Germantown Academy - Ye Primer Yearbook (Fort Washington, PA)

Page 37 text:

CENSORHS' SPEECH You have been having the time of your lives to-night. You have displayed remark- able sagaeity in discovering our foibles and eccentricities, and you have racked your diminutive cerebral tissue in devising what you thought to be fitting terms of opprobrium and insult to my classmates. But you yourselves are not to escape un- scathed. lt is my cheerful duty to defend the honorable members of this class from the as- saults of your mighty intellects, and to reveal to you in some slight degree the spirit with which we have received your feeble remarks. First, you, Edwin Campbell, so aptly de- scribed by a real poet in the words- Hlong, lanlc, lean and thin, as one of Satan's cherubimf, How you must have exerted that great mind of yours to recall so many of our peculiarities, and then put them into the silly twaddle which you call verse. VVhat contor- tions of the brain and what straining of the imagination you must have undergone in try- ing to convince yourself that you could com- pose a poem. No, Edwin, it won't do. You are as little fitted to write poetry as a cow is to catch mice. Do not try to be great in any other way than that in which Nature designed you to be great-the greatness which you have already attained. Now Mr. Raymond Quarter of a bushel. You too have had fun at the expense of your classmates. You have seen visions and dreamed dreams, and in your nightmare at- tacks you have babbled forth fiction as though it were fact. But your words have no terrors for us. We are used to your vagaries and mental aberations, and estimate them at their true worth. Though your prophecies contain no word of truth, still they may prove valua- ble in fitting you for your legal career, so that you wil be able, like the man in bed,ito lie lirst on one side and then on the other.

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XV. Toiling, rejoicing, sorrowing, See Sterrett onward go, Each morning hears the question asked, As he to Payne doth go: Anything ready, anything done, For that Monthly-or no? XVI. And now another tiny thing, Oh, say, what may it be? Ah! yes, it is a miniature man, But a brainy man is he, For Pete can figure out logarithrns, And work the rule of three. XVII. But yet before I end this ryhme, Of two more I must tellg Of Scrapple and Roy Watson tall, Who long for the recess belly For every one works in our class, But this pair work repel. XVIII. And now at last because he's least, But that's not true at all, For Shoey is a mighty man, Our leader in football, And Fritz a banjo, too, can play, And music from it call. XIX. Thanks, thanks to you, our teachers true, For the lesson you have taught, For in th' Academy of life Our futures must be wrought, And as our minds have now been shaped, Will move each deed and thought. XX. And now at last this p0em's done, With it my duty, too, And I have one more thing to say, Although it's nothing new, That we, the Class of Nineteen Six, To G. A. will be true. EDWIN L. CAMPBELL

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Last, but by no means least, I must give my attention to you, Mr. Billy Gassoway Keefer. You are the chief offender. You have given free rein to-night to that eccentric mind and buzz-saw voice of yours, and your taunts and sarcastic remarks have no doubt seemed to you to be the scintillations of a brilliant intellect. But do not get puffed up, VV'illiam. Any phonograph could have reeled off brighter sayings and made more telling hits without half so much bluster. In bestow- ing upon your classmates the odds and ends which you have acquired in your visits to pawnshops and other questionable places, you have shown, perhaps, as much judgment as could have been expected from you, but your gifts betray rather the erratic nature of your own mind than any special peculiarities of your fellows. And now, Billy, I take pleasure in present- ing you with this ball. It is not covered, as you might suppose, with a map of the earth and populated with thousands of politicians, fakirs, and prize fighters ready to bow to the wonderful King of Gasers, Wfillie Keefer, but still it is a gift remarkably appropriate for you, for it is chuckful, like yourself, of Hot Air, Hot Air, Hot Air! '