A couple of years ago, a colleague walked into my office to tell me that, the night before, there had been a crisis at The Yale Daily News. It became clear that she was talking about the fictional News on the popular television series “The Gilmore Girls,” no doubt well enough known then to students on campus, but not to me — I had never heard of the show. As my...
A painting looms over the top floor of the Yale Daily News building, a portrait of a young man in a green eyeshade who wears a pencil-thin mustache and a mysterious sideways smile. His bright eyes follow you wherever you walk. He commands the room. The man pictured is Briton Hadden, the founding genius behind Time Incorporated. It was he who dreamed of the first...
In September of 1974 I began working at the Briton Hadden Memorial Building. Raymond Wong and Charles Kaplan were the co-publishers who hired me. On my very first morning at the News Christopher Buckley, who had been working on the Yale Daily News Magazine all night, opened the door for me and introduced himself and he and his crew left to go to Patricia’s for...
One of the greatest mysteries surrounding the Yale Daily News is surely this: How, for 130 years, have generations of Yalies been convinced to spend night after night working on a college daily? After all, the proposition the News offers aspiring staffers has always been, to put it charitably, a bit of a tough sell. It’s not much of a pitch: Start with the most menial...
From Midwestern high schools and dorm rooms at Smith, Oberlin, Wellesley and Vassar, they packed their bags for a move to ivy-covered towers that were previously off limits. Pegged by The New York Times as “the Yale Superwomen,” the freshmen and transfer students who would make up Yale’s first coeducated classes arrived on campus to excitement and a media explosion...
Fight, fight for Yale. We’ll raise the slogan of Yale triumphant. Smash, Bang, we’ll rip old Princeton. Whoop it up for Yale today! One of the earliest recorded Yale cheers, this chant printed in the News on Nov. 15, 1912, exemplifies the same confident optimism and catchy lyrics often associated with today’s cheerleading. But in sharp contrast to the often...
Nearly a century before Cross Campus Library was renamed Bass, the Cross Campus itself was to be called the “New Campus” and was to extend to Temple Street — about twice as far as Cross Campus does today. It was in John Russell Pope’s 1919 master plan that the “New Campus” was proposed in its first form. But the many changes to Pope’s original vision...
Today the Gothic Gates of campus may appear to separate Yale from the rest of New Haven. In 1918, this barrier was taken to the extreme. That year, under fear of the influenza virus, the University placed itself under a virtual quarantine. Although the wrought-iron gates could not keep the pandemic — the largest and most wide-spread in history — from spreading, the...
Ten men have had the distinction of being full-time President of Yale since 1878. Over the past 130 years, each has faced the challenges of governing the University in a changing world. Reverend Noah Porter, 1871-1886 While many important changes occurred under Porter’s watch, such as the development of football and the completion of the Peabody Museum, some would...
G. Gaddis Smith ’54 GRD ’61 — with his gray blazer and yellow t-shirt, his ironed khakis and casual sneakers — settles into a booth at the venerable Mory’s. The scene reeks of Yale past. Anonymous initials — EL & KL, RD & MS — are sketched in the wood behind the history professor emeritus’ cropped white hair; oars from past Harvard-Yale regattas hang...
