Yale University - Banner / Pot Pourri Yearbook (New Haven, CT)

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r i These were the sights and sounds of a year. We looked and listened, and we wondered how clearly and loudly they would be recorded in the annals of history. Were we striding triumphantly into the dawn of a new day, crossing the threshold of a new world in the making? Or were we stumbling blindly into the dusk of a dying one? It was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness... We paused, silhouetted against the fiery glare of an atomic age, wondering how far our shadows would extend into the future. Bb

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THE senior class was being sent into the World Beyond with little more to shield them from its slings and arrows than a Yale diploma. Their entrance in June would receive little notice ; it was a world which was preoccupied with the problem of how to keep man from destroying himself. But if the class of 1955 was confronted with a host of problems in this brave new world, they could somewhat gleefully leave a number of minor ones to the underclass- men. Another tuition increase was scheduled, this time to the tune of two hundred dollars. A general lowering of grades, coupled with a suggested raising of the standards for Dean ' s List, tore the last shred of meaning from the legendary Gentleman ' s Average. Freshmen were to receive no choice in their allocation to residential colleges, and seniors would henceforth be required to take a fifth course. The crackdown in the administration fur- ther decreed the death of leniency in the cut system, and the new controversial school cal- endar heralded the demise of such old favor- ites as the Thanksgiving holidays. The crown- ing blow of all, however, came not from Woodbridge Hall, but from a tired wooden shanty on Park Street: the price of a pitcher of beer was raised from seventy-five cents to one dollar at the Old Heidelberg. Truly, nothing was sacred. ' And then into the world tve come The youth dramatizes himself and his world. The mirror in which he sees himself casts not a life-sized reflection, but one which magnifies him and frames him against the background of an age which he envisages as unique. Perhaps Sights and Sounds 1954-1955 is similarly guilty. Perhaps it emphasizes names and incidents which are of only ephemeral significance. Perhaps, in its historical nearsightedness, it is blind to the ideas and events which will neither fade nor be forgotten but which will be stressed by those who will write of us in the future. But there is a virtue in such a limited view: it distills, if only for a moment, the ingredients, great and small, which gives an age its peculiar flavor. If it has captured that flavor so that it may be recalled by those who tasted of it, it has succeeded. What sort of a year was it? We can hardly say; one must stand back from a mountain to judge its magnitude. Certainly 1954-1955 was a year of futility, of frustrated hopes, of broken ideals; certainly it was one of great strides in mans yearning to master his own destiny. In short, it was neither the best of times nor the worst of times, but lay somewhere between. The sights and sounds were the only variables; the essential continuity re- mained. In this sense, it was like the years that had passed, and the years which were to come. 25

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honors