Page 212 - WhyAsInY

Why (as in yaverbaum)
difference between “Jr.” and “the Second,” but it did take me a while before I got it. A few were even “the Third.” And let us not forget Alex- ander Dillingham Washburn IV. Many were called Chip. Two Chips, which are a lot like Juniors, were in my pledge class; one of them was very much a Chip, because his first name, and that of his father, was Wood. No one was called Biff, however or, for sure, Velvel. As I later learned, not all people who possessed a Jr. or a Roman numeral came from wealth. Roger Scott Jr.’s father was a member of the Philadelphia Orchestra, and Roger earned money by working with the local laundro- mat, collecting student laundry.
Finally, I realized that many of the members of my class were “legacies,” students whose fathers had graduated from Amherst, and they all seemed to be WASPs, preppies, jocks, and Jr.’s or “the Seconds.” At first, I resented legacies, thinking them to be privileged and less hard- working or bright than my fellow classmates who did not share in their good fortune. In time, however, the legacy distinction—and most of the others—seemed to fade in importance, and the class would start to gel.
He Didn’t Do a Thing?
So, what got the class to gel? Most important at the outset was the fact that not only were the freshmen and the dorm advisors the only people on campus for the orientation week, but they were housed in dorms that were devoted only to freshmen—and would continue to be throughout the school year. Many other schools intermixed students with the idea that new students would benefit more immediately from the upper- classmen who were housed with them. Amherst did not, primarily for academic reasons, as I’ll discuss in the next chapter.
Housing the freshmen together, academics aside, would lead to all of the informal and spontaneous events that would bond people: playing hall hockey or hall soccer; having a water fight; partying (with or with- out females); tossing a baseball, lacrosse ball, or Frisbee; going to the gym; taking meals in Valentine; getting pizza in town; going to the snack
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