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Why (as in yaverbaum)
pioneer in the field of germ warfare; he is reputed to have penned a letter in which he suggested the delivery to those Indians of blankets that were infected with smallpox. This was not explained at the dorm meeting, but even after it was, the power of the song was undiminished. When I first heard it sung by virtually the entire student body at a huge bonfire rally that was staged on the Friday night prior to the opening football game of the season, such was the spectacle and the spirit, as well as the obvious pride with which Lord Jeff was sung to end the evening, that I felt as if I were not at a Little Three college, where football, I had thought, was merely a nice intercollegiate sport, but at a Big Ten university, where football was a religion; the rally was truly stirring.
(It should be noted that, in January 2016, when—after student pro- tests concerning the use of “Lord Jeff ” as a mascot [a word that I never heard when I was on campus] and a polling of the student body, the faculty, and the alumni, none of which rallied to Jeffery’s cause—the board of trustees took the following positions: first, that whether the smallpox suggestion was made is a matter of dispute; second, that Amherst had never anointed Lord Jeff as a mascot; third, that, in any event, the college was not named after him but after the Town of Amherst; and then, fourth, that it should nevertheless rename the Lord Jeffery Inn, which was the only possession of the college that bore that name. I think it unlikely that the inn’s new name will honor the school’s other unofficial mascot, Sabrina, a mostly unclad female statue, which has attained legendary status due to the innumerable heists and pranks to which it has been subjected since the nineteenth century.)
One other tradition that I suppose had its somewhat positive effect was the swimming test that each freshman had to take. For reasons that will become clear, it was an event that would stick in one’s mind, espe- cially if one was not a preppie. At Amherst, it seems, you could not graduate if you could not swim one hundred meters. Richard Gross- inger ’66, of the fabled Grossinger family, who was quite a good student, could not swim, and it was rumored that he would not graduate. I can only assume that in the four years allotted to the acquisition of the skill, he learned how. Otherwise, it is possible that his parents endowed the
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