In the thread about Burl Ives, Art Thieme mentioned a story from Eastern Illinois University in Charleston which he called "local lore." As the story goes, Ives "didn't just leave college in his 3rd year to go on the road. He was found in a girls dorm after hours (a bad thing in those days) and was tossed out of school."

This strikes me as similar to a legend in common circulation at Macalester College, my own alma mater. There, the most famous alumnus (at least before Walter Mondale and Kofi Annan became famous) was DeWitt Wallace, founder of The Reader's Digest. He was also a big benefactor of the college, financing several new buildings in the 1960's. His father, James Wallace, had been president of the college when DeWitt was a youth, and DeWitt was a student there himself for a while, but didn't graduate.

According to the legend, DeWitt was expelled for a prank he pulled. Somehow he and some accomplices led a cow into Old Main and up the stairs to the top floor, where James Wallace's office was. Presumably they did this at night, and left it to be found there the next morning. Furthermore, the legend states that, while you can coax or prod a cow into climbing a flight of stairs, there's no way you can make it go down again. So the cow had to be butchered and brought down piecemeal. One can only imagine the mess!

On campus, the legend was widely accepted as true, although as far as I know, it never appeared in print while DeWitt Wallace was alive. More recently, it was mentioned in the alumni magazine, but no sources were cited.

I have always been skeptical about the story myself. It has the smell of an urban legend. I even went to the Macalester Library and looked up an official history of The Reader's Digest, the first chapter of which is a biography of DeWitt Wallace up to the point where he started the magazine. There it gives an innocuous reason for his leaving school - he was bored. I realize this doesn't prove anything.

Maybe the story is just too good to be true. Several elements account for its great appeal to students. It's funny. It cuts a big man down to size. It expresses students' resentment of the administration, and their fear of punishment for breaking rules. And it explains the inexplicable: Why would such a great man leave such a great school?

It would be interesting to know whether other colleges have similar legends about their famous alumni. How about it, folks?