Wabash College - Wabash Yearbook (Crawfordsville, IN)

Page 23 text:

■ 4 Top left, upperclassmen filter out among the shifty rhynes who sought oblivion and obscurity in the outer fringes. Center left. Army Peck overwhelms a rhyne. Bottom left. Bill Sweet harasses a hapless rook in his own inimitable manner. Below, the Dynamic Duo of Steadham and Johnson team up again, this time to inculcate a neophyte Wabash man in the folkways of the campus.

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From Honored Guests to Lowly Rhynes For the upperclassmen, Freshman Sunday means a return to a familiar, pre-established way of life. But for the freshmen it is completely different: they are treated with remarkable deference, rushing through the hectic days and nights and being inun¬ dated by an endless stream of mixers, jags, out¬ stretched hands and grinning faces. This charade of pseudo-cordiality changes abruptly, in fact, virtually overnight. The novice is given his first hint of the trials of Rhynedom toward the end of Freshman week in a chat with that mysterious, august body, the Senior Council. Two days following, the annual campus fun and frolic begins, and the sale of freshman pots once again turns Steck ' s a tidy profit. Meanwhile, for the freshman, the heretofore benevolent upperclassmen become, for several months at least, some of the most obnoxious, overbearing people he has ever met.

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Tradition Personified What happens to a rhyne after he enters the Chapel is an excellent example of a highly structured folkway in operation. When he has proven to the satisfaction of a Senior Council member (or to an underhanded upperclassman masquerading as such) that he cannot sing Old Wabash under pressure, he is swept up into the gears of a machine which is acti¬ vated only twice a year—the Council as Judge. Told to write the song free from harassment—and without mistakes—the rhynes scatter throughout the Chapel and toil away. The scrawled results are pored over by Council members while the nervous mis¬ creants wait with bated breath in the choir pews. Two lucky winners of the tonsorial prize—Denny Lawson and Richard Perry—emerge from the machin¬ ery and immediately enter a more formidable institu¬ tion: John Evans as Barber. The finished products are gloated over momentarily by those who tried them and found them musically lacking. Then they are sent forth, living proof of the puissance of the Senior Coun¬ cil and the actuality of the word indoctrination . 20