Canisius College - Azuwur Yearbook (Buffalo, NY)

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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

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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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only military establishment maintained by Can- isius during the years of the Second German War. The College also served as the academic base for a continuously changing contingent of Air Force Cadets. In and out, at the fixed statutory intenlals, the waves of blue-clad train- ees, four hundred at a time, came and went: from Brooklyn, the South, the lVlidwest, the Far West. They barracked at the hastily con- verted one-time Nlasonic Consistory on Dela- ware Avenue, gained their first flying hours at an airdrome operated by the College, drilled and ran their vigorous obstacle races at the Villa, and studied in the classrooms of Old Main where otherwise, only a dwindling pool of civil- ian 4Fs worked according to an accelerated schedule of trimesters. Continued in the early post-war years and, for one overlapping year, elongated into a tetramester, this produced the odd anomaly of the Centenary Commence- ment's being the hundred and fourth. lVlean- while, the Canisius gownsmen who would nor- mally have sat beside these fellows of theirs, as well as the graduates of fighting age, marched and flew and lived and died in every theater of the gigantic conflict. The Alumni War Records Office under its director, Canisius Archivist J. Clayton lVlurray, S.J., faithfully kept the long and stirring tally of that Canisius lliad. In all, one thousand six- ty-three Canisius men served in the armed forces. Sixty-two of these died for their coun- try, among them a faculty member, Captain Nliquel Rafael Rodriguez, Chairman of the De- partment of Mathematics, who at fifty was lost at sea somewhere off Africa. Two Canisius Jesuits served in the Chaplain's Corps: James l.. Shanahan, S.J., later Provincial of the Buffalo Province, and John L. Shea, S.J., who returned to head the Department of Economics. Dr. Aus- tin C. lVlcTigue, commissioned during World War I, played an active role in Civil Defense during this Second War of the Nations. Dr. James H. Crowdle received a citation for his scientific contribution to the American war ef- fort - it paralleled one received for World War I. Hundreds of Canisius warriors were wounded. Many survived prisoner-of-war camps. Five hundred and ninety - virtually a mathematical third W were commissioned as officers. Not counting citations, Good Conduct medals and combat infantrymen's badges, over three hundred awards for valor were conferred on a hundred and thirteen Canisius soldiers. After the victory of 1945, with America an empire, albeit a not altogether willing one, there were other wars whose issues were not quite so simple as they had been in 1917 and 1942. Though Canisius men were to fight in Korea, that stalemated conflict did not touch the College closely. The tragic American mis- adventure in Vietnam, however, which had served as chief catalyst for the chain reaction engulfing American campuses from Berkeley to Cornell, did not pass Canisius by. Up to 1967, the fairly infrequent Canisius student demonstrations had tended to center about the classic complaints common to the student condition - there was for example, a cafeteria crowd-in protesting the quality of the daily cuisine. After 1967, they became in- creasingly political. Petitions were circulated: and certain members of the faculty joined the various student causes. With The Griffin, the student newspaper, as its spearhead, the Stu- dent Government, no longer a mimic parliamen- tary arena, showed itself skilled in the new techniques of encounter - confrontation seemed too strong a word to apply to the students' general respect for due process - there were exceptions, naturally - and to the countervailing humorous resilience displayed by the administration. When the rising curve of angry disillusion against what seemed to the students the ambiquities and sequent frustra- tions of national policy reached its apogee on the day after the deaths of the four students at Kent State, the ensuing triune rapport among students, faculty and administration was so close knit and so devoid of excess that the faculty spontaneously found it possible to con- gratulate the students publicly in a paid adver- tisement published in the Buffalo Evening News on Nlay 15, 1970. While the admissible extent of nascent student power remained an open issue as the fall term began in September, 1970, there was a reservoir of good will on all three sides that boded well for the adjustments that the future would necessarily have to bring. As elsewhere in the Eastern academic world, R.O.T.C. membership diminished at the College during 1968-1970. Nonetheless, up to the fall of 1970, student activists had not made it a serious target of complaint. For one thing, membership was no longer compulsory by the time the issue became a fighting one. For another, from its inception in 1951 R.O.T.C. courses had never counted toward academic credit at Canisius. For still another, there was a counter-climate of opinion also operative, ex- pressing itself temperately in favor of an institu- tion that, in more than one way, continued to suit the ethos of a portion of the Canisius constituency. lVloreover, under its local sporting sobriquet of the White lVlachine, the College's military unit, year by year, went on garnering a respectable number of drill and rifle prizes. ln fact, where competition was the criterion, the Drill Team trod close, percentage-wise, on the heels of the Varsity Debate Team which, main- taining along Canisius tradition of success in this forensic department, placed third in 1969's na- tional rankings and first in 1970. All these marches and counter-marches were a far cry from the way things were when the first returning G.l.'s invaded the Ivory Tower in 1946. With registrations booming generally, not only faculty but classroom space, too, were at a premium. lThe faculty bull market would show no signs of flagging until January of 197O.l One reflex of this situation was the College'sfirst territorial expansion in almost half a century. Temporary classrooms in the form of rhom- boid-shaped wooden hutments, painted gun- boat gray and stretching from the Science Building almost to the corner of Hughes and Meech, proved inadequate to accomodate the enormous student onrush. To supplement them, the College purchased the buildings and K . .,,, i rtfr 294 W +54 arr ., - 7 ' ll I -., ill: .... as RJ- ' 'ff- qgl!,,5-.- f-ff- ,-- - r 4- ll In ll H Old tion. lVlain During Various Stages of Construc-