Canisius College - Azuwur Yearbook (Buffalo, NY)

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two thousandth anniversary of the birth of Ver- gil whose Aeneid had been, for centuries, the archetypal book of the Jesuit curriculum but would be so no longer, the College's participa- tion, on a major scale, in the 1932 centenary celebration of Buffalo's incorporation as a city. The material advance, heralding the massive building program of the next three decades, was the opening of the Horan-O'Donnell Science Building. Except for the unsuccessful football policy, each of the happenings in this parabola of event was a mernorializingof the past and of the traditional. ln sharp contrast to this same dis- carded rhythm, 1969-1970's stocktaking within the Canisius centennial year - and a backward glance was but a part of the Centenary's trans- actions - represented the only major considera- tion of the past's impact upon the present which the College had engaged in over the inter- vening three decades. Moreover, hindsight per- mits a tracing of a curve of tendency from sacred to secular which was to grow more strongly underlined in the years immediately preceding the beginning of the 1970's. When the 1920's began, Canisius was still a religious college in an extremely sectarian sense, its fac- ulty largely, its administration - except for the office of the Registrar - totally clerical. Over the next half century, gradually at first, then at a rapidly accelerating pace, the faculty became mainly lay with Catholic affiliation no longer a shibboleth for entrance even into the depart- ments of Theology and Philosophy. Laymen achieved key positions within the administra- tion and came to dominate the Board of Trus- tees. Insofar as Canisius remained a Catholic college, it did so in an ecumenical, Chardines- que sense - a contributor to The Canisius Pa- pers, a sheaf of centennial year essays, preferred to style it a Christian college: and even this circumscription was not a restrictive one. The De- partment of Religious Studies, for example, which superseded the older Department of Theology, and which had announced a lVlaster's program before the beginning of the Centenary year, the staff numbered, among others, a Pro- testant theologian, the Bishop of the Episcopal Diocese of Western New York and the Rabbi of Temple Beth Zion. The two Passion spectacles, given during the summers of 1920 and 1923, marked both the midpoint and, to date, the most ambitious ef- fort within a continuing dramatic tradition. lThis is by no means the same as styling them the apex, a title which, even though comparison is always invidious, might well be reserved for the Shakespearean cycle produced by the Cani- sius Little Theater in the now demolished band- box stage located within old Canisius-on-Dela- van during the years just after the Second World War.l The Passion Plays represented over attempts to relocate the Oberammergau tradi- tion within the geographical context of Western , 1- s 3,3--if ax f ff 9, yi 1 ws 1. 'iff K ' fyfs f'f'l '. .si '9- fx ff , 1 X , . X . New York. If the times had been propitious, they might conceivably have made Buffalo what the two Stratfords, of Canada and Con- necticut, were to become three decades later. ln the upshot, the grand, but very costly, concep- tion on the part of President Michael J. Ahern S.J., 1919-1923, had to be cut back. The sump- tuous open-air theater built in the rear of Old Main, with an electrician from New York's Theater Guild to operate the light panel and Beerbohm-Tree's former stage manager as regis- seur, seating four thousand at its capacity and accommodating upward of a hundred thousand people during each of those two summers, was .5 ,Q 7 -sf' r ' f . ..v ,. ,--1 ,. :al ' ll. . af 5 ,X 1 i v demolished in the fall of 1923. The camels, imported for the Nativity Tableau, which had grazed on the Villa grass from lVlay to Septem- ber, became permanent residents of the Buffalo Zoo. The great adventure was but a memory. The attempt to field big-time football in- volved an even greater financial drain, though the fact was not officially recognized until Feb- ruary 8, 1950, when, after thirty-one years of intercollegiate competition, President Raymond W. Schouten, 1947-1952, announced the aboli- tion of the sport. There were contributory rea- sons in addition to the brute fact of the heavy monetary loss. The Buffalo Bills had come to

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12, 1919, of the Canisius Summer School. That same autumn an Extension School, operating on a regular basis, appeared, the nucleus of what would later become a flourishing Evening Session and a populous Graduate Division. Orig- inally conceived of as a series of service courses for the Catholic teaching religious of the area, the new Schools almost immediately outran this intention. From this point on, Canisius began to supply a surprisingly high percentage of the Niagara Frontier's teachers and adminis- trators on the public school plane, a proportion that kept pace with the College's steady output of lawyers, physicans, dentists, and ecclesias- tics. Along with most other American institu- tions of higher learning, Canisius proved a little tardier in acknowledging its responsibilities for professionalizing business. Nevertheless, 1926 witnessed the initiation of systematic business curricula. Until February 14, 1928, fraternities, tolera- ted but never fostered by the administration, had perforce assumed responsibility for the Col- lege's social life-an ingrained conservatism, where a mingling of the sexes was concerned, had been carried over intact from the German period. Now, through the first annual Junior Prom held in the Statler Ballroom, the College officially entered the Jazz Age in the city where, only two decades before, Scott Fitzger- ald had spent his boyhood. Despite this official relaxation of a long-standing tabu, social ma- chinery, over the nextdecade,remainedlargely in the hands of the fraternities which main- tained clubrooms in such divergent places as the Park Lane and certain Burchfieldian mansarded mansions on Linwood Avenue. By filling this social vacuum, whatever their other shortcom- ings, the Greek Letter societies marked an evo- lutionary stage in the College's progress from an invertebrate social organization. What doomed them in the end, at Canisius as elsewhere, was their being grounded on a principle destructive of true fraternity, that of caste and ethnic Apartheid. By the 1960's the social pendulum had swung full circle, and most of the social affairs were held in campus facilities. lf the College, in that decade had been reluctantly driven to abandon its old in loco parentfs stance, by way of compensation it had become the students' social arbiter. Taken together, the twenties and thirties may be said to have enclosed five symbolic events and one physical thrust into a pattern of future expansion. The events were these: two outdoor Passion Plays on a positively Max Rein- hardtian scale: a gathering momentum in the direction of that period's will-o-the-wisp, big- time football, a policy that eventually was to prove abortivep the College's acknowledgement of the canonization of its patron, St. Peter Canisius, whose earlier beatification had played its due part in the establishment of the Canisius ethos, 1930's public commemoration of the 'vm' l MQW' Canisius in 1870 fern lk. . Nl h 3j,.,.'Z 'n ' -f ff at Q ' sh ui' 1 4 f ,j s H, : ii ..- mtg ll , f I 1 f- ' 4' .U wg H 1 qi. fs' i - A 1 9 ' 3. 1 1 -'i- --. ' '47 Y ' im Canisius in 1872 ?'v fi ig 'uf va- iv' T Canisius in 1876 31 .Petrsirli R53

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command the Frontier's imagination as, during the 1920's, the 1930's, and the latter years of the 1940's, the cleated warriors of the Little Three once had. Buffalo's uncertain autumn weather had also played a part. Generals Rain, Snow and Cold had brought Western New York College football to its knees. Nevertheless, those three decades had been glorious ones in local sports annals. Though football had been accorded intra- mural cognizance shortly before America's en- try into World War l, its first regular intercol- legiate schedule had had to wait until the aca- demic year of 1919-1920 when, with Hymie Bleich as pioneer coach, eight games were booked: Hobart, Hamilton, Rochester, Alfred, Bonaventure, Theil, St. Lawrence, Niagara. The decade in which America's sports mystique would be, overall, at its height was just begin- ning. Never again would the popular imagina- tion feel quite so unsophisticated an admiration for athletic heroes who, professional or ama- teur, were still thought of as contestants in an Olympiad rather than a gladiatorial arena. For a brief span, amateurs gained the popular affec- tion as they never had before and, most likely, never would again. The good genius who pre- sided over Canisius' sports destinies in these years was a professor of chemistry, Dr. James Crowdle, for thirty-three years Graduate Man- ager of Athletics. During this long period Crow- dle was responsible for two crowning achieve- ments. He was chief architect of the Little Three Conference composed of Canisius, Niaga- ra and St. Bonaventure, the most exhilarating sports combo the Niagara Frontier ever man- aged to put together. lTechnically, it was not a conference: but the association was, if any- thing, even more intimate than that of a con- ference.l lt was his shrewd judgement which, by siring the double-header basketball program, brought big-time basketball to Buffalo for the thirty-five years preceding the arrival of 1970's professional team, the Buffalo Braves. Four years before the twenties began, the coming cult of coaching personality was anti- cipated when the College retained its first for- mal basketball and baseball coaches in the per- sons of Ray J. MacDonald and Eddie Russell, former Montreal outfielder. Baseball, Canisius' first recognized sport - this happened in 1903 was to retreat before the advances, first of basketball, and then of King Football. It enioyed a recrudescence after World War ll, though hardly to the point of regaining its former primacy: and is still being played now. The golden age of Canisius basketball began with Earl Brown who provided the recruiting dynamic that brought the College into the mainstream of basketball's postwar advance. Brown was succeeded in 1947 by Joseph P. Niland, 1948-1953, number one in a triumvi- rate of young coaches, which would also num- ber J. Joseph Curran, 1953-1959, Robert A. MacKinnon, 1959-1972, John R. Morrison, 1972-1974, and John McCarthy, 1974 to pre- sent. Under their cool, intelligent tutelage Cani- sius teams became familiar staples in Madison Square Garden, reaching the N.I.T. final once and achieving a berth in NCAA play for three consecutive years. James Naismith had invented his game in response to the weather exigencies of Springfield, Massachusetts, where, as in Buff- alo, falls were brief and springs late. lt is one of the factors which has always rendered basket- ball the most viable of collegiate team sports in northeastern cities. One of sport's most potent allies is the sportsman's nostalgia for past feats, a human impulse satisfied by 1963's inauguration of the Canisius Sports Hall of Fame which, up through 1975, had installed thirty-nine members. Sport is also a sovereign cement for alumni relations. But there are tides in student interest, and one of the great unresolved problems of American college life is that of inducing student participa- tion on something more than a purely spectator basis. Counteracting the ominous signs of de- creasing student interest during the troubled sixties, there were two favorable portents in Canisius affairs. Student-initiated club foot- ball, simon-pure amateur and operating at a minimal expense, returned in 19665 and this year varsity football returned. ln 1969, through the comprehensive facilities of a magnificent new Athletic Complex, for the first time Cani- sius found itself in a position to realize the desideratum Harvard's great Percy Haughton once simply phrased as athIetics for all. It would be too much to say that all difficulties had been circumvented. Nevertheless, there was some hope that the delicate equipoise Canisius' ninth president, John B. Theis, S.J., 1898-1901, had enunciated in a Latin letter on January 30, 1900, was finally within reach: Ludos ration- abiliter restringimus. That is: We are keeping sports within rational bounds. On the other hand, a swelling tide of professionalism men- aced the old amateur mystique of sport as a liberating experience for body and spirit, one wherein love and need are one. Only the future will tell whether the Griffin, the Canisius totem animal, would succeed in his task of shielding a harmonious evolution of an athletic ideal for both varsity and intramural partici- pants. lContinuef p. 36l s tm f 1 .. 1. 1 'Kimura it rv-YV X154 A h-1.iQ.' 5 ,,g' ff- w r . 1 . f r-, ,iq . I 5 ,gVVur'.,l ., -vf-wr.-t-..i viii, lei 'full gr F -les--.1-1-tr--PEL' s N ,fer is 1. -.iq or ,,,,.,,- 4,., .. me I n 5.1! -' na. 1 .Q J lj, ' :. g ,SEI , A Q If ,' V '- A , . ,T ,Sl A ,ll Q.-' t f A 'til , i f . il9',..f . , ij 'fl' 5--'E 'si - ' 'Z - ' -'Q A W f -lf' ,Q 5. . 3.5.1. - NEFF! :T S I '1 ,iii wig. 'F If JJL' ,sk .- F. M - f' X j Vg- th .D s A L Y 5L '.hh'Qf .ll 1 f if 3 . P? Sai. 4' 1 'Q,,....'5 ,' ' lift- ' iv afggr ' - ff 'S K --1'-LB' ' , t 455,-nf Mi... ,K I rs X 'eq N gn, I V ., swan 'Em 5 I ,Q 1 1' 6-f Stk, L .M K 33 as ' I