Tuesday, November 29, 2011

* A Yankee Romance 1900-1902

You are invited to view the 110-year-old courtship letters which I rescued from an attic in Mt. Carmel, Connecticut, 40 years ago.

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Tuesday, November 22, 2011

* Guest Columnist Ron Richo responds to today's NYT article, The Umbrella Man

  (link to NYT article) 

The Umbrella Man

“Conspiracy theories aren't real, the government just wants you to think they are so they can steal your thoughts when you aren't looking.” Oscar Wilde.


I don't know what to say about the Kennedy Assassination. It seems like ancient history now. I bought into all the conspiracy theorists’ theories until one day I realized they were doing the same thing they accused the Warren Commission of doing and making a profit from it as well.


Kennedy wasn't killed by a lone gunman, the moon landing never happened, Marilyn was murdered, Elvis is still alive, AIDS is a government plot, and 9/11 was an inside job. And so on.  It begins to say more about us than anything else. We believe in nothing. Mom, the flag, apple pie, the Church and your Alma Mater are all you can trust......OOPS! We are a nation of children and we just found out there's no Santa Claus.  Disillusioned!

                                                                        Ron Richo

                                                                 Guest Columnist
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Monday, November 21, 2011

* In Remembrance of G. Harold Welch and a Yale-Harvard Game Tradition

The Man Who Never Saw the End of The Big Game




Ghost of Thanksgiving-Past

A bit of New Haven history.




G. Harold Welch, New Haven banker and real estate developer (he owned the Century Buiilding and Macy's in central New Haven) used to throw a post-Yale/Harvard-game party at his estate over-looking The Sleeping Giant in Mt. Carmel.


I was invited once, when he was 84 (he lived to be an active 96).


The irony of the party (which had occurred for decades) was that Mr. Welch had never seen the END of a single Yale/Harvard game.


As the Game's banker, he had to collect the money from all of the ticket-takers at half-time and spirit it off to his bank where it was dutifully locked up for safekeeping.




Posted by The Anti-Yale on November 19, 2010 at 11:55 a.m.




The Game Behind the Game


THE DICKENSIAN DRAMA BEHIND THE BIG GAME


It is Half-time at the Big Game, and the wealthiest man in New Haven leaves his seat and guests to meet his associates outside the Bowl itself.


Octogenarian now, he remembers being a poor boy whose first job was to light city gas lamps, one-by-one, street-by-New-Haven -street, seven decades before.


Now he owns many of those same streets, or the property encompassed by them.


His associates help him load his Mercedes sportscar (or perhaps the gleaming pick-up truck he uses on his estate) with the brown paper bags, each containing about $100,000 in cash bills.


It is 1979, and the era of credit card payments has not yet arrived.


Those entering the Bowl on the sacred day, all 64,000 thouand of them, must pay in paper currency, and it must be whisked out of sight to a vault swiftly and safely, all million or so dollars of it.


A Brinks armored vehicle would arouse suspicion, but a white-haired, white-skinned, immaculate, grandfatherly gent, driving a sportscar or pick-up through the impoverished streets of New Haven with a trunk full of grocery bags, wouldn't raise an eyebrow.


Twenty minutes later, as he nears his goal opposite the Green, he skirts the Ivied campus itself, a 19th Century Dickensian background of stone mansions for a Dickensian character on a Dickensian mission of Midas proportions.


He pulls up in front of the bank over which he presides and a guard working overtime brings a grocery cart out to his vehicle. The brown bags and their "foodstuffs" are transferred to the cart which he escorts inside.


He unlocks the vault.


Touchdown.


Posted by The Anti-Yale on November 20, 2010 at 8:38 p.m.


http://www.yaledailynews.com/news/2010/nov/18/news-view-harvard-sucks/

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Sunday, November 6, 2011

* The Anti-Yale's Yale: Nine Bits of My Yale History



My maternal grandfather, LeRoy Ward (above right), laid the hardwood floors in Yale's Strathcona  Hall.
My paternal grandmother, Hulda Bonhau Keane  (above), took in boarders in West Haven.


My maternal grandmother*, Alice Nugent Ward (above),  lived in a third floor walk-up with no hot water two blocks from Yale, at Elm and State Streets, from 1940-60.


(Link to YDN article) OUR PAST AND WHERE WE ARE GOING

Comments

River_Tam 3 days, 9 hours ago

I'm going to be honest, I know who Cole Porter was, but for the life of me I can't name a single thing he wrote.
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theantiyale 3 days ago

worked where we do now
My grandfather, LeRoy Ward* laid the hardwood floors in Strathcona Hall. Does that count, or do only the academic accomplishments of the big shots around Elihu's Empire count as "work"?
Paul D. Keane
*His widow lived two blocks from Yale in a third-floor walk-up with no hot water at Elm and State Streets until she was 70 years old.
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River_Tam 2 days, 23 hours ago

My grandfather, LeRoy Ward* laid the hardwood floors in Strathcona Hall. Does that count, or do only the academic accomplishments of the big shots around Elihu's Empire count as "work"?
Come now, Paul. We need not interact with our floor-layers in the same way that we interact with our sisters or our childhood best friends.
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theantiyale 2 days, 18 hours ago

Touché !
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joematcha 2 days, 12 hours ago

@Paul, I love that you know that. I wonder if there has been any effort in the past or even now to collect that kind of history. It would be fascinating on a number of levels.
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InterestedInBiology 2 days, 12 hours ago

Christian, did you take Yale & America?
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theantiyale 2 days, 12 hours ago

Every week of my childhood we drove in from Mt. Carmel to my Grandmother's ghetto apartment two blocks from Yale to bring my Grandmother to Sunday dinner back in Mt. Carmel. My mother would say, as we drove past Strathcona, "Your Grandfather Ward laid the hardwood floors in that building."
I have never repeated that story in the last 60 years until the previous post yesterday, I believe. It is a great personal satisfaction to think that someone found it interesting and also to write my Grandfather's name, LeRoy Ward, which has probably not been written or uttered for half a century.
Thank you, Joematcha.
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theantiyale 2 days, 11 hours ago

Here's another bit of Yale trivia. My Hamden childhood pal's father, Henry Pfisterer, was the enginerer for the Empire State Building. He told us that he had to design into the structure an ability for it to sway one foot in all four directions at the top of the building to accommodate the rotation of the planet, otherwise it would fall over! He was an adjunct prof in the Architecture School.
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theantiyale 2 days, 11 hours ago

Here’s another piece of Yale history: A theology professor at Yale, Douglas Clyde Macintosh, took on the U.S. government in the Supreme Court , over the supremacy of government over religion. United States v. Macintosh
283 U.S. 605 (1931)
Facts of the Case:
A Canadian citizen wanted to become a naturalized U.S. citizen, but he refused to pledge to take up arms in defense of his country. He would only fight for his country if he thought the war was morally justified. On his citizenship application he wrote, �I am willing to do what I judge to be in the best interests of my country, but only in so far as I can believe that this is not going to be against the best interests of humanity in the long run. I do not undertake to support 'my country, right or wrong' in any dispute which may arise, and I am not willing to promise beforehand, and without knowing the cause for which my country may go to war, either that I will or that I will not 'take up arms in defense of this country,' however 'necessary' the war may seem to be to the Government of the day.� While he was willing to give allegiance to the United States, he was not willing to put that ahead of his allegiance to God.
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theantiyale 2 days, 11 hours ago

Here’s a fourth for your Yale Trivia Quiz:  In 1977, thirty years before the category transgender became fashionable, Yale Divinity School was the site of the first lecture in Yale’s history by a transvestite on the subject of transvestitism: the actor and playwright, Quentin Crisp.
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theantiyale 2 days, 10 hours ago

Five: What Yale M.D.in 1984 revealed on CBS's "60 Minutes" to 20 million viewers for the first time the news that AIDS could be transmitted by a woman as well as by a man? Answer: Dr. John Dwyer, Head of Immunology at Yale New Haven Hospital.
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theantiyale 2 days, 10 hours ago

Six: What famous Yale scholar carried a typewriter equipped with Greek and olde English characters on his back like a backpack all over Europe to transcribe documents before the invention of the xerox machine? Answer: Roland H. Bainton, Titus Street Professor of Ecclesiastical History and the author of "here I Stand" Abbingdon Press's all time best seller, the biography of Martin Luther.
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theantiyale 2 days, 10 hours ago

Seven:
When Lord Byron was exhumed to determine which of his legs was shorter then the other, that post-post-mortem took the extraordinary step of rcording the dimensions of every possible measurable on his body, including his alleged infamous record-breaking reproductive measurable. Where can that data be found at Yale? Answer: Sterling Memorial Library and its subsidiaries.
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theantiyale 2 days, 10 hours ago

Eight:
True or False?
 When a world famous scholar and prolific published writer at Yale developed Alzheimer's in his middle to late 50's in the late 1970's early 1980's and could no longer lecture, Yale refused to grant him early retirement and said that the only way he could maintain his position and salary was if he met all of his classes.
He had one year to go before he qualified for retirement, so kindhearted colleagues outwitted the cold administrators led the distinguished gentleman around to each of his classes which he greeted with a "good day" and then took him back to his office. He died when he wandered from his office into New Haven traffic and was hit by a car.
TRUE. (Astonishingly true.)
11/5/11
I just remembered a NINTH:


                In the old Faculty Club at Yale, where my ballroom dancing school held its banquets, there used to be a dining table with a semi-circle cut out of one of its sides. This semi-circle had been provided for professor William Howard Taft (later U.S. President Taft)whose girth was so enormous at 380 lbs, that he needed the accommodation in order to belly up to the table. I wonder if that table was lost to Yale history when the faculty club shut down in the 1970's.

11/6/11
I woke up with a TENTH, but rolled over instead.  If it comes back to me I'll add it.

I just remembered it (11/21/11) : Click on this link:  

  http://theantiyale.blogspot.com/2010/11/remembrance-of-g-harold-welch.html
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