In the Footsteps of Flash and Temporary What Ran’s Doing on Summer Vacation

A few weeks ago, to my great surprise and excitement, I was awarded a little grant to study for a brief spell at Yale this summer.
It may strike you that, at 66, I’m a bit old to start traipsing upon the hallowed cobblestones of this fine old academic institution, wandering amid the gothic buildings where have trod the fine leather shoes of such luminaries as William F. Buckley, Bob Woodward, Sinclair Lewis, Gerald Ford, Bill and Hillary Clinton, William Howard Taft (a half dozen U. S. presidents, in fact), Cole Porter, Clarence Thomas, Ben Stein, Dick Cheney—well, maybe that’s a good place to stop.
If you Google “famous Yale grads,” you’ll get a list that would stretch from New Haven to Cambridge. Personally, I’ve been impressed with Yale ever since I was a kid and found out from my comic books that Flash Gordon went there.

But I do have a feeling I’m going to be out of my league—I well remember a little rhyme I learned in my elementary school days:

Here’s to dear old New England
The home of the bean and the cod
Where the Lowells speak only to Cabots
And the Cabots speak only to God

I’m not sure just how well a grits-loving, vowel-slurring, tractor-driving retirement-aged UGA grad is going to get along in the Ivy League, albeit briefly. (At least Yale and Georgia have a bulldog in common.) But I’m looking at this grant not just as an academic opportunity but as a possibility of integrating myself into the Yale culture. I’m seeing a chance to ring the famed Tower Bells, to join a singing group, and certainly to affiliate myself with a secret society—preferably Skull and Bones like President Bush, his dad, and his dad, etc.

I’m kidding around here, but my summer’s adventure is actually a serious pursuit—I’ll be in a group studying slave narratives with the foremost scholar on that topic in the country. I’ve been reading the assigned literature for weeks now, becoming steeped in the harrowing tales written by slaves in the early to middle 1800s. They’re heartrending and often surprisingly eloquent—remember, it was against the law to teach slaves to read and write.
So I’m all set to go up to New Haven and gather a lot of information that I can bring back to my students here in Richmond, but I do find I’m getting no respect at all from my friends.
“Did I tell you I’m going up to New Haven this summer?” I told my friend Brian.
“What?” he says. “Are you delivering a package there?”
“Did I tell you I’m going to Yale to study this summer?” I told my friend Andy.
“What?” he says. “Are you planning to become a locksmith?”
Very funny, fellows. You’ll regret that sarcasm when I choose a secret society.

I read online that a new member of Skull and Bones must first be prepared to adopt a nickname, and I can certainly do that. Barb calls me “Ran,” and that will work fine. I learned online that George W. could never decide on a nickname, so as a temporary measure, his secret brothers nicknamed him “Temporary,” which remains his S&B name to this day.
I also learned there are perhaps costumes involved in secret society initiation, and I’d like to go on record right now as saying I will NOT wear a dress again, even to become a Bonesman (yes, they’re actually called that). And I didn’t mean to say “again”—that just slipped out.
Apparently some of the secret society rituals take place in what Yale students call the “tombs,” and I couldn’t figure out exactly what those “tombs” are. I need to say here that at my age, I don’t want to have anything to do with tombs.

Going to Yale in the summer is, of course, a definite disadvantage because I will miss The Game. It’s hard to be a true Eli and not see a single Harvard-Yale football game during one’s New Haven studies.
(Yalies are called Elis for Elihu Yale, the philanthropist after whom the college is named. I read online that Yale actually had a donor who gave a lot more money to the school than did Elihu Yale, but this other fellow’s name was Jeremiah Dummer, and the school preferred not to be known as Dummer College.)
As I mentioned, I do plan to join one of the singing groups while I’m there, notably the Whiffenpoofs. I don’t know the “poor little lambs—baah, baah, baah” song, but I do sing in a bluegrass band locally, and we know a lot of songs involving other farm animals. For instance, there’s “Cluck Old Hen” and “Whoa, Mule.” I feel sure either of those would impress the heck out of the New England undergrads.
Don’t worry—I’ll do Virginia proud. Or, as we say at Yale, “boola, boola.

Randy Fitzgerald is chair of the English and journalism department at Virginia Union University. He is a former Richmond Times-Dispatch columnist and University of Richmond administrator. His blog is www.randyfitzgerald.blog.com.

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