Samurais and falling plaster: 100 years of weird Yale

By Orianne Dutka

Any campus tour guide can take you around Yale and tell you how the residential college system was founded and when the Women's Table was built. The tour, however, will inevitably leave out some of the more far-out facts that have colored the past 100 years of the University. A brief Herald guide to the stranger parts of Yale in the 20th century.

COURTESY YALE UNIVERSITY Mrs. Carry Nation, Bible-clutching, hacket-wielding, anti-alcohol activist, in a rare moment drinking with Yale's Jolly Eight.

1900: Arthur Twining Hadley took over Yale's presidency from Timothy Dwight. Known for his "extreme eccentricities of manner," Hadley was an exemplar of the odd behavior many Yalies have displayed throughout the century. During one of his lectures, he stepped into a wastebasket and struggled for a lengthy period of time to extricate his foot, without interrupting his flow of speech all the while. He also organized his entire library of books by color and still managed to find them with ease. Upon his death, he arranged to be buried in full Japanese samurai dress.

1902: A group of Yale students formed an informal social club called the Jolly Eight. One inspired member of the Eight wrote a fan letter to Mrs. Carry Nation, an anti-tobacco and anti-alcohol activist known for roaming the country with a hatchet and destroying any drinking establishments she encountered. The correspondence eventually brought her to speak on campus. After the glee club serenaded her with songs like "Down with King Alcohol"—accompanying them with a bottoms-up gesture—Nation addressed the student body, holding a Bible aloft and declaring, "Every gate of hell is open for the ruin of you young men." Later, the Jolly Eight persuaded Nation to pose in a photograph. As the lights were extinguished to prepare for the flash, the Eight replaced Nation's glass of water with another sort of beverage and later doctored the picture to include a cigarette in her hand.

1924: Scandal erupted on campus when, one October morning, a crew of workmen appeared on what is now Old Campus and began to dig up turf and cut down trees. No students or faculty members had been notified that there would be construction and received no answers from the Administration when they were consulted. The students and faculty, angered over the secrecy of the project, nicknamed the emerging building Hush Hall. After five days of silence, the administration finally let the students in on their plans. Hush Hall is now known as McClellan Hall.

1930: Faculty and students found a small cause for celebration upon the death of former President and Yale graduate William Howard Taft, Class of 1878. At his passing, Yale was able to lift its Latin requirement. Taft, a member of the Yale Board of Trustees, had insisted that only over his dead body would the requirement come to an end.

1934: Timothy Dwight College students were shocked to find their new college already falling apart. Plaster from the ceilings of rooms throughout the college fell down on to students, burying them in their sleep. Instead of rioting and responding with anger, however, the students decided that the falling plaster gave their college character. After the ceilings were repaired, they held a banquet to celebrate the end of the "Plastercine Age," and songs were written to commemorate the event.

1959: During the New Haven St. Patrick's Day Parade, Yale students threw snowballs at marchers, provoking the largely Irish Police Department to chase them into the campus gates and beat them. The incident, needless to say, caused considerable strain on previously peaceful town-gown relations.

1960s-1970's: Yale students learned to thumb their noses at authority figures in a less obvious way with the creation of Bladderball. Playing with an enormous canvas ball which measured six feet in diameter, the students claimed that the object of their game was to get the ball to the President's house. However, their real intent was to bounce it around the streets of New Haven in order to provoke the city police. In 1972, the bladderball made it almost a quarter mile from Old Campus, causing traffic jams much to the delight of students. But four short years later, Bladderball met its demise when, even before it got outside Old Campus, the ball was deflated with a meat hook.

1999: A Yale graduate student's backpack was confiscated at Tweed Airport for containing "suspicious chemicals." After he had boarded a flight to Wisconsin, airport authorities seized his belongings and called the Fire Department and the F.B.I. When the package was examined, however, it was found to contain chemicals and a sample of semen from a 91-year-old Yale professor. The student was apparently going to the University of Wisconsin to conduct scientific experiments with his specimens.

Nishant Kumar contributed to this article.

History taken from George Pierson's Yale: A Short History, Brooks Kelley's Yale: A History, Harry Arnold's Unpublished Autobiography, the Yale Daily News, and the Yale Herald.

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