University of Massachusetts Amherst - Index Yearbook (Amherst, MA)

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Class History. AYS the old proverb, Happy is the nation that has no history. So far as material prosperity goes, the saying is probably trne. It would, however, hardly apply as well to a class in college. History is but a record of achievement; the student is, above all things, proud of the achievements of his class and of his Alma Mater. The form of achievement in which a class excels varies widely. Different classes have different ideals. Our Seniors, for instance, pay strict attention to the cravings of the palate. Be its fortune great or small, ' 01 will never hunger nor thirst. It is an impossibility to even imagine that class without plenty to eat and still more to drink. The Sophomores, on the other hand, are strictly temperate to a man, even declining sweet cider on occasion. The bulwark of the local Y. M. C. A. , they are regarded by the Faculty as the soul of honor and the epitome of youthful innocence. Their crowning glory is their scrupulous regard for the truth. For proof of this we have only to refer to the characteris- tic attitude of the class in regard to the stacking of rooms a year ago, the tam- pering with the Senior flower bed last spring, and the — ahem — borrowing of Prof. Cooley ' s rope this fall. Not a single member of ' 03 was connected in the slightest degree with any of these brilliant performances, as they themselves will tell you. We doubt if the Freshmen have been here long enough to get an ideal. If they have one, the large number of them who have gone into the band would seem to indicate that their highest ambition is to make a noise. Probably at this they will be a howling success. But how about ' 02? Well, we will not boast. We do not need to. We will simply let the facts speak for themselves.

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Junior Class, 1902 Class Yell. Boom-a-racka ! Boom-a-racka ! Sis-boom-bah ! Naughty-Two! Naughty-Two ! Rah! Rah! Rah! Class Colors. Maroon and Black. Officers. A. L. Dacy, J. M. Dellea, W. Z. Chase, H. A. Paul, IT. L. Knight, F. R. Church, President. Vice-President. Secretary and Treasurer. Class Captain. Historian. Serjeant-at-Arms.

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Our record last year closed just before the rope-pull. Everybody did us the honor of assuring us that we were certain to lose in that; and it wasn ' t quite the thing to win after everybody had predicted the opposite. Moreover it was highly discourteous to snake poor Corporal Tinker and his squad along the ground the way our team did that day. But then, we had to have that rope, even if it was only an old one, and have it we did, by a good nine feet. And right here it ought to be stated that the ' 03 historian got a little pre- vious last year. In his somewhat lurid account of the affair (written two days before the -rope-pull took place), he winds up by dramatically exclaiming, The result you all know; why mention it? He must have realized later, when the result was announced, that from his point of view there was mighty little rea- son for mentioning it. It was another case of He laughs best who laughs last. After the rope-pull, football occupied our attention and we practiced hard. Sunderland, which had proved a stumbling block the year before, now twice bit the dust, and finally we tackled the Freshmen. It was a hard struggle but we could n ' t lose, and, finally toward the close of the second half, Paul fell across the line for a touchdown. The Freshman celebration was once more indefinitely postponed, and T. Fred Cooke gulped down a second long and bitter sob. About this time, or may be a little later on, the Aggie Life cheerfully re- marked, If the Freshmen can win in basketball and baseball, they can still tie in the number of events won. Unfortunately for the Freshmen there was that big If in the way. We had seen a basketball once or twice before, and when the time came we did n ' t do a thing. The Freshmen danced around like a lot of peas in a hot skillet, but that was about all the good it did. The score was only about 24 to 4, or something like that. ' ' For the sake of completeness, as Professor Brooks loves to say, we might state that we also went into track athletics a little that winter and ran up about twenty points more than the Freshmen in that, too. Spring came, and with it baseball. We couldn ' t spoil our record and so we took that in 11 to 8. Everybody got pretty well rattled that day on both sides, but after all, All ' s well that ends well. The Freshmen hadn ' t had a single chance to celebrate in the whole year; and they do say the Freshmen were naturally great hands to celebrate, too. This unbroken series of victories indicates what sort of a position we have in athletics. And yet it doesn ' t tell half of the things we did. Why, we spent most of the year breaking in a new Prof, and if that is n ' t a tough job we don ' t know what is. We did the job well and succeeding classes ought to thank us for it. We also made things pleasant for some of the old standbys. We never tired of hearing of the beauties of the Baldwin apple and the Concord grape, particularly if the samples of both were at ha nd for illustration. We were much