USA > Connecticut > New Haven County > New Haven > History of the class of nineteen hundred thirty-six, Yale College, fifteen-year record > Part 2
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One man says, with truculent brevity, "My hobby is guns." An- other, however, a Commander in the Navy, says his hobby is becom- ing a civilian. Another writes, "With the world situation what it is, it is obvious that we may some day need to defend our homes, as did our ancestors of yore, with our rifles. And now, as then, skill with the rifle can only come with assiduous effort. Therefore the need of train- ing young men with the rifle before they reach military age. I would like to appeal to my classmates to join in this effort, both by influ- ence and personal leadership. May I pass on to all the slogan of the National Rifle Association ?- America again a nation of riflemen!" Another, who worked on guided missile control and bombing com- puter systems during the last war and now has a new engineering consultant business of his own, writes, "Most of the work entails electronic and mechanical design of military systems, components, etc., and the future looks very promising." One of our classmates is a distributor of formaldehyde; if our Cassandras are proved right, his future will be a busy one, too.
10
1936 FIFTEEN-YEAR RECORD
Putters and Putterers
We are busy. The entire autobiography of one of our high-pressure characters consists of a single sentence: "I seem to be hard pressed for time." Yet it is one of the signs of our middle age that we are settling into habits in diversion, as in everything else. Our amuse- ments range from the bucolic (reported from Massachusetts) to the alcoholic (reported from Texas). We tend more and more to concen- trate on a single interest. One man reported in the ten-year record the acquisition of a gold-fish. He still has it. Probably our purest case of singlemindedness is the organic chemist who went into organic gardening and then took up the pipe organ. Our hobbies are mostly constructive-such things as repairing old clocks, fly-tying, re- finishing antiques, casting bronze. At least ten of us play with electric trains. We keep aquariums and terrariums. A handful of us don pink coats, unchagrined, and hunt the fox at the Chagrin Valley Hunt Club, in Ohio. One Ohioan has caught a 581-pound blue-fin tuna, but not in Ohio; one Denverite shot an elk last year, but fortunately not in Denver. On the whole, we are slowing down athletically. One in three plays golf or tennis or both; there is a pronounced middle- years swing from tennis to golf. One of us has held the Number One tennis ranking in New England; another, who has played in all the major golf championships, including the U.S.G.A., has been a runner-up eleven times-but mostly our muscular glories are behind us. We are turning to quieter pastimes. The favorite sport of one of our classmates (not the permanent-wave mogul, as it happens) is curling. One man says his only exercise is unzipping his briefcase at night. Even in sport we have a managerial tendency-one of us is on the Executive Committee of the U. S. Golf Association and another is President of something called Southern Skis. We are extremely clubbable men. We have been put up for membership and got past the blackballers 1,574 times, all told, and one of us belongs to two clubs called "Saddle and Cycle" and "Fin 'n Feather." By far the most common and rewarding sparetime occupation among us, though, is puttering around house and yard, fixing things, cleaning up the mess in our immediate vicinity and leaving more distant chaos to cops and statesmen. One man rakes leaves under the largest oak tree in Connecticut; it gives him plenty to do.
"Culture Must Be Served"
Our cultural yearnings are perhaps best characterized by the fact that now, fifteen years out of college, we consider the most useful Yale courses to have been English and Accounting. Our reading habits are fairly good-on the average, 1.89 books per month per man. The average man at least flips through 4.6 magazines a month, though he subscribes to 5.08. We follow the pattern of upper-income Ameri-
11
YALE'S GREATEST CLASS
cans in being, so far, relatively casual television viewers. More than half the class, 54.91%, still don't own sets. Of the class of 830, 496 of us don't watch television at all, while 334 watch on the average 55 minutes and 12 seconds a day. Two evidently choleric men can only stand to watch one minute a day. (Maybe they'd like to join the National Rifle Association, train awhile, and then go after their classmate who is art director of Young & Rubicam, in charge of t.v. commercials.) Excepting television, we tend to prefer mechanical entertainments, such as movies and the radio, to entertainments that require work, such as walking through art galleries and staying awake at lectures and concerts; except that we're willing to work at dancing. The average man goes to 12 movies a year, 3.22 concerts, 4.24 plays, 1.2 art exhibits, 2.7 lectures, and 4.84 dances. He drinks a little more than he did at Yale-11.8 highballs, cocktails, or beers a week (median: 8.8). Our foremost patron of art (or perhaps he likes to think of himself as a victim of art) is the classmate who allowed his bicycle shop on Chapel Street, New Haven, to be torn down to make way for a new Yale Art Gallery. As the demolition cranes went to work, he said, for quotation in the press, "Culture must be served." Another patron, who has taken up being an angel for Broadway plays, reports that this activity enables him to get seats to any show in town-from scalpers, at scalpers' prices. A few of us are amateur, and a very few professional, actors. We have won Arthur Godfrey's "Talent Scouts" contest; sung Pimen in Boris Godunov; played Ravenal in Show Boat. One of us, a member of the Grosse Point Players, took the lead some time ago in Jenny Kissed Me. "All in all," he writes, "it is a busy life and a pleasant one."
The Women in Our Lives
Speaking of what Jenny did, we seem on the whole to be a highly uxorious group. One of us, in keeping with this, is a manufacturer of wedding rings. Of those who answered the questionnaire, 91.75% have bought his product, or a competitor's, only 2% have been divorced, and 77% of the divorcees are remarried. Though the class is about evenly divided on whether the world is better or worse off than when we graduated, which was toward the end of the big depression, 88.4% of the class consider themselves personally better off, or at least no worse off, than they were then; and they attribute by far the greatest part of their well-being to work, home, and family. By and large, our wives are domesticated but not tamed. About two thirds of them went to college, and about two thirds had jobs before they had us. One man in six married a secretary. How- ever, only 4.4% of our wives have jobs now. (Among these few wives, it happens, there is a noted interior decorator and one of the best novelists in the country.) The overwhelmingly predominant
12
1936 FIFTEEN-YEAR RECORD
interest, among wives, is family and home; but a very large number of men list, as their wives' hobbies, such varied things as Braille, ceramics, talking, the D.A.R., puppets, and sleep. Only four men have the courage, or the cantankerousness, to say that they disapprove of their wives' interests, and one notes as his reason: "Have to pay bills."
The average man says he does the things Dr. Kinsey was interested in 1.78 times a week. This makes his sexual age, on the Kinsey gradient, about 48. The average is drawn from a quite astounding range of activity, or lack of it-all the way from one man who avers a consistent tally of eight times a week to one who lets it go at twice a year. Six say they are wholly abstemious. One man, evidently absent-minded to a high degree, says he has "no idea."
Time's Winged Chariot
Though few of us feel our Kinseyan age, it cannot be denied we are getting on. One of us, an Associate of the Society of Actuaries, could tell us exactly how middle-aged we are; but we don't need, indeed we actively don't want, his measurements. We are conscious enough of our decrepitude. On the average each of us has gained 10.7 pounds since graduation. Even those who have not gained weight are aware of the catabolismthat has set in. One writes that he weighs exactly what he did in college but is a different man-"somehow muscle has been transformed into a chemical unknown." Our class baby matricu- lates at Yale this fall. Two or three of us have already retired; this is the second sentence of one man's two-sentence autobiography: "Can't seem to make enough money because of taxes to retire as yet." "I am an old bachelor and I have no hobbies," one writes, and we can hear his knuckle-joints crack as he forces his arthritic fingers to put the words on paper. Another man measures the progress of his material aggrandizement by the progress of his physical decay: he broke a front tooth crown on spare ribs in 1946 and another on lobster in 1951; things are getting better, he says. And we display another symptom of decay-maudlin nostalgia. Once in a while one of us gets out his trumpet and seems, he says, to hear the echoes of its blasts in the far reaches of the Yale bowl, where once it youthfully sang. "Went to the Yale Glee Club concert last year in Plainfield," another man writes, "and had one of those rare and elegant evenings when time stands still and the years drop away, singing with the Club at the reception which followed, remembering yesterday so clearly and yet making fun to remember tomorrow, too."
Our advancing age has given us a sense of the life cycle. The wheel turns; ashes to ashes; one of us sells fertilizer in the country and one works for a dust-collecting company in a city. We find our values shifting as the clock ticks swiftly on. A man who finally had the
13
YALE'S GREATEST CLASS
gumption, a couple of years ago, to quit the city and go back to his small home town to live, sums up all the time before that: "Thirteen years of jockeying, jostling, grubbing." Some of us, like the man who spent ten years at the experimental towing tank at Stevens Institute, must have felt we weren't getting anywhere. But more and more men seem to have begun to choose not to get anywhere. A reader detects, in some of the autobiographies, something more than the slowing down that comes with maturity-something that must be connected with the times we inhabit: something like the Buddhist's limiting of his desires. One man, a school teacher, subsists on one pleasure, which is seeing the lacrosse teams he coaches win-a small thing, but his. One man moved to open Oregon from the chiseling east because he was so disgusted with materialism; another, who had been a stock broker before the war, dropped everything after it, in his early thirties, and started at the bottom of that appalling stair- way, the study of medicine. Very many men have gone to the land. A Vermont single-family farmer tranquilly tells his whole story with a brief quotation. " 'Nine bean rows have I there,' " he says, " 'and a hive for the honey bee.'" Our outstanding Thoreauvian, who lived alone beside a Massachusetts pond for a year after graduation and then went into the insurance business, is back on a farm now with a family. He says he doesn't count coins or reckon reputation, but thinks "of lush green rows of potatoes passing beneath the tractor, of two laughing children swinging from birch tops, of a pretty wife pick- ing blueberries against a great white cloud on a mountain top, of hesitant fingers dipping into the hot sap pan, of rich brown earth- curls falling away behind the plow, of frosty starry nights when the eager dog barks coon-tree along some distant ridge, of smooth slopes of snow marked only by blue shadows and the tracks of our own skis, of sunsets and sunrises, and the more to come." It is not "security," in the urgent, traditional American sense, not the assurance of finan- cial safety, not freedom from physical hazard, that this large, and growing, body of men who have shifted gears, as it were, in mid-life, seems to be after. The Thoreauvian's wife stepped on a rattlesnake in a raspberry patch not long ago, and he was so severely stung by a swarm of bees that his heartbeat was, for a time, imperceptible. To this group, enough money seems to be less than they had thought it could be. These are the men who, by deliberate choice, keep the income averages of the class from soaring even higher than they are. These men seem to wonder what Yale taught them.
Of the "more to come" the members of the class seem, on the whole, unafraid-better than unafraid: quite anticipatory. Some of us, naturally, have been jarred by the world. The wife of a fellow who's deputy to the colonel who's in charge of finance in Kokura, Japan, writes in her husband's stead, and concludes: "Need I add
14
1936 FIFTEEN-YEAR RECORD
that our future is most uncertain? Have just sold our home in West- chester, and I am writing this on a packing crate." For most of us, though, these are simply middle years. We have traveled quite a piece; we've got a long piece further to go. Some of us have shifted gears; some of us are just reaching for the lever. "I feel," writes one, unabashedly, "that my years of greatest happiness and of greatest usefulness to mankind lie ahead rather than behind."
And for Yale
Although we permit ourselves occasional orgies of sentiment about Yale, occasional trumpet-shrieks or glees gloomily sung with high- ball in hand, our material support of the University has been con- siderably less than orgiastic. Though the average total annual dona- tions to charity have been $581.51 per man, the average gift to Yale has been only $13.21 a year. One man in ten gives nothing to the University. In the ways that are painless, however, we have been an exemplary set of old grads. The average number of revisitations of New Haven is 10.26 (the median is 3.71; the average is evidently brought up by a few football faithfuls). One of our class is a member of the law firm that defends Yale against all comers; another is curator of maps in the University Library; another is an editor of the University Press. We have more associate fellows of colleges than any other class. One of us has served a term as the youngest member of the Yale Corporation. Several of us have gone back to Yale to teach. The question, "Will you send your son to Yale?", brought answers that indicate a slightly tyrannical tendency among some of the fathers. There were 368 fathers among the answerers; 153 said yes; 8 said no; 4 said maybe; and 294 said they would leave it up to their sons. In other words, there were something like 117 men who said both that they would send their boys to Yale and that they would leave the decision up to them.
And Sue Yale
Well, it's impossible for the editor to say whether this book is a ridiculous waste of time and money. For the errors in it, the elusive misprints that may hurt, the garbled names and numbers, the few autobiographies lost in the shuffle, he can only apologize in advance. If you feel obliged to sue, sue Yale; then you can hire a classmate- a mercy-killer's knight or a video puppet's champion-to support your case in court, and you will have a classmate-Yale's legal eagle -to oppose your case. Indeed, one good thing about this book may be its chance of bringing us back together again in ways like that. One can hope that the man who manufactures garter parts will get together with the man who buys women's stockings for Lord and Taylor. Maybe, at the very least, some euphonious corporations will
15
YALE'S GREATEST CLASS
result from associations and re-associations brought about by this volume-Renziehausen, Harnischfeger, and Kieckhever, for instance, or Lingo, Hollup, Booz, and McGloon. Certainly the hollow-eyed pack of writers in our class deserves to know again, and know much better, their classmate who is now First Vice President of the American Lead Pencil Company.
(This chapter appeared in the September, 1952, issue of Harper's Magazine. Proceeds from the article were assigned to the Class of 1936 Fund and were applied toward the expenses of this book.)
THE CONFIDENTIAL QUESTIONNAIRE
HOW MUCH DID ALMA MATER?
1. What did you major in at Yale? Number answering: 404
Economics 79
French 8
History 53 Mechanical Engineering
8
English and American Literature 48 International Relations 7
Pre-Medical
26
Mathematics
7
Industrial Administration 25 Electrical Engineering 6
Applied Economics
23
Art
6
Sociology
14
Engineering
5
Chemistry 12 History, the Arts, and Letters 7
Government 9
Four each: General academic; biological science; chemical engineering ; civil engineering ; philosophy.
Three each: Geology; metallurgy; history and government; Spanish.
Two each: Architecture; biochemistry; German; physics; forestry and plant science ; social sciences ; history and economics ; zoology.
One each: Art appreciation; American history and psychology; military science ; language ; banking; English and pre-medical.
No major 6
2. Is your life work in the field of that major?
Number answering: 400
Yes
167 41.75% No
216
54
%
Partly, related
17 4.25%
3. Did you win scholastic honors?
Number answering: 339
Phi Beta Kappa
32
Honors
86
Sigma Xi
5
Tau Beta Pi
5
Delta Omega
1
None
210
4. Did you win any varsity letters?
Number answering: 398
Yes
92
No
306
How many?
One-55; two-16; three-16; four-3; five-1
16
17
THE CONFIDENTIAL QUESTIONNAIRE
5. What College course has proved most useful to you?
Number answering: 385
English and American Literature 61 Physics 13
(Includes : Berdan Daily Chemistry
11
Themes, 17; French's Chaucer, History 11
2; Berdan, Age of Pope, 2;
Industrial Relations 10
Tinker's Age of Johnson, 2; International Relations 9
Young's Shakespeare, 1; With- Mathematics 8
erspoon's Milton, 1)
Anthropology
5
Accounting Economics
35
Sociology 5
29
Four each: Applied physiology; R.O.T.C .; Seward's Industrial Manage- ment ; Westerfield's Banking.
Three each: Advanced organic chemistry; French; German; N.R.O.T.C .; naval science; Northrop's Philosophy and Science; philosophy ; psy- chology.
Two each: American sciences; American Thought and Civilization; art; biochemistry; business law; calculus; chemical engineering ; electrical engineering ; engineering; engineering drawing; geology; Government 36; Haggard's courses; histology; History, Arts, and Letters 21; industrial psychology; logic; modern European history; public control of business ; Spanish; statistics ; Urban's Philosophy.
One each: All strictly cultural courses; American society ; architecture ; A.R.O.T.C .; B. Heidelborg; biology; business psychology; business statistics ; economic geography; education; Electrical Engineering 45 ; engineering efficiency ; experimental engineering; finance; forestry ; French history; history of art; history of England; honors thesis ; human relations ; immunology; inland transportation ; law; mechanical drawing ; mechanical engineering ; metallurgy ; military science ; modern history ; music ; nineteenth century English history ; pre-medical ; public utility regulation ; Saxon's Business Operations ; sculpture and painting ; security analysis ; science of society.
No one in particular 25
None 17
Don't know or don't recall 15
All courses 7
6. What course has given you the most pleasure or satisfaction?
Number answering: 325
English and American Literature 106 History 23
(Includes : Tinker's Johnson
International Relations 21
French's Chaucer, 3; DeVane,
2; Crawford, 2; Berdan, 5; Raff's English Novel, 1; Young's Shakespeare, 1; Mi- zener, 1; Phelps, 1.)
Five each: Anthropology; economics; German; Spanish.
Four each: Geology; government.
Three each: Art; art appreciation; human relations in industry; music ; music appreciation ; science of society ; sociology; Urban's Philosophy ; psychology ; physics.
Two each: American history; biology; Allison's French History; Dunn's Government; mathematics; organic chemistry; public finance; English history ; pictorial art; History, Arts, and Letters 31; Northrops Phil- osophy of Science; engineering drawing; electrical engineering ; Lull's
and 19th Century Poets, 18;
Haggard's Physiology 12
18
1936 FIFTEEN-YEAR RECORD
Organic Evolution; Simond's History of Music; Meek's History of Architecture ; modern European history.
One each: Accounting; Art 10; astronomy ; architecture; American society ; appreciation of architecure; automotive engineering; banking; bio- chemistry ; business statistics; business operations; chemistry ; calcu- lus ; classical civilization ; contemporary drama ; ethnology ; education ; engineering ; fine arts ; Freshman history ; forestry ; corporation finance ; German; government; great living religions; Gabriel's American Cul- tural History ; history of art; Hellenistic civilization; history, arts, and letters; industrial psychology; J. Phillips' Pots & Pans; Latin; languages ; marine engineering; Mitchell's English Constitutional History ; naval science; physical chemistry ; political science ; R.O.T.C .; sculpture; sculpture and painting; Seward's Industrial Management ; Shakespeare; societal evolution; Winslow's Epidemiology; Wolfers' Political History ; Werntz's Business Operations and Relations ; zoology. Can't say 18
No one in particular 13
None
5
7. If you had it to do over, would you go to Vale again?
Number answering: 406
Yes
358
No
33
Perhaps
11
Yes and No
2
Depends how Yale has changed
2
8. If not, would you skip college?
Yes
1
Go to another college
35
1
Yale and another
1
9. How many times have you visited Vale since graduation?
Number answering: 391
None
32
Six
28
15-20
5
50
9
One
42
Seven
2
20
11
70
3
Two
47
Eight
8
25
7
100
2
Three
35
Ten
25
30
9
200
1
Four
28
12
13
30-50
1
300
1
Five
25
15
15
45
2
Many
27
Have lived or worked in New Haven 11
Average of those who were explicit: 10.26 visits Median 3.71 visits
10. What has been your annual average contribution to the Yale Alumni Fund, if any? Number answering: 387
None
34
5.00
74
10 .- 15.
4 30.00
4
$1.00
11
5 .- 10.
8
12.00
3 35.00
1
1.50
1
6,00
3
15.00
26
40.00
1
2.00
14
7.00
3 16.00
1 50.00
13
2.50
2
7.50
1 20.00
16
75.00
2
3.00
12
8.00
1
25.00
30
100.00
5
4.00
2
10.00
113
25 .- 30.
2 2 .- 150.
1
Average: $13.21
Median : $10.28
19
THE CONFIDENTIAL QUESTIONNAIRE
BREAD & BUTTER
1. How many jobs have you held since graduation?
Number answering: 385
One 93 Four 44
Seven 8
Ten
2
Fifteen
1
Two 85 Five 36
Eight 9
Eleven 1 Eighteen 1
Three 82 Six 17
Nine 3
Twelve 2 Nineteen 1
Average : 3.12
2. What is your line of work? Number answering: 407
Law 39 Insurance
18
Investment Banking
9
Medicine
35
Teaching
16
Banking
8
Sales
31
Advertising
10
Executive
8
Manufacturing 28 Accounting
9
Farming
9
Six each: Administrative, merchandising.
Five each: Cost accounting, government, journalism, personnel, real estate, research.
Four each: Chemical engineering, finance, newspaper work, oil industry, production manufacturing, self-employed.
Three each: Engineering, mechanical engineering, production factory man- agement, industrial engineering, textiles, lumber, teaching and research, retailing, transportation, writing.
Two each: Broker, expediter, investment analysis, printing, sales engineer- ing, television, plastics, hardware, foreign trade, pharmaceutical chem- istry, management consultant, publishing, building construction, ministry, consulting engineer, civil engineering.
One each: Architecture, architectural woodwork, air-conditioning, autos, air transportation, business, hotel business, production engineering, coke and coal, diplomacy, forestry, dentistry, international relations, invest- ment counsel, investment management, construction engineering, navy, army, marines, steel fabrication, vocational counsellor, research analy- sis, physics, psychoanalysis, real estate management, economist, radio, sculpture, actor-singer, aeronautical engineering, baking, credit finance, editorial, grain buying, aircraft shipping, foreign service, plumbing and heating supplies, technical expert, comptrollership, museum, cotton buy- ing, jewelry, public housing and city planning, radio engineer, statistics, utilities, utility construction, rice farm, veterinarian, geologist, canning, marketing, radio, pathologist, public health, pension plan, farmer rela- tions, wool, traffic, medical student.
3. If you did graduate work, what degrees did you earn?
LL.B. 42 M.A. 16
B.F.A. 3 M.D. 37 M.B.A. 11
M.F. 2 Ph.D. 18 M.S. 6 M.P.H. 2
One each: M. Arch., M.F.A., J.S.D., S.T.B., J.D., DD.S., D.V.M., LL.D., LL.M., B.D., D.Eng., M. Eng. M.C.P.
4. Are you happy in your work? Number answering: 405
Yes 349 No 10
Don't know exactly 41
Partly 5
20
1936 FIFTEEN-YEAR RECORD
5. How many times have you quit? Number answering: 394
None
174
Four 21
Seven 3
Once
96
Five 8
Nine 1
Twice 50
Six
9
Eleven 1
Three
30
Twelve 1
220 men have quit 517 jobs
6. How many times have you been fired? Number answering: 380
None 333 Once 38 Twice 4 Three 3 Four 2 (both layoffs) 47 men have been fired or laid off 66 times
7. Were you in one of the services during the war? Number answering: 394
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