BS: College legends about famous alumni.

Subject: College legends about famous alumni.
From: Jim Dixon
Date: 10 Sep 01 - 12:13 PM

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?

Subject: RE: BS: College legends about famous alumni.
From: wysiwyg
Date: 10 Sep 01 - 12:21 PM

And then the stories can become song challenges! LOL!

~S~

Subject: RE: BS: College legends about famous alumni.
From: Mrrzy
Date: 10 Sep 01 - 01:12 PM

I went to college with Tracy Chapman. We used to send her home from parties to fetch her guitar if she hadn't already brought it...

Not music, but one of my sisters went to college with one of Robert Culp's daughters, who had anorexia before there was such a diagnosis. They used to call her Bones.

I graduated with one of Bob Dylan's daughters and we all laid in wait, circling vaguely around her in case her dad showed up. He didn't.

UVA has all kinds of legends about Edgar Allen Poe, who went here as an undergraduate and lived on The Lawn, which is a big deal if you care about such things. Again, sorry, not musical. I guess the Tracy Chapman thing is the most musical, although I was a grad student here when Dave Matthews was an undergraduate, and I'm sure stories abound about that too!

Subject: RE: BS: College legends about famous alumni.
From: catspaw49
Date: 10 Sep 01 - 01:36 PM

Around here the most famous legends are about Woody Hayes, the longtime coach of Ohio State football. Coaches since have had the hardest time in simply measuring up, not to the reality of the man, but to the legend. That's true in almost any school where a coach like that has been........Alabama and Bear Byant is another example. when Paterno leaves Penn State, I pity the next few coaches.

Anyway......There were always plenty of jokes about Woody. One ended with a punch line of "That'sGod, he just thinks he's Woody Hayes." During the real haydays of Woody's career there were some stories that players still swear to til this day. This story comes from several players including 2-time Heisman winner, Archie Griffin.

Outside it was pouring rain....a real frog strangler with thunder and lightning....the whole works. Woody had the team suited for practice and was in the stadium video room with them reviewing game footage when he suddenly walked over and switched off the projector. He walked to a window and looked out at the downpour and then turned and said, "Okay, everybody out!" The players grabbed their helmets and by the time they had gone down the hall and out the ramp, the rain had miraculously stopped! They practiced for about a half hour when out of the blue, Woody yelled, "That's it.....Everybody in!!" As they re-entered the ramp area the heavy rain started again as quickly as it had stopped. I guess only God and Woody could control the weather.

Spaw

Subject: RE: BS: College legends about famous alumni.
From: Jim Dixon
Date: 10 Sep 01 - 01:57 PM

Mrrzy: Your stories about your classmates sound like the kind of thing discussed in this thread: BS: My claim to fame - what's yours?. They don't really qualify as the kind of legend I had in mind, because they either (1) come from your personal experience rather than hearsay, or (2) don't tell a story of something that a famous alumnus/alumna allegedly did.

I'm more interested in those stories about Edgar Allan Poe. Can you tell one? Have you ever tried to confirm any of those stories by looking them up in a biography? What I'm trying to get at here is folklore.

Poe is a tough case, though, because lots of material has been published about him, and unless you're familiar with all of it, you can't classify any particular story as folklore. That is, you can't tell whether the story was passed down orally from one student to another for a long time, or whether someone recently got the story from a book.

Spaw: Your story is closer to what I had in mind, but interestingly, instead of "cutting a great man down to size" it builds him up!

Subject: RE: BS: College legends about famous alumni.
From: catspaw49
Date: 10 Sep 01 - 02:20 PM

Yeah, sorry Jim.....But Woody did a better job of cutting himself down to human size with his outbreaks of temper toward the end of his career......pushing the ABC cameraman and slugging the Clemson player! It was a sad end and written as most are by the man himself and not by others. (Woody remained at OSU and as a Professor Emeritus, was still VERY popular here in his last years)

Spaw

Subject: RE: BS: College legends about famous alumni.
From: Mrrzy
Date: 10 Sep 01 - 02:25 PM

I'll ask around about Poe. I was a grad student and the tales are mostly undergrad, but I know some people...

Subject: RE: BS: College legends about famous alumni.
From: Jim Dixon
Date: 10 Sep 01 - 02:38 PM

Spaw, you needn't apologize. Your story is a relevant contribution. It just shows that folklore can take different forms.

Subject: RE: BS: College legends about famous alumni.
From: Burke
Date: 10 Sep 01 - 08:39 PM

There's a cow on a top floor story around the place where I work, as well. I think a faculty brat may have been involved, but no one famous. I wonder if it's an urban legend thing, or the kind of stunt frat's did all over.

Subject: RE: BS: College legends about famous alumni.
From: Sourdough
Date: 10 Sep 01 - 08:51 PM

I'd heard the cow story, too. At Yale, though, it was a horse.

And then there was the VW that was disassembled and brought upstairs to be reassembled and discovered.

Sourdough

Subject: RE: BS: College legends about famous alumni.
From: Jim Dixon
Date: 11 Sep 01 - 07:54 PM

Here's why I think the story of DeWitt Wallace and the cow is an urban legend:

If you think the story is true, you pretty much have to assume the story was passed down orally from one student to another starting around the time when DeWitt Wallace was a student until the present day. Now it's somewhat believable that a funny story about a famous person would be repeated over and over, but there must have been a period of time when DeWitt Wallace wasn't famous.

Maybe people would remember his name for a few years after he was gone, but eventually he would be forgotten, and if the story was repeated at all, it would just be "some guy" who led a cow to the top floor of Old Main. It took DW many years to become rich enough to start donating millions of dollars to the college, and until that happened, the average student wouldn't have known who the heck he was. Even if newspaper articles identified him as the son of a former president of the college, they wouldn't have made the connection.

Oh, I suppose it's possible that some classmate of DW's, while visiting the campus many years later, made the connection, and said, "Hey! I remember him! He's the guy who got kicked out for leading a cow to the top floor of Old Main!" And maybe some student heard him, and the story took off from there.

But even if something like that happened, it's not enough to convince me the story is reliably true.

And the same objection could be made to the story about Burl Ives.

Burke: Where do you work?