Passing Geography, Playing the Tuba, and Partying the Night Away

George A. Plimpton '48 is an acclaimed writer and humorist, perhaps best-known for Paper Lion, a book describing his brief foray as a member of the Detroit Lions. He is also the editor of The Paris Review. While an undergraduate, he enjoyed mocking The Crimson as a member of a semi-secret Bow Street social organization that used to occasionally publish a so-called humor magazine.

We drank too much. My first year I have a very vivid memory of being sick into a desk-side wastepaper basket. We lived on the ground floor, Adams F-2, and I remember looking up and seeing a middle-aged couple looking in the window with slightly worried expressions, as if they were thinking, "Oh the stress! These poor boys..."

They had a point. I remember Dr. Whittlesly. I took his Geography of South America course for my science credit my senior year. I was agitated. The science credit was mandatory and I had waited too long, but his was the most noted "gut" course in the curriculum: His final exam was invariably based on five books on this reading list. If you read those, you were home free. I had other things to do that spring and I didn't go to any classes. I read the five books and sure enough, with a great sigh of relief I saw that the questions were all related to my reading. I wrote, I thought, a credible exam. I put a return-address slip in the blue book to see how well I had done. It came back with an E. I sailed up to see Dr. Whittlesly. I knocked on his door. I said who I was and that I'd come to see about the exam. Surely there had been a mistake.

The professor, white-bearded as I recall, leaned forward and asked as follows: "Have I ever seen you before?"

It was a question, it occurred to me later, I could just as well have asked of him.

"No sir."

The professor sighed, then announced quite smartly that he wasn't going to pass anyone, however proficient his performance on the final exam, he was laying eyes on for the first time.

So that summer I took the Geography of Africa, on which I got a comfortable C, maybe even a C+. I lived in the Lampoon building with Fred Gywnne '50, the actor, who'd had trouble with his "gut" course. Someone gave us a rabbit and it had run of the Great Hall. Zero Mostel, the great moon-faced actor, came to have dinner one night and he put his face down at table-height and he and the rabbit stared at each other for a few minutes. I remember that very distinctly.

I remember my roommates, of course. Farwell Smith '48-'49 took a strange trombone, most of it missing, to the football games. He'd go for one or two notes, and then a part of the trombone would fall out. One freezing afternoon, when the team was losing to Dartmouth, Farwell left his seat, leaving me his trombone, and ran across to the Dartmouth side. Back then the Dartmouth cheerleaders were Indians, their badges painted red, and they wore breached-clouts. To keep out of the cold they spent most of the afternoon huddled in their teepee set up on the sidelines. I think it was Farwell's idea to surprise them in there and make off with a couple of breechclouts. The teepee took on a life of its own, swaying back and forth, a struggle going on within, and then Farwell, overpowered, emerged missing most of his clothes.

I wish I remembered more of what F.O. Matthessen had to say in his lectures, and Archibald Macleish's stories about Hemingway in Paris as we sat in his Widener office with the spring sun streaming through the window, but I remember the teepee swaying, and the rabbit on the Great Hall table and the tuba player from the Boston Pops who played solo at a cocktail party we gave in Eliot B-42. The tuba player said he'd never been asked to do such a thing before--to play alone at a cocktail party, and he truly enjoyed it. We enjoyed everything about everything. We weren't very solemn back them. I don't know that it's the same now, but it ought to be.