Editor’s note: we have two very different styles of tribute for Professor Waite. History major Bob Heiss was Waite’s student; Yani Counelis knew the man and his family intimately but never formally studied with him. We thank both authors for graciously sharing their work with us and for accommodating each other’s approaches and styles. Bob […]
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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.
Whitney Stoddard
I doubt that upon hearing mention of Prof. Stoddard many Williams alumni from our era, will think first of his important scholarship in engaged sculpture of medieval French churches or his parallel interest in modern architecture. Nor will many be reminded immediately of his broad service as advisor to pre-architecture students, administration counsel on architecture […]
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Lane Faison
Lane Faison: A great teacher, he taught in his own distinctive way. Lane swept the boards with his grad school teaching at Yale and Princeton and then later at Williams. The Williams grad degree in Art History didn’t exist before him. He helped bring over Henri Focillon, a famous art historian from France, who influenced […]
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