Two parts to this, both written in 1967 by Tom Stevens, our class speaker and humorist extraordinaire. Check out both… Tom Stevens, vintage 1986 Andy Weiss 1. Classmate Andy Weiss lets loose in his theatrical role as (temporary) villain 2. The Talking Heads of the Lower Reading Room. Ever wonder who those solemn stalwarts […]
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Jack Sawyer, the Visionary President We Hardly Knew
President John Sawyer was a distant figure to most of us, the more so because he was not the best of public speakers and seemed to have a certain reserve in gatherings. It was rather paradoxical, really, on a campus where the Mark Hopkins ideal of professors and students engaging in lively discussion in a very personal educational process was the norm.
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Performance art? Street theater? Library Theater? Happening?
The academic monotony of the New Williams was abruptly shattered at 11 pm Wednesday night as 35 students witnessed a near-fatal knifing incident in the lower reading room of the college library.
The victim, Paul Sloan ’67, and fellow student Andy Weiss ’68, became involved in a dispute arising from Weiss’s attempt to type in the study room.
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Spiking the Stevens-donated ball at Wood House
Tom Stevens, in one of his several efforts to breathe life into the Hamilton B. Wood Residential Unit (which, in a rare somber mood, he likened to the Dark Hole of Calcutta) donated the autographed volleyball (and net). It caught on immediately. The normally sedate were converted, people forget all about lunch, and the neighboring […]
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Portraits fuming at poor hanging
Scene: The lower reading room of the Williams College Library
Time: About 3 am.
A kind of late-night emptiness, accentuated by the buzzing of fluorescent lights, pervades the room. All the dawn-scribblers and midnight-oilers have left. From across the campus the gym clock sounds its three o’clock dirge, and the dark portraits, silent for generations, finally speak.
First to break the hollow silence are Charles Dewey, 1824-1866, a weak-eyed, rather pale former trustee; and to his right the stern nobly-bewhiskered benefactor Frederick Ferris Thompson, he of the Memorial Chapel and the science buildings.
Williams in transition in the 60s: almost a frat boy
Editor’s note: One of the many changes we witnessed as members of both the Class and Generation of 1968 was a complete overhaul of the social environment of Williams College. Future treatment(s) will delve into Jack Sawyer’s influence on the process; here we focus on how it felt to be half-in, or half-out of the […]
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We gotta get out of this place
“If it’s the Last Thing We EVER DO!” This existential declaration in music hit the airways in 1965, a classic British Invasion contribution by Eric Burdon and the Animals. It was immediately embraced by collegians—collegians ending the evening at a lousy mixer, lamenting an unhappy social life, disgusted by a particular academic experience, or […]
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