that ideas need not be found only in classrooms or books. They were to be found in the air, in friends' heads, in debates, even in drink. It should be no wonder (as it is no wonder to many who know me) that I carry with me every day profound appreciation to my alma mater for having awakened me to the adventure of ideas.

Above all, it was my teachers who led me on that adventure. I recall them all. Most of them were good at their craft. A few were brilliant. The one I'd like to memorialize here, the one who, upon reflection, had the greatest impact upon me, was the most formal and aloof of them all. What's more, he flouted most of the conventional tenets of instructional conduct that are now held up to be eternally valid and unfailingly effective. He lectured. He never smiled or told jokes. He held himself aloof and appeared to be unapproachable. No friendly demeanor toward undergraduates offered he. In fact, in the two senior-year terms in which I sat at his feet—literally, directly below the stage where he held forth at a lectern; remember that in large courses we had assigned, alphabetized seats then, and "proctors" took the roll—I never shook his hand or had a single word with him; and though I later joined him in the tribe of historians, I never met the man. Yet more than any other single person, he made me a historian.

He was Franklin LeVan Baumer, and his year-long course (History 59) covered the entire Western intellectual tradition—from Plato to Camus. Tall, dark-haired, always in dark three-piece suits, his piercing dark eyes covered in dark horn-rimmed glasses, his entire aspect, in fact, entirely dark and forbidding, Frank Baumer, presence and gravitas personified, offered inimitable, full-bodied introductions to the thought of single thinkers in 50-minute lectures to a roomfull of 350 students in Harkness Hall. He lectured with his left thumb hooked in his armpit, his right hand extended palm down as if in benediction (or was it warning?). Even though he never varied his manner, never tried to adopt himself to the different ideas or dispositions of his subjects, his genius was his ability to make us think that the ideas of each thinker, from however far in the past, were worthy of the deepest respect. And in talking of them, he seemed to embody them. Hobbes and Locke were no more, but no less, important than Hegel or Nietzsche. Aristotle was as immediate to Frank Baumer as Albert Camus. What seems additionally remarkable about Baumer's course was that it met only twice a week for lectures. No sections, no discussion. Yet those lectures led to self-starting discussions among classmates late into the night and set me on my own to reading serious, difficult documents and books with excitement and pleasure. The memory of those lectures remains with me to this day. I can quickly summon the sensation of anticipation with which I looked forward to them, the excitement of the discoveries Frank Baumer never failed to open to me, the pleasure of the struggles to wrestle some thinker's ideas to the ground and master understanding of them. If this was what the past was like, filled with such ideas and men (all men—although that fact never crossed my mind at the time), then the past was for me.

After I had graduated and was suffering through basic training at Fort Dix, I wrote Frank Baumer a note of thanks. I still possess his warm, appreciative reply. Once I had become a practicing historian, I hoped to meet him at a professional meeting but never did. I tried to arrange to see him in New Haven, but it never could be worked out. When I learned of his death some years ago, I was deeply saddened and frustrated that our paths had never crossed. But perhaps that's the way he meant it to be—that teacher and student should not be familiar, even in later years, as if to preserve the mystery of the original passage of knowledge from one to the other. If so, that would have been entirely in character.

May this be my public tribute to that unforgettable, distinctive teacher of the young.

Otis Graham: Nonfaculty Professors (posted July 22, 2006)

Raised in the white suburbs of a small southern city, much of what I learned at Yale came from what I call the Nonfaculty Faculty, perhaps especially because of the raw ethnicity I found in New Haven, even though I rarely ventured far from the university. At St. Anthony Hall, Joe Sauer, the big German (he spoke a sort of mixed German and English) bartender was one of our uncles who stood for law and order. The other was Armand Dupre, French-born, the Maitre D who knew more about European music than most music professors across the street, and who would fight the Second World War over and over with Joe when we brothers came in for morning coffee. My wrestling coach for four years was the very Irish Catholic Johnny O'Donnell, who actually wanted to know who my family was and how they were doing. My two Spanish instructors were not "ladder faculty" but temporary adjuncts, and wholly authentic foreign imports—"Senor Previtali," the dynamic Argentine, and a brilliant Spaniard whose name has slipped out of my elderly head. My Thanksgiving weekend hosts (it was too far to go home to Nashville just for a weekend) were a Jewish couple in East Haven (I had known one Jew in my entire l8 years of life when I arrived in New Haven, a thoroughly assimilated guard on our football team) who kindly took me in lest I be desolately lonely in my dorm room on that holiday and taught me, among other things, that one could actually eat mashed up goose liver and practice a religion in which Jesus Christ was not the center. I learned a lot at Yale from Frank Baumer and L. P. Curtis and David Potter, distinguished full professors who spoke perfect English, but my education about America's ethnically marbled large cities and that part of the wider world that was Spanish-speaking came from warm and extended contact with the only partly American, Non-Faculty Faculty that Yale pulled into New Haven at much lower wages than the scholars who were not very often in their departmental offices. Sometimes, it really does take a village.

Bob Rosefsky: The True History of Our BladderBall Games (posted July 22, 2006)

Let me get the facts on the table before some twisted propagandists start suggesting otherwise: The Yale Record convincingly (overwhelmingly?) conquered its foes in the only two games of BladderBall ever recorded in human history.

Those games were played on Saturday mornings before football games during the 1955 and 1956 football seasons in the middle of the Old Campus to crowds of thousands. (Well, okay, maybe hundreds.) In the center of a roughly 40 foot square stood a gigantic ball, some six feet in diameter, weighing perhaps 20-30 pounds and of unknown origin. On the sides of the square stood the Combatants: The (ever-triumphant) Yale Record team; the (puny) Yale Daily News squad; the (intimidated) WYBC flunkies, and the (completely-out-of-their-league) Yale Banner staffers.

At the whistle, all teams rushed to the ball which was promptly airborne. The object was to not let the ball be pushed over your line. The team with the fewest incursions won. And what a sight! The throngs of sturdy athletes pushed and heaved and jumped and gasped and belched. All the teams were equal, but the Record team was a little bit more equal. Their resolute defense won the day, sending the losers home in shame.

Proof? You want proof? We would have solicited ESPN2 to cover the games, but it hadn't yet been created. So we vowed to REMEMBER WITH CRYSTAL CLARITY the outcomes. And gentlemen can not doubt the memories of their colleagues. Proof enough. Don't believe what others might tell you. Sour grapes.

Dave Johnson: A Paean to Tom Bergin (posted March 3, 2006)

In those years I was a College Aide for the Master's office— printer, photographer, and other tasks to help the college along—a Bursary job, as they were called then. I was also not at all interested in romance languages, having got through the language requirement thanks to some good French instruction in secondary school. But contact with Bergin intrigued me and I enrolled in his Dante course. We read the Commedia in English translation— his, of course— one of the few written in Terza Rima, å la Dante.

Bergin was famous for writing "Keep off the Grass Signs" in Latin or Italian Terza Rima. We still got the message. His course turned me into an Italophile for life. When later , in the military, I had a chance to learn Italian I signed up for it, orders were written to get me to Italy and thereafter I have never had enough exposure to this grand country of humanism— and Machiavelli.

My point is simple. Yale offers serendipity— serendipity to other students with different life experiences and serendipity to faculty deeply committed to the education of young people. My guess is we could all tell stories such as this one— experiences which changed our directions and paths. So, bravo, TGB— and thank you! Grazie molto.