Remarks by 1950 alumnus Dwight A. Hamilton, delivered
to his classmates
on the occasion of their 50th reunion, at the Colorado College
Fifty Year Club
Induction Service held in Shove Chapel October 13, 2000.
______________________________________________________________________
On behalf of your Reunion Planning Committee - Suzanne Anderson,
Ann Hunt Hieronymus, Carol Weigen Rogers, Evie Van Lopik Stark
and Gordon and Anne Wiedman-Westcott - I am pleased to welcome
all of you to this, our Fiftieth College Reunion. Our thanks is
extended to acting Presidents Tim Fuller and Richard Storey and
Chaplain Bruce Coriell, and to all faculty members present, for
your participation in this memorable service. Our special thanks
to Barbara Goss, President of the 50-Year Club, Sophia Malkasian,
Alumni Relations officer, and all the staff in the Alumni office
who have done so much to make this weekend a success.
We can only respond to the award of our second
diploma and our induction into the 50 Year Club with thanks. It
is sometimes difficult to find the right words to express one's
deep felt gratitude. Mary Baker Eddy, the founder of Christian
Science, once defined gratitude in a letter: "What is gratitude
but a powerful camera obscura, a thing focusing light where love,
memory, and all within the human heart is present to manifest
light." This service on our behalf today does cause us to
focus on our years at Colorado College allowing memories to rekindle
in our hearts the love we have for our alma mater.
I ask each of you to join with me in remembering
events and happenings during our journey through Colorado College
as I mention a few events which I remember and a few people who
were involved.
The first completely civilian undergraduate
student body in four years, 1,250 strong, including 550 veterans,
were allowed to enter into their dorms on September 17, 1946.
Tuition for the year was $400. Hagerman Hall, Jackson House, and
Howbert House, equipped with double-deck bunks and small wooden
chests and desks left by the Navy, were crowded to capacity. Students
ranged in age from 17 to 29 and older. Cossitt Cafeteria was open
to provide meals for men, and the women dined in Bemis Hall under
the watchful eye of Dean Louise Fauteaux. Among the eighteen new
faculty members in our first year were Richard Pearl, Max Lanner
and Lew Worner.
In our first academic year the hockey and basketball
teams were the most successful. The hockey team, under new coach
Cheddy Thompson, was 14-5, and the basketball team had an 18-4
record. Its season was climaxed by a game in Peoria, Illinois,
against nationally ranked Bradley University. As the seconds ticked
down to the end of the game, Colorado College was ahead by one
point, but the timekeeper allowed the clock to stop until Bradley
scored to put them ahead. He then allowed time to run out. The
team, led by several veterans of World War II, took violent issue
with the action and a real riot ensued. The local broadcaster
reported the riot from under the sideline table. From that position
he reported to his audience that a local gambler was standing
above him brandishing a handgun. The following day, the victory
was awarded to Colorado College and Bradley was knocked out of
the Invitational in New York.
The Athletic Department had four years of progress.
The 1950 football team's 9-1 record won a second consecutive Rocky
Mountain Conference Championship. The 1950 hockey team, led by
Captain Mike Yalich, won the NCAA championship. We were very proud.
Mother Nature bracketed our years at C C with
two memorable snow storms which I will call Alpha and Omega. Alpha
occurred on November 1, 1946. It was the worst snow storm to hit
Colorado since 1913. The Tiger football team left Colorado Springs
by bus about 7:00 a.m. on November 2nd to travel to Golden to
play Mines. The bus made it as far as Littleton by mid day only
because the players had pushed hundreds of stranded cars out of
the way so the bus could get through. The game was canceled. After
spending considerable time in Littleton, the team was able to
return to Colorado Springs to prepare for the Homecoming game
against Colorado State College on November 9th. That game was
played in sub-zero temperatures on an icy Washburn Field.
Omega occurred in late May of 1950, one week
before graduation on June 3rd. As I recall, it was a heavy wet
snow, over a foot deep which damaged many of the trees and shrubs.
'Tis a privilege to live in Colorado, says The Denver Post.
One other natural disaster is firmly fixed in
my memory. On January 18, 1950, a smoldering brush fire on North
Cheyenne Mountain was fanned into a raging forest fire by 60-70
mph winds. The fire threatened the Broadmoor district and Cheyenne
Mountain Zoo and swept through Camp Carson. For two days, men
students at the College joined in the fight against the fire.
Women students established a Red Cross canteen service operating
out of Bemis kitchen. Eight soldiers died in that fire. Fortunately,
C C casualties were limited to smoke inhalations and eye irritations.
It was a frightening experience many of us will never forget.
I am still fond of the campus and its location
close to the beautiful Victorian homes of North Colorado Springs.
The campus sits neatly below the stately old peak named for Zebulon
Pike. Nearly every morning we could watch the Peak catch the first
rays of sun, and it stood guard over us each day. Some of the
campus fixtures are gone except in our mind's camera. For instance,
missing are the Quonset huts, erected in Shove's front yard east
of Perkins Hall, remodeled to provide twenty living units for
married veterans with children. Many wonderful friendships were
made there. Diapers on the clotheslines in "Tiger Town"
were a common sight. What would they have given for disposable
diapers!
To provide classrooms for our historically large
class, three war surplus buildings from Peterson Field, were erected.
One was erected on each side of Palmer Hall. A third was placed
west of Hayes House on Cache La Poudre. They were inventively
named East, West and South Halls. Like most temporary buildings,
they seemed to last a long time. They helped one of our classmates
recall classroom experiences with Professors David Crabb and Paul
Jones. They were eventually removed to make way for beautiful
modern buildings.
Speaking of colorful campus decorations, who
could forget Amanda Ellis. Juan Reed, in his history of Colorado
College commented, "Flamboyant Amanda Ellis, who would gain
distinction in developing new methods of teaching English, became
a colorful figure on the campus as she often balanced precariously
on her spike heals with one of her countless ornate hats adorning
her head at a rakish angle." She too is gone but not forgotten.
I am sure many of us have wonderful memories
of the quad. At Bemis Hall , one could hear a female voice cry
out " Man on First" or "Man on Second". I
have never known whether it was meant as a warning or was a type
of advertising. One thing is for sure, those days have gone forever.
Many of us can still recall the Bemis Porch, enjoying every second
before the 8:30 or midnight curfew rang down. Bemis was also the
principal location, as I understand it, of the Louise Warner Fauteaux
School of Charm. Part of her quest was to polish the manners and
social graces of the young ladies of The Colorado College. There
is a story, or legend, or perhaps it is a myth, about a fried
chicken dinner being served at the evening meal. Dean Fauteaux
is purported to have been overseeing the table manners, which
meant the fried chicken was to be eaten with knives and forks,
and not with fingers. This occurred in a week preceding a game
with arch rival Colorado School of Mines. Shortly after the main
course was served, there was a blast of dynamite on the campus
immediately followed by a blackout, during which time an "M"
was being burned in Washburn Field. While the lights were out
the fried chicken was consumed at a record rate (for Bemis Hall).
As the lights came back on there was throughout the dining room
the clatter of chicken bones hitting plates.
The quad was also the location of many a serenade
for a coed who had been given a fraternity pin and become a fraternity
sweetheart. I doubt if we can today recall enough to judge the
quality of the serenades, or remember the words, but good memories
they are.
With gold beanies, green hair ribbons, and black
sweaters our campus social life began in 1946. Once accepted into
the school community, it was sloppy Joe sweaters, saddle shoes,
and bobby sox. Four years of traditional dances, proms, pep rallies,
queen contests, Ptarmigan Ski Club activities, beer busts, fraternity
and sorority dances, and school parties followed. Fifty years
ago, the college provided us the opportunity, community and structure
for those tangible and intangible things that count most in the
daily lives of young people, namely good will, fellowship, social
intercourse, and sympathy when needed, all tangible things necessary
for an individual to be productive and capable of becoming educated.
Our social connectedness on the campus, boosted our educational
attainment.
When we left school we were prepared for and
entered into a society much involved in community affairs in a
dense network of reciprocal relations. When we graduated, card
games were the nation's favorite form of social recreation. One-third
of all adults were bridge players. Today, the average age of the
American Contract Bridge League is 64 and rising steadily, and
card playing is fast becoming extinct. Over the past fifty years
we have become increasingly disconnected from family, friends,
neighbors, and social structures. We in America are no longer
as involved with the PTA, church, recreation clubs, political
parties, bowling leagues, or fraternal organizations. Americans
feel uncomfortably disconnected. The bonds of our communities
have withered. The ebbing of community over the last fifty years
has been silent and deceptive. What is missing today , what has
vanished almost unnoticed are neighborhood parties and get-togethers
with friends, unreflective kindness of strangers, the shared pursuit
of the public good rather than an individual quest for private
goods, and electoral participation and turnout.
We desperately need an era of civic inventiveness
in America to create a renewed set of institutions and channels,
that will fit the way we have come to live, which will reinvigorate
civic life. It will not happen overnight because it will require
a generational change. To be successful we must be ready to experiment,
willing to err and then to correct our aim and fire again. Higher
education is capable of and best fit to rekindle civic engagement
among the generation that will come of age in the early years
of the 21st century. Because smaller schools encourage more active
involvement in extra curricular activity than larger schools,
more students have the opportunity to play right-tackle, or the
saxophone, or Hamlet. Surely CC will do its part in this social
revolution.
We have watched with pride as Colorado College
has risen to new levels of distinction in accomplishing its purpose
of providing the highest quality of liberal arts undergraduate
education. We have seen tremendous changes in the past fifty years,
and changes in the future are a certainty. Adapting to change
is one of the key requirements of progress and continuing vitality.
Resistance to change is a sign of ageing which is manifest in
decline and deterioration. Colorado College has proven it has
the courage to change while continuing its ultimate purpose. It
is well prepared for the 21st century. We are pleased to be here
to see it and be a part of it.
Twenty-five years ago, one of our classmates
wrote something he first heard in one of Doug Mertz's political
science classes, which I believe conveys the feeling each of us
has for Colorado College today as much as it conveyed Daniel Webster's
feeling for Dartmouth College in 1818 as stated in the well-known
Dartmouth College case: "It is, as I have said, a small college,
and yet there are those of us who love it."
