Hobart College - Echo of the Seneca Yearbook (Geneva, NY)

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20 CENTS SEPT. '53-JUNE '57

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History: the facts and the feelings. The facts are there. We witnessed a score of firsts. We entered in September, unaccustomed and be- wildered, and yet always optimistic. Our first year of firsts: Hobart’s first inter-collegiate soccer team; the first girl cheerleaders on campus; the first annual Parent’s Weekend. Sonny Wilson became the first basketbalf player in Hobart's history to score over 340 points in a single season. The Arnold Air Society was formed from the ranks of the outstanding advanced AFROTC cadets. And the plague of Rheinhold plagiarism swept through our ranks. Some of us returned — sophomores — fewer but “stronger.” Hobart's first inter-collegiate rifle team was formed; a new demerit system was installed by the AFROTC detachment. The I.F.C. announced its first limited and controlled rushing system; we became the first sophomore class in years to turn out in full force for the Frosh-Soph brawl. We won. Hobart's football team attained its first undefeated, untied season in its 63 year football history to become one of the most respected small college teams in the East. Sonny Wilson scored 43 points in a single basketball game. Air Force Secretary Talbott spoke at the graduation of the class of 1 955. Our Junior Class dominated the membership of the College Quiz Bowl team, competing for the first time on a national radio hook-up; our social calendar and our hands were slapped by six dry weekends; our athletic status continued its upward surge as the basketball squad finished the season wirh a 15-5 rec- ord—the best in Hobart's history. And some of us sat in the stands as the national sports spotlight played upon Boswell Field at the Annual North-South La- crosse game as Babe Kraus celebrated his 30th anni- versary as Hobart's lacrosse mentor. The inauguration of the Rev. Dr. Louis Hirshon as Ho- bart’s 19th President heralded in our senior year. The Colleges received a $100,000 anonymous grant for the completion of the Chemistry building which we had seen grow staggeringly from the ground over the previous three years. The New Student Union finally achieved its rightful status as a recreation room rather than a show case. Most of us sat for the first time in a greatly enlarged and improved Boswell Field. And we watched that day as Hobart ran rough-shod over our old football nemesis, Rochester, renewing an inter- rupted rivalry with a 20-0 victory. These are facts which we remember as we leave. But we must also recognize trends. Our four years was marked by a period of constant administrative change. Passing in review: two deans, Dr. Seymour Dunn and Dr. Walter Durfee; three Presidents, Dr. Alan Brown, Dr. Newton Hubbs, and the Rev. Dr. Louis Hirshon. We lived in an era of tremendous athletic upheaval at Hobart. Our varsity schedules were not only marked by outstanding won-lost percentages but also by remark- able upsets. Among the most notable of the team vic- tories: basketball upsets over LeMoyne and Colgate, a baseball win over highly touted Colgate, and foot- ball triumphs over Alfred, Rochester, and finally, Buf- falo. In our four year memory of football, we recall but three losses. And finally we will remember the revival of what can only be known as spirit.” When we came as Freshmen we were hit by Herald headlines proclaiming “student apathy and declaring that the school was “going to the dogs. We helped to revive the tradition of fresh- man hazing and, as a result, we have witnessed a re- turn of class unity. This has been our life at school—what we have ac- complished, what others have accomplished and we witnessed. We leave now for other accomplishments in a different world. We have lived at Hobart, sheltered. Our time here has been, in a sense, unreal because it has not come to grips with what is on the outside—beyond the halls of ivy. We have seen the outside through windows of information. We have seen the last four years of others' lives go by on pages. What follows is what we remember from the outside, what we did not en- counter but saw only in a mirror. We have watched it go by and we have not yet joined it. We go now to encounter the reality of experience,” to find “away from home and friends what the heart is and what it feels. We go to encounter . . .

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A decade adrift found its heroes and its symbols in driven, pessimistic but good men, in Joe Friday of “DRAGNET” and in James Dean of “Rebel Without C » ause. Sgt. Friday, sombre, quiet, followed criminals to the thudding dum-de-dum-dum thematic mood music of TV’s most popular cops-and-robbers program of 195.3. Old values, shaken by two wars, and the rise of a new ideology, promised deep changes. A profound longing arose that this generation which had come of age in a moment when dreams of a technological utopia were within grasp, in a nuclear tragedy, and die by self- execution. Human viciousness, multiplied by technology, was the unaccountable which threatened the future of man- kind. Joe Friday spoke with the monotone of a ticker- tape and a generation of scientific-minded viewers agreed that this was the way the world ran. The message of Sgt. Friday was that in the age of misery one might from time to time smile weakly. The old moral America kept the old moral values, but cynicism and relativism confronted the youth of the citadel of democracy. New men rose to power while the arch-symbol of youth and handsome liberal success perished in prison. The decade still adrift, was not without propulsion as the forces of revolutionary change besetting the civilization grew. The rift between old values and the unmapped luture and its strange values widened. The Selective Service Act brought grim news to spec- ulative heads who would have preferred alter five decades of war to talk awhile yet. They would like to discuss the dark vision of communism, its forbidding and malevolent character. It was now a time of trou- bles, worse than anytime in the past. Many events of the ’50’s were analogous to the 20’s. But, the condition of all thought was nuclear warfare, which distinguished this decade’s troubles Irom its kin in other ages. A handsome young student of the ,30’s, philosophical, liberal, revolutionary, delivered a nation in the 50’s from its pharoah. Gamel Abd-el Nasser became the beloved of F.gypt, of the uncommitted peoples from Tokyo to Cairo, of the Arabs, and told the world his moving story behind the July Revolution in the “Phi- losophy of the Revolution.” What was the aim of thi-s proud Egyptian? What did he mean to this generation of Americans? He was good of course, although a bit anti-semitic; he was going to do something for the Egyptians. We were for that. Events were taking shape: the good, the just were, as when America was young and revolutionary, winning. The smile of Nasser was a good smile like Eisenhower’s: old moral America glowed in reassurance of itself and we lent a hand. There was the case of a certain smiling, handsome prisoner whose serpent cry could scarcely be heard as it hissed into the corners ol the decade. But one day, the toothy Nassar sprouted horns and fangs, and the faintest tendency to a clipped moustache, and an inspired generation watched the s-s-s-s of the west poison Nasser. The generation was delt a handsome blow. 24 r