Canisius College - Azuwur Yearbook (Buffalo, NY)

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making a safe voyage from the Niagara River to the Strait of Detroit LaSalle's ill-fated caravel, the first ship ever built on America's inland seas, with its 45 tons and five cannon, had its beakhead adorned with a flying Griffin, and an Eagle above it, in honor of the two heraldic beasts on the armorial bearings of the great Frontenac. According to Edward L. Staton in the Courier Express Maga- zine of July 1, 1973, Rene Robert Cavelier de La Salle wanted to obtain the rich fur-bearing land of the west for France. Destitute of funds and knowing that New France would have to be the outlet for the rich fur region, La Salle allied himself with Count Frontenac, who was governor of New France at the time. It was in honor of Frontenac, his powerful business partner, that La Salle named his ship Le Griffon, as Frontenac's family Coat of Arms had a griffin in it. The Canisius history illuminates: lt is one of history's minor ironies that he lLaSallel should more than once have said of his Griffon that, through it, he would make Frontenac's beast-insigne fly above Loyola's Wolf and Kettle. LaSalle had been Jesuit-educated, but later was at odds with them over policy in New France. 4 as X LaSALLE was among the first white men to see Niagara Falls: and it was the same mighty Falls which caused him great prob- lems in building his ship. A seven mile portage was required to carry the materials past the Niagara to an impromptu boat harbor up the river. It took three months to finish the vessel, which was a rough product at best. The ship reached the Strait of Detroit successfully, and it was loaded with 12,000 pounds of furs. However, it disappeared without a trace on its return trip. Staton elaborates: What happened to the Griffon has long been a matter of speculation. LaSalle believed that the pilot and the sailors scuttled her... Among the Jesuits there was the belief that the Griffon was driven ashore by a gale and the crew was murdered and the vessel plundered by lndians. llt is nonetheless clear that Canisius always intended to spell the word with its lN ending, despite the implications from time to time that the French ON suffix would be more proper. Fr. Clayton Murray, the College Archivist, has addressed that ques- tion. Would those who were searching for a symbol have taken as such a ship which floundered in a storm on its maiden voyage? Hardly an inspiring symbol. The animal, on the other hand, is a symbol of courage and vigilance. Fr. Murray also points out that one can conceive of many animal griffins, while, if the members of the teams owed their name to the ship, they would better be called Griffonauts. The Canisius history also deals with the problem of griffins in the plural. One must say a Griffin, since, unlike the Phoenix, there is more than one at a time, even though it is not yet settled what their collectivity should be called. On the analogy of flight of eagles and pride of lions, one might suggest a flourish, a rally, a gathering, even, in view of their implacable faces, a masque of griffins. -X' -K' -K- K .Ku J 7 ,, The LaSalle Medal marked the first official appearance of the Griffin at Canisius. lN ANY case, the appearance of the Griffin at Canisius has been shrouded in as much mystery as the disappearance of the Griffon on the Great Lakes. We know that it was in 1932 that Canisius first cast its La Salle Medal, which has been given out at every Commencement since. We also know that the first student honoree was Charles J. Wick, and that the second was Charles A. Brady. The suggestion for placing a griffin on the medal was very likely made by Fr. Harold C. Gardiner, S.J. We know further that the medal marked the first official appearance of a griffin at Canisius. We said at the outset that we would go from the known to the unknown. All of the foregoing was, in one form or another, known. Let us proceed to what has been, up to now, an un- known: how was it that the La Salle Medal, with its griffin, came about at all at Canisius? In the November, 1931 edition of a now-defunct journal, the Canisius Monthly, a short story entitled The Foot That Went Too Far appeared. The story was the first in a series of Frontier Vignettes which the Monthly started in order to commemorate Buffalo's one hundred yearsasacity. According to the Monthly itself, the Frontier Vignettes were designed to bring home, in some small degree, the wealth of modern Buffalo's historical heritage. lt may be regarded as a small part of Canisius College's contribution to the coming centennial. 'K' 'X' -X- THE STORY concerned the life of La Salle, and included a section on the building of the Griffon. Witness this passage from the story: A ship was gallantly beating up the Niagara River, against the head winds, a ship that carried two tall topmasts, and five guns, 'two were of brass and three Harquebuze a crock,'and it flew the white Bourbon flag. From the beak started that winged Griffin which was borne in the arms of Frontenac. And faithful Tonty was on the deck. La Salle's eyes were wet. Something of his heart's blood had gone into shaping that craft, during those long black months between his driving of the first bolt, midwinter, and today when she sailed her maiden voyage. Rene Robert Cavelier had built his boat the Griffon. It seems certain that this piece of historical fiction, which contains the first reference to a griffin here at Canisius, stirred imaginations on campus. For it was only six months later that the La Salle Medal was instituted. Clearly, the medal was a direct reflex of the short story. There then followed a chain reaction. The first place that the Griffin alighted was on the Masthead of this newspaper. Soon thereafter Canisius teams began to be re- ferred to as the Griffins. The Canisius history continues: For Canisius athletics the Griffin totem provided as sovereign a gold- plumaged aegis as the gold-tasseled, goat-shaggy shield of Zeus himself, a protective relationship that first began before the middle-thirties. Once the Griffin had been loosed at Canisius, it was here to stay. But it was the short story which provided the spark. Says the author, It was just one of those serendipitous things, a felicitous occasion, a gracious chance. The Canisius Griffin was born in the November, 1931 Canisius Monthly. There is a very good reason why the existence of this historic short story has been till now unknown, why it was ignored in the Canisius history. The authors of Canisius College: The First Hundred Years and The Foot That Went Too Far are one in the same man, Charles A. Brady, an English professor here at the Col- lege. lt was out of a sense of excessive modesty that Dr. Brady neglected to tell of his short story in his history. But l can get away with it. Because the guy happens to be my father. Editor's Note: This column has been reprinted from an October edition of The Griffin because of its relevance to the theme and Dedicatee of this book.

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EIS TUBE WSWS - EPIQBRADY You can have your Chihuahas, Plranhas, Horned Frogs or lguanas. The best all-around athletic mascot in the business today has to be the beast adopted by Canisius- the Golden Griffin. -Steve Weller Buffalo Evening News This column is called Griffin On The Wing. This newspaper is known as The Griffin. Athletic teams at this college are referred to collectively as the Golden Griffins. This much we know. What follows is a history of how the griffin came to rest its wings here at Canisius. Let us proceed, from the known to the unknown. A griffin is a mythological beast, with a lion's body and an eagle's head and wings. Hopefully, this uncomplicated definition is not an unknown for any Canisius student. lAlthough, a number of years back, a freshman was under the mistaken impression that Griffin was the surname of some prominent alumnus who had donated money in order to have the teams named in his honor. Which, when you consider the Canisius scheme of things, was not an unreasonable assumption.l Perhaps the very best anatomy of a griffin's sporting utility comes from the continuation of Steve VVelIer's quote above: The Griffin is a creature with the head and wings of an eagle, which is partiotic: the torso of a lion, which gives the student body a feeling of securityg and most important, the changeable personality ofa chameleon, which keeps the coach from getting complacent. as as as THE LEGEND of the griffin predates Christianity, though our fabulous creature was to become a symbol in Christian art. The Canisius history-Canisius College: The First Hundred Years-pro- vides the following information: One of the high points of European poetry is that part of Dante's silver Purgatorio where, on the banks of the river that winds through the Earthly Paradise, there passes the Pageant of the Griffin. The Griffin of the City of God, which draws the Church's chariot of triumph, is a symbol of the Hypostatic Union in Christ of the two natures, human and divine. The bird part is divinity's incorruptible gold,' the beast part is red and white for humanity's flesh and blood lt is the most K i l 1 1 i augustly appropriate of symbols' and this haunting imaginative quality may be the reason why, of all heraldic monsters, the Griffin seems at once the nearest and most remote, the most incredible, yet most believably realistic. A case might even be made out for griffins being at least as easy to believe in as pteranodons and pterodactyls. What if there are no griffin fossils extant? There are pawprin ts of their making all over the world's major m ythologies. ln its pre-Christian time, the griffin carried very different connotations. According to the Britannica, in the natural history of the ancients, the griffin was supposed to watch over gold mines and hidden treasure. When strangers approached, the guardian griffins leapt upon the scavengers and tore them apart, thus chastising human greed and avarice. The legend of the griffin goes as far back as the fifteenth century before Christ. In classical mythology, the griffin was supposed to have pulled the chariots of Jupiter, Apollo, and Nemesis. During the Middle Ages, however, the griffin underwent a serious identity crisis. To some it was know as the emblem of the devil, and witches were said to have invoked the help of griffins to defend themselves against torturers. Still, the Christian symbolism has prevailed. -K' -16 -ll' THE EXACT circumstances under which the griffin flew to Canisius have never before been revealed completely. First, let us once again consult the Canisius history: Though the problems of when and where the Griffin began his reign as King Herald of the Canisius College Coat of Arms are not easily settled, the whence is easy to establish. Out Griffin flew to us from the prow of LaSalle's lost Griffon, U79 Flying Dutchman of the Great Lakes, which disappeared after

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Change, gradual but palpable, characterized the academic side of the 1930's and 1940's. Until the closing years of the thirties the most memorable teachers had tended to be clerics. Three Jesuit culture-heroes are cases in point: John La Farge, son of the great American painter, who taught English and classics in 1907, the last year of the German regime, Har- old C. Gardiner, later to be literary editor of America as well as of the New Catholic Ency- clopedia, who served in the same capacity be- tween 1929-19325 and John Courtney Murray, theologian of freedom and principal author of Vatican ll's Declaration on Religious Liberty, who taught Theology in several separate sum- mer sessions at the end of the 1930s. The fact that the now separate New York, Massachusetts and Maryland provinces constituted a single hyphenated province into the 1920s - the ar- rangement held for Maryland and New York into the 1930s - meant that, during those decades, the College had been able to draw upon a triply, then doubly, rich pool for its Jesuit personnel. Slowly but surely the balance shifted to the lay side after that until, by the 1960s, the preponderant maiority of Canisius teachers were no longer clerical, even though the original Jesuit Ieaven continued to work gratifyingly in this new dispensation. All in all, however, the lay professor, once very little more than what Oliver Goldsmith had called a gentleman usher, was distinctly in the ascen- dant. Developments during and after World War I had given the sciences a fillip that, over the succeeding decades, meant a continuous expan- sion in Canisius Physics and Chemistry, for their own sakes as well as prerequisite courses for the M.D. The approach of World War ll brought with it an allied curricular innovation that was to have far-reaching consequences, both short-term and long-term. At the request of the then director of the Buffalo City Hospi- tal, Dr. Walter S. Goodale, Canisius agreed to divide with the University of Buffalo responsi- bility for the academic courses mandated for the City Hospital School of Nursing's R.N. Out of that ad hoc arrangement came an unex- pected chain of results. One was an almost immediate connection with the nursing pro- grams of certain other area hospitals. Another was a Nurse Cadet contract toward the end of World War ll which salvaged a fiscal crisis at a time when registration had fallen off to virtual- ly the vanishing point with the few available civilian students serviced by a skeleton staff of teachers and administrators. For a short period, during the 1950s, the Canisius program evolved into a full-fledged Nursing School equipped to offer a B.S. in Nursing. Without possibility of outside subsidy, however, the amplified offer- ing proved too costly to continue. An unforeseen development, of really major significance, may be laid at the door of the Nursing Program. ln retrospect, it appears to have been an evident, if inadvertent, milestone on the road to full coeducation. The expanded Extension Program of the 1930s - and this process had actually begun just after World War l - had brought women onto the campus in the late afternoon, early evening, and Saturday morning hours. Now students, faculty, and administration alike grew used to the presence of young women at all hours of the academic day. The sixties were to witness the penulti- mate stage of this circuitous process which took the form of a half decade of technical evasions of the letter of the admissions law. Transfers from Extension to day school status were sanc- tioned by the Dean's office, with the business curriculum serving as the underground railway breaching the wall of exclusion in this almost fifty year advance toward the granting of full official academic recognition to the second sex. lOnce comfortably matriculated as a business student, it was possible to transfer to any of the other curricula.l By the fall of 1965 Canisius was finally a full-fledged coed college, some- what behind Harvard in this respect, but some- thing in advance of Yale, Princeton, Hamilton, Colgate and Kenyon. Dr. Whateley's too long accepted Oxford principle about a woman's being a creature that cannot reason was given the triumphant lie by the Canisius Dean's list, 1965-1970, a record of feminine intellectual prowess culminating in the Commencement of 1970 where six out of the eight graduates at- taining summa cum laude rank were female. The Nurse Cadets did not constitute the time Laying the cornerstone of Old Main, .lune18, 1911. 36