Page 213 - WhyAsInY

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bar; buying school supplies; sharing a keg (being “on tap”); etc. All of these could and would obviously lead to conversation that was at first introductory in nature, then more relaxed, then perhaps jocular, then in the form of the classic bull session, and then totally and terrifically out of control.
The school tried in other ways to tie the freshmen together during orientation, and some of those ways succeeded only because they failed. At our first dorm meeting with the advisors, we were told that it was a decades-old tradition that all freshmen wore a freshman beanie on cam- pus at all times. The purple beanies were on sale at the two clothing stores in town. So, everyone bought one. Most everyone wore it on the first day. Nobody saw the point, and within days, the decades-old tradition was dead. (Beanies usually ended up tacked to the walls of the dorm rooms, if they weren’t just tossed.) Similarly, we were taught that when someone says something that is met with approval by the audience, Amherst men (there never was an Amherst boy) did not applaud; instead, they snapped their fingers! This tradition lasted just about as long as the meeting in which it was introduced. Accordingly, two traditions that were intended to bind us succeeded through the power of shared ridicule of traditions.
One great tradition that did bind, though, was the tradition of song, and that too was introduced at the first dorm meeting. A number of songs were sung for us, and song sheets were passed out. The most rous- ing and memorable one, a song that every Amherst man takes very seriously and loves to sing in a group is, of course, “Lord Jeffery Amherst,” after the man who “was a soldier of the king” who “came from across the sea.” The second part of the first stanza, silly in the extreme, but nevertheless sung with pride, is
To the Frenchmen and the Indians he didn’t do a thing, In the wilds of this wild country.
In the wilds of this wild country.
“He didn’t do a thing?” Well, it seems that good old Lord Jeff, who became Governor General of Canada, might well have become a
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