Cartoon from the 1878 Caldron, a senior class yearbook. (Click all images to enlarge.)
There was a time, before the advent of radios and recordings, and long before the current era of individually headphoned, asocial music, when everyone sang. Sang together, without coercion, for the sheer joy of singing. (Anyone who sings will tell you that it is a marvelous means of community-building.) Williston Seminary students were no exception. There were, of course, many singing-societies and glee clubs, but any occasion or activity, from football games to debate meetings, was a cause for music. Student letters describe athletes and spectators riding the train to away games, singing all the way.
Many of the tunes were from well-known songs of the time, but often with words unique to Williston. Some were borrowed from college songbooks, notably those of Yale. To disseminate the lyrics, student organizations printed song sheets and songbooks. “Sammy,” by Pitt Johnson, class of 1905, and still ubiquitous today, made its first printed appearance in a song sheet from that year.
Over the last several decades, formal forensic debate has led a somewhat checkered history at Williston. Last year a new Political Awareness Club presented several well-attended and well-argued, if informal, debates. And in 2013 members of the AP U.S. History class went all the way to the national We The People finals in Washington. So debate is currently alive and in reasonable health. But it doesn’t compare with what was arguably a golden age of debating, for roughly sixty years beginning around 1860.
A Gamma Sigma debate, ca. 1935. (WIlliam Rittase) (Click all images to enlarge.)
There were two rival societies: Adelphi (“Brotherhood”), representing students from the Classical side of the curriculum; and Gamma Sigma (from the Greek initials for Socrates’ admonition to “Know Thyself”), drawing its membership from students in the Scientific program. The elder society, Adelphi, was founded in 1853, and was initially open to all students. But the growth of the Scientific program produced friction. The Classicals arrogated to themselves a tradition that as members of the intellectually superior division of the Seminary, all positions of leadership within Adelphi should devolve to them. Naturally the Scientifics objected. Unable either to achieve compromise or extract an appropriate apology, in 1870 they withdrew from Adelphi and founded their own organization. The rivalry continued unabated for decades, long after the initial slight was forgotten.
Adelphi’s unequivocal motto. (Constitution and By-Laws, 1858)
In March, 1881, an attempt at reconciliation resulted in the creation of the campus newspaper, The Willistonian, to be “published by the Societies of Williston Seminary.” Good feeling and cooperation lasted for exactly one issue, after which Adelphi published The Willistonian on its own. (The newspaper became independent of either society in 1894.) Continue reading →
1932. The national economic depression was at its worst. President Herbert Hoover, forced to defend his record, was about to receive the worst electoral whipping ever at the hands of Franklin Roosevelt, who promised a New Deal for the American People. But even FDR’s most rabid supporters knew that recovery would take years. And the people who managed tuition-dependent private schools weren’t sure they had years. Williston Academy’s Headmaster Archibald Galbraith (served 1919-1949) was no exception.
To be sure, Williston was in somewhat better shape than some of its competitors. The 1920s had been reasonably good years for fund-raising. When the 1929 crash came, much of the school’s assets were liquid, since Williston was midway through a major construction project. So we were less affected by the implosion of the investment market. The construction of the Recreation Center (see previous post) proceeded on schedule, and the building was opened in 1930. But endowment was nearly nonexistent, and the pool of academically eligible students whose families could afford boarding school was shrinking.
One answer was more aggressive marketing. Gone were the days when a combination of alumni networking and discreet ads in a few prestigious magazines was sufficient to create a viable group of applicants for admission. Galbraith needed to cast his net wider, to appeal to families that perhaps had never considered private schools. Among the products of this re-thinking was a 1932 pictorial pamphlet entitled “Williston Boys at Home.”
The booklet is nearly devoid of text, in contrast to the dry, text-heavy and pictureless Annual Catalogue of the time. It manages to avoid nearly any mention of Williston’s crumbling Old Campus, although more than half the students lived there and all classes met there — in fact, whether through oversight or design, there is no reference to the academic program at all. This Williston is a place of hockey and dancing, theatricals and swimmin’ holes. Times are good. Williston boys are indeed at home.
(“Williston Boys at Home” was generously donated to the Archives in 2008 by Gordon Cronin of Taurus Books, Northampton, MA.)
The sole evocation of the “Old Campus” in the entire booklet.
Most recently Worthy Durgin headed community foundations in Greensboro and Cary, North Carolina. Now retired, he is “immersed in spiritual quest and writing.” A couple of years back, he sent Richard Gregory several perceptive vignettes of Williston life back in the sixties. Dick, who has contributed several memoirs of his own, shared Worthy’s words with the Archives. My thanks for Worth’s permission to publish this! — RT
Worthy Durgin ’68
The old gym was an outgrown, but proud building. The basketball court was directly above the swimming pool. During wrestling matches, when our senior heavyweight wrestler, who was deaf, wrestled, all the students there would jump and stomp in cadence so that he could feel our support, since he could not hear our cheers. The void of the pool beneath the floor amplified the waves of exhortation. (The common effect of this cacaphony, coupled with the knowledge that if this strong guy could not hear the cheers, he likely could not hear a potential injury-saving whistle either, led to many an expression of relief on opposing wrestlers’ faces, once they had been pinned.) Often this was the deciding match in a meet. But we could never carry the big guy off the mat on our shoulders — he was huge, and flaunting victory was not his style.
