Class and Charter Day 2000
Your Day, My Recollections
by Patricia Tolles Smalley P'93
President Tobin told me that the speakers for this occasion are a distinguished group. They include my father, fellow trustees Carl Menges and Dick Couper, who says he and his family have given four of these talks, and Ellie Wertimer, whose remarks I greatly enjoyed a few years ago. The president also said that addressing you on this occasion would give me a chance to talk about the Hamilton of my youth, my father?s role here and to recall "any reminiscences that are meaningful to you and can be shared in mixed company."
That comment brought several thoughts to mind. The first was to read my father?s speech of 28 years ago. It was a fine speech and it wears well. (But you will hear only some moments from it today.) Another temptation was to read the speeches my brothers, my husband or my son would have written -- but I?ll refrain from that and offer them as future candidates so we can outdistance the Coupers.
My own links to Hamilton are many -- my father, Class of ?28, an instructor for two, and dean for 25; my son; a cousin in the Class of ?93; and a nephew, the son of my younger brother, Tony, currently attending. My cousin is represented here by her grandmother, Maria Teresa Doyle, and it is a special pleasure for our family to have her here today.
But perhaps I should focus on a couple of family members who wanted to come to Hamilton but did not. There are two. The first, my brother, Terry, wanted to come here, but was told that his father, the dean of the College, had enough problems or challenges, and he should look elsewhere. He chose another, we always said lesser school you may have heard of -- Williams College.
However, his heart has always been here. Terry shot his first baskets, tended his first bar and I suspect drank his first beers on this campus. He also met his wife, Jacqueline, here, though she arrived with another date. Theirs was a remarkable union, producing two fine daughters and now a very special granddaughter. Rit Fuller, please count her in the class of 2020.
And the other is my sister-in-law who planned, at age 17, to come to a house party weekend -- until her older brother, the aforementioned spouse, calling in from graduate school forbade it. Truly. That perhaps tells you something about his student days. She later married a Yale man who was a Marine, so I suspect she would have been okay at Hamilton house parties.
That background gives me some knowledge of this community and the individuals here. Communities and individuals are confusing things. Where does community begin and individual end, and vice versa? News events in Miami, Zimbabwe and around the world show us this confusion.
In describing it, a 20th-century novelist wrote that we seek, and I quote, "some kind of way to scratch out a balance between being an individual and being something bigger than yourself. This," he continued, "has always been a puzzlement -- how to have a community, but remain an individual -- how could you manage to be separate but joined, and somehow not lose sight of either your separateness or your togetherness.
The two conditions go up and down like a teeter-totter, first one and then the other, tipping the balance. If you set out alone and sovereign, unconnected to a family, a religion, a nationality, a tradition, a class, then pretty soon you are too lonely, too self-invented and unique, and too aware that there is no one like you. If you submerge yourself completely in something, your town, your profession, your hobby, then pretty soon you have to struggle up to the surface because you need to be sure that even though you are part of something big, some community, you still exist as a single unit with a single mind. It is the fundamental contrariness of the USA -- the illogical but optimistic notion that you can create a union of individuals in which every person is king. I envy those who can find and fit themselves into a small and crowded circle with moments when they can step outside of that and vouch for their independence from it, and then happily step back in." ... end of quote.
This community (the hilltop and the town and the College where I was raised) has the space, the support, security and a sense of adventure and uniqueness to do that -- to give one a sense of self and of community. I hope it has done that for you; it did for me. Let me say something about the community I came to and how it compares to your community here today, with thanks to Frank Lorenz and colleagues here for the research.
My parents came to "the Hill" in 1947 from Utica College and World War II. Hamilton in ?47 had 599 men enrolled (97 were seniors). Fifteen percent of those were veterans of WW II, and 50 of them lived in the old gym; today you number 1,745 men and women (534 seniors) and no one intentionally sleeps in the gym. The faculty, staff and administration in ?47, totaled 50; today that number is 387; the College then was on 300 acres of land; today it owns 1,300 acres. In 1947 there were 19 buildings; today there are 68. Students carried five courses and classes met six days a week, with compulsory Chapel on the seventh; today the course load, you know, is more commonly four, and classes convene five days a week. In 1947: 30 states and four foreign countries (Canada, China, Greece and Norway) were represented in the student body, and today it is 40 states and 35 foreign countries.
The Hamilton of today is a larger, more complex place, but it shares a good deal with the Hamilton of 1947. It was then and is still a community of individuals -- with community and individuality important, and with teaching and learning greatly valued -- that is the reason Hamilton exists and thrives.
My parents came here as teachers, and they were team. The had a fine marriage, and Daddy maintained that was not hard. He said they had made a basic agreement: he got to make all the big decisions, and Mother made all the small ones. Then he defined that: he decided if they should recognize Red China and how to pay the national debt, and she determined how they raised the children and how they spent their time and money. That made getting along easy.
We were three children, fewer than our Doyle cousins who lived in Clinton and numbered six, so we always had plenty of family around for holidays and celebrations, good times and crises, graduations, school performances and recitals.
We also had a ready-made gang of playmates -- faculty children (the College Hill Killers), David Patton, Bobby Schmidt, the Cameron twins, Eric Weber, Barbara Graves and Katherine Johnston. Later when my younger brother, Tony, came along, he had a whole new group of faculty children friends -- the Wertimers, the Jones boys, the Richardson?s, and his fourth-grade girlfriend, who was, Jennifer Potter, now Hayes.
We loved growing up on the Hill. We played softball and touch football in the lot next to what was the dean?s house where the health center now stands. We rolled down the hill at football practice every autumn. If you were a Tolles you went to almost every single football game -- at home and away -- rain or shine. Terry and I remember getting up very early to drive to Schenectady, Haverford and even Earlham and Kenyon in Ohio. Daddy paced the sidelines, mother sat in the stands drinking hot coffee, and we roamed and shouted and never really understood how anyone else could win. Later our father decided some of the trips were pretty far away, so if he didn?t take the whole family, he rode the team bus; something my brother, Terry, has been known to do too. We lived in a community where education was valued and important. There were not philosophical discussions about cognitive and experiential learning -- it simply happened around you and you absorbed.
Daddy taught Restoration Drama, and given the number "underachievers," as he termed them, who took it, I think it was fairly described as a "gut."
My brothers and I learned to play bridge and chess looking over our parents? shoulders when they played with College students, and you learned to sing and play the piano with John Baldwin, the head of the music department, and John Ibach, a student, and later a fine surgeon and now accomplished jazz pianist.
My parents loved Hamilton. (They reveled in the colleagues and students and worked through the hard times, enjoying the good, and always, standing next to and with each other.) My mother did worry once after they had been here 10 or so years, that the freshman at the reception welcoming them at the start of the academic year, in her words, "looked so young -- much younger than before," to which Daddy pointed out, "Pat, the freshmen are always the same age." And they were and are!
Stories of my father, the dean, are many, including that he was one of the best at cleaning up, with a pail and rolled up pants, the water fights in South dorm. [After one such incident] the young man was called into the dean?s office and thoroughly berated for his bad grades and poor social behavior. Daddy thought he made the point well when he summed it up. ?Young man,? he said, ?it is simply clear that there is too much wine, women and song in your life. What are you going to do about it?? The young man thought. He looked penitent, and he said, ?Dean, you are absolutely right. I need to make some changes. I?ll quit the choir.?"
Despite that defeat, my father had many successes here. The faculty was one of them. He took great pride in the faculty and its accomplishments. He respected the superior teachers that were here on his arrival, despite the fact that many of them had picturesque nicknames. Professor Graves was "Digger," Earl Count was better known as "Noah Count," and Professor Marsh was "Swampy." They were a revered group. You will hear many of their names -- Cameron, Graves, Lindley, Barrett, Hamlin, Johnson and Johnston in the prizes given today. Others named in prizes include Lee, Wertimer, Todd and DePuy, and Daddy was proud that they joined the faculty while he was dean. Daddy knew that those who joined the faculty needed to be superb teachers dedicated to serving the individual student.
Additions to the faculty had to have the potential to be as great as those already in place. They include, teaching at Hamilton today, Professors Anderson, Briggs, Gescheider, Kinnel, Marki, Medina, Miller, Murphy, Pearle, Ring, Simon, Vaughan and Williams.
The dean also thought he should have authority and be a fearsome and awesome figure. But he never had not much luck at creating that image -- except ONCE.
It happened on a Sunday morning of a Spring House party weekend, and that is never a good time for Sunday morning is so close to Saturday night. On Saturday night, one group had hosted a dance, open to all the College, and then on Sunday another group had a party open to only a few "invited" groups. Some of those who had entertained all the night before were angered about not being included on Sunday and they set out with "Machiavellian skill" to get revenge. They ordered roses delivered, taxicabs to call and two tons of gravel to be deposited on the lawn in front of the closed party house. Why those getting the calls thought anyone wanted these things on Sunday morning is a bit of a mystery, but nonetheless they showed up, and confusion and a scuffle followed. My father walking the campus, as he often did, came upon the melee with one taxi driver punched, one gravel truck driver angry for he had no payment, and two state police troopers with a car flashing blue lights. A Hamilton student, perhaps the ringleader, weighing almost 300 pounds and with the nickname of "Whale," was about to be shipped off to the local jail.
Daddy intervened, talked with the visitors and it was agreed that some restitution was needed, but perhaps it need not be jail for the budding young graduate. Further conversation, it was agreed, should take place away from the scene of the altercation. Daddy suggested his office in Root Hall some 100 yards across campus. Daddy then turned to the student and said "Bill," (that was his real name), as severely as he could muster, ?The state police and I want to talk with you in my office. We need to get there. Will you ride with me or the police?? The young man looked at Daddy, looked at the police officers, and then determining who would be more sympathetic to his plight, he paid Daddy a compliment he cherished all the rest of his life. He said, "Dean, I think I?ll go with the police."
Never, my father said, did he feel more powerful.
One further and last story is also revealing about the role of an authoritarian dean, the individual student and the community. A few years ago, when my older brother was at a party in NYC, he was introduced to a well-established and well-to-do investment type. On hearing Terry?s last name, this man said, ?Tolles, Tolles, there can?t be too many of them. Are you any relation to Win Tolles?? Terry said he was his son and the man preceded to say how important Daddy and Hamilton had been for him and that all his successes, which given his dress and his apartment looked to be substantial, were due to that man (our father, the dean). Then he told this story: "I flunked out of Hamilton," he said, "at the end of my sophomore year. And I flunked out ingloriously and fully -- 2 F?s and 3 D?s (quite a record for one semester). So I went off to work for a year to ponder my very bleak future. I worked on an oil rig and finished up in May of the next year, convinced that I wanted an education so I did not have to do a job like that ever again. I returned to the Hill in mid-May and walked in to the dean?s office. He remembered me, and I said ?Dean, I want to come back to Hamilton.? He said that he was glad to hear that, he did not have the sole power to readmit me that was a matter for the Committee on Academic Policy, but that it was my good fortune for they were meeting that very evening.
"He continued that my case was not on the agenda, but it was timely and could be added, and that I only needed to fill out a brief form of what I had been doing and why I wanted to return. I did so, and then I asked who was on the committee. He told me, and any hopes I ever had disappeared. It was a committee of five, and three of the professors I knew -- or more to the point, they knew me. ?Dean, I said, I?ll never get by that group.? ?Oh no,? he said ?why??
"?Well, Dean, the French professor gave me an F because I only attended three classes all semester. The biology professor also gave me an F, and I dated his daughter. I think he thinks I thought to learn my biology that way, and the English professor and I ended up on the wrong side of a debate about student drinking and morals. And the fourth professor I do not know, but he is seeking further appointment and is the tennis partner of the English teacher and will certainly follow his lead.?
"Your father smiled, and simply said to me, ?Well, I don?t know about all of that, but I do know the procedure. This committee has to determine if you can be readmitted, and we meet at 7 tonight, and if you?ll call my house around 9:30 or 10, I will be glad to let you know the result.?
"I truly thought my case was hopeless, so I left your father?s office and proceeded downtown to Frankie?s, (later known as Zsa?s Zsa?s and the Rok) and drank my supper. I called your home, a great deal the worse for wear, about 10 p.m., expecting bad news. Your father answered and said, ?I am so glad you called. The committee reviewed your case, and you may re-enter Hamilton in the fall. You have some back credits to make up, including biology and French, but we can work that out and with an extra class load, and perhaps some summer work. If you do well you could graduate with your class.?
"I was flabbergasted. ?Dean,? I said, ?how can that be. There were five members of the committee, three hate my guts, the fourth does what the third tells him, who could have voted for me?
"There was a long pause at the other end, and your father said. ?The committee discussions are confidential, so I cannot tell you about them. I can tell you that the vote was 4 to 1, and I counted the ballots.?"
That may provide an example about using authority to benefit the individual. So much for my recollections of this community and its individuals. I hope that you have experienced on this hilltop the defining sense of being one; and being part of the whole.
In closing, let me urge you to give that idea some thought in the context of today -- your day -- and the special times ahead of you. Today you cite some of your fellow students for special honors. In doing so, you honor each and all of you.
The community enables the achievements of each and every member. It shapes your individual strengths and traits and your community spirit. Revel in it on this hilltop in the days between now and Commencement. Enjoy this special time; this time of camaraderie and celebration. Today is yours and as the celebrations begin, you are sharing them with your classmates and teachers -- your immediate community. Do not trade who you are, the individual you, for the community, Rather keep them in balance knowing that by so doing each is stronger. Have a grand time today. Good luck, Godspeed and congratulations for a job almost all and well done. It will always be yours.
