Here is the pertinent part of the background for my book of stories about living in an informal commune outside of New Haven, Conn., circa 1970. Most of us had connections to Yale.
There were a lot of well-known names at Yale the year I showed up, and others who would soon enjoy a splash of fame, or -- like the characters in Doonesbury -- would become more permanent fixtures in the landscape. George W. Bush was a couple of classes ahead of mine, regarded at the time as kind of looney-tune frat boy character from a powerful political family then rooted in Connecticut. (After all, his father ran the CIA.) I didn't care much about the state of Connecticut, I just wanted it to legalize the birth control pill, which it soon did.
W. was a boozer in a dawning era of New Age stoners, an embarrassment to the spirt of the times. Other big names included high-profile jocks such as swimmer Don Schollander, who won an Olympic gold. I stared at him one morning, searching for the glow of fame (or simply a Florida tan) while serving him toast and orange juice in the Calhoun residential college dining hall where I worked my 'bursary' job. Scholarship athletes, and other rich kids, did not have bursary jobs.
My freshman class contributed two football players who made names for themselves. Calvin Hill went on to play for the Dallas Cowboys, and starred for a Superbowl team. A rare Black face on campus, Calvin was in my American history class and once came to my dorm room to borrow my notes. He stood in the doorway while I lacked the wit, and the confidence, to try to befriend him.
Freshman Quarterback Brian Dowling’s fame was more enduring; he became the model for the cartoon character B.D., Doonesbury’s archetypical helmet-head, always depicted wearing his helmet to the breakfast table. Cartoonist Gary Trudeau, a couple of classes behind mine, was a mere freshman when he began picking on established Yale sports culture. I don’t know who the model for Zonker was; there were, in those days, plenty of candidates.
The Yale campus had a best-selling author on the faculty as well, a Classics professor, of all things, Erich Segal, whose authorship of "Love Story" (the story of "a girl who died") seemed to illustrate the lightness of pop culture fame. The book became a movie with a name actress in the lead role. But neither the book nor the movie changed the world, and the people I hung around with thought there were more important things to do, such as stopping the Vietnam War.
One of the 'floormates' in my freshman year went on to play a role in the Clinton administration, arguably a way of doing good. That became the mantra of those times: Down with personal ambition for wealth and status. Up with doing good, making the world a better place.
And even at a time when media attention was ignoring traditional Ivies like young GW Bush and covering sex, drugs and political protests on campus, it wasn't hard to run into the scions of wealthy or influential families. One of our pothead set, a Long Island kid like myself, belonged to a family that owned newspapers and glossy magazines. Almost anybody with journalistic or writing ambitions would have had the sense to maintain that connection. I lost it.
But what I will always have, though it would never appear on a youthful resume, is the memory of the "hippie house," the rented farmhouse in a town outside of New Haven, where a small collection of Yalies and their friends and lovers began the project of creating an alternative adulthood to the then-available mainstream models.
How did it go? About as well, or ill, as could be expected. But it provided me with the memories that became these "House Stories," or the basis for these stories -- which almost by definition means something worth talking about.
Please take a look: House Stories
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