Undergraduate Page
PRINCETON. REUNION
By DAVID SYMON (Magdalen College, Oxford) THE summer term was ending when we arrived at Princeton University. Haggard examinees were looking at the results pinned up on the notice boards. The stale air of celebrations lingered in the rooms, over the litter-strewn tables and the empty bottles. The furniture was in chaos, for all the men who were graduating that year were taking away their beds, chairs, drawers and tables; and next year's freshmen were replacing them with their own. Many of the undergraduates who remained had brought up their fathers' cars to celebrate the coming of the vacation ; since only bicycles were allowed in term time. But most of the influx of automobiles and rowdiness was due to the arrival of the " alumni " for their annual reunion.
Alumni are graduates ; and all those who graduate together are called the class of that year. This " class " consciousness is born in the undergraduate days, when the boys decorate the walls of their rooms with great banners saying, " PRINCETON 1950" or " PRINCETON 1951 "; and it lasts a lifetime. Class secretaries keep in contact with the alumni, and invite them to return to Prince- ton for the annual reunion, to meet their old friends, parade through the streets, drink together, and perhaps subscribe in that mellow mood towards the foundation of a new building. Through these subscriptions many new quadrangles have been added to the university in the last few decades ; and each has a large stone panel giving its name and the numbers of the classes whose combined donations paid for it.
The architecture of every new building there has to be Gothic ; whether it is a quadrangle or undergraduates' rooms, a chapel, library or gymnasium. From a turret in one of the high embattled towers a plume of smoke drifts upwards ; for that is the furnace chimney for the swimming baths. The thickly-planted green trees and the cool lawns take the edge off this incongruity, and lend some of the air of an Oxford college, if not the peace ; for the quietness is con- tinually broken by friendly shouts. " If you want anyone in a dorm.," I was told, " you just go into the middle of the quad and holler."
One afternoon, as we were strolling down one of the paths in the campus, a grizzled old man turned aside and asked us, " Say, can you tell me the way to Henry Hall ? " We knew that he meant the building, not the band conductor ; but none of us knew the exact whereabouts of Henry, so we admitted, in our best British accents, that we were strangers there. The man looked at us and said, " Oh, you must be from this Oxford-Cambridge track squad. I heard you were coming here. Wal, I reckon I've come as far as you for this reunion. I've come from Washington State on the western coast. Yes, it's taken me eleven days driving to get here."
It was a slight shock to see respected business-men like this dressed up as tigers, and even worse to find men striding down the avenues in kilts of an orange and black check, with plaids of the same striking colours flung across their shoulders. We discovered, however, that the tiger is the symbol of Princeton University, and orange and black are its colours. Each of the alumni on his arrival goes to his class secretary and collects his fancy dress, a different costume for each year, and wears it for the rest of the week. The younger classes have their marquees, and some of the larger ones their bands, which we heard playing there far into the night.
The climax of the celebrations was the parade, or " P-rade " as they pronounced and spelt it. In the sticky midday heat on Satur- day the alumni gathered on the lawns in front of the old Nassau Hall, all dressed in their orange and black costumes, carrying their banners and slogans, accompanied by the bands, and large numbers of wives and children. When the assembly was complete the P-rade began strolling through the streets in procession, class by class. Military brass bands, naval fife and drum bands, university jazz bands and the Philadelphia Clan Macgregor pipe band marched between them, imposing some form of step on a few of their followers. As they moved through the streets men broke from the ranks to greet bystanders whom they recognised, and old friends exchanged snatches of news. At last the procession turned in from Prospect Avenue to the baseball field to watch the Princeton v. Yale match in full force. The class of 1924, which was celebrating its 25th reunion, came first, carrying a barrage of gas-filled orange balloons ; they released these as they climbed to their seats, and the crowds cheered to see them floating away in the wind. The class of 1939 was also loudly applauded ; large banners proclaimed that it had been away for ten years, but it still remembered some French ; and it supported this claim with a display of French phrases and punning transla- tions, varying from the witty to the obscene. The 1944 class was all in pierrot costumes, with black circles on its orange pantaloons ; and it contained in its ranks three performing elephants, prodded on by circus attendants. The banners of the last classes boasted the rate of their baby-production.
The bands went round and round the field, leading the classes to their positions in the stands, until all the hot and dusty alumni were seated. With the aid of ice-cream vendors many of the men managed to survive the gruelling afternoon, applaud Princeton's baseball victory, and then filter down to the enormous Palmer Stadium to watch our track-meet. Their dappled costumes combined with the white of the girls' dresses to make the concrete tiers attractively colourful. The bands arrived, too, and celebrated the frequent Princeton-Cornell victories with rousing tunes ; so that we were soon picking up phrases of the Nassau song.
In the evening, after hearty singing on the steps of Nassau Hall, the younger alumni went to their marquees, where unlimited beer was flowing and the bands were playing again. The children had been packed off to bed, but a few of the wives lingered on. Some of them joined in the fun ; others were quiet, and seemed a little apprehensive. But the merrymaking was quite orderly ; the atmo- sphere friendly, not riotous. After our dinner in the Nassau Tavern, the athletics teams moved from tent to tent, drinking, talking and listening to the tireless swing bands. I discussed the British Welfare State with a marine underwriter from New York, who was dressed in a baseball cap and a striped blazer. " It's an interesting experi- ment," he said, " but I don't think it will work. You've got to remember the profit motive ; if you take it away you just have a lot of slackers. Then you may have to use force, and you get in a com- plete mess. Look at the state of Russia. No. When you get back to England, remember the profit motive."
So all night the serious and the inconsequential conversations continued, till the dispersal of the last revellers left the marquees quiet in the dawn. Many of the "old guard," who had been gone from the university for more than fifty years, had spent a quieter night and turned out sprucely for the final Baccalaureate Service in the university chapel. The younger men turned up, too, in their sober ordinary clothes, for by now all the costumes had been handed back. The American mood flicked over from the absurd to the solemn ; and as the morning passed the alumni moved off to their homes by car and train, leaving the university to its vacation quietness among the Neo-Gothic buildings and the green trees.
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