Category:

Places

Today’s students may not be aware that we were presented with no choice of entrée at mealtimes for four long years: either we had to eat the meal chosen by the college foodservice or else hit the snack bar. Fortunately for hungry students, the A&W chain sold hamburgers and fries as well as root beer, […]

  Prior to the advent of the modern electronic era, the arrival of the day’s mail always generated palpable expectations in the denizens of any institutional residential setting, whether it be summer camp, the military, or college. As a matter of expense, pay phones provided by the AT&T monopoly were not dialed up regularly by […]

When we arrived on campus in 1964, Belvidere Brooks House was only three years old.  It was the 1961 replacement structure for the classic DKE fraternity house, which had burned down in 1959. Understandably, it would have been prohibitively costly to replicate the DKE house, but it seemed surprising that the new residential house was […]

The Murky Secrets of Williamstown’s Green River We sing the school song about the majesty of the surrounding mountains as “monarchs”—Mount Greylock, Pine Cobble, and so forth. But what of the lowly Green River meandering around Williamstown? The lyric of the song does recognize that “the peaceful river floweth gently by.” While mountains and streams […]

Williams and other Massachusetts college students in the 1960’s who hailed from urban places like New York and Washington, DC, where the drinking age was 18, found the drinking age of 21 in the Commonwealth to be not merely quaint, but puritanical. Indeed, it seemed to be an annoyance and an impediment to their social […]

Lowell Davis:
In the summer of 1964, nine freshmen (including me) were told that due to an overabundance of freshmen we would be living in a renovated home just outside the freshman quad. We lived in the home occupied by Jack Savacool who was a French professor at Williams.

John Stickney ‘68, writing in the travel section of The New York Times in 2003, described the Williams College snack bar to his readership: “This breakfast or lunch standby, open to the public, has wooden-beam ceilings and a broad semicircle of tall windows. A motherly counter staff serves up comfort-food favorites like curly French fries […]