FRESHMAN EPIPHANY

I am certain that we all have our favorite anecdotes about our experiences at Yale. What follows below is one of mine.

By way of background, I grew up in modest economic circumstances in southwestern Ohio, where my father taught school and my mother was a secretary. While we were better educated than most, our living standard was decidedly blue collar. My father provided for the four of us by working two jobs (moonlighting as a factory worker at a local Frigidaire plant to supplement his teacher’s salary) and liberally availing himself of easy credit meted out by usurious loan companies.

Having no exposure to affluence of any kind, let alone the kind associated with the families with “blue arms” who year after year produced the waves of prep school kids who flooded Yale’s campus, I received a crash course in the meaning of ascriptive wealth during my college years. My first lesson occurred during my very first year at Yale, when I met my freshman roommate, Burr Nash.

I had traveled almost 750 miles from Ohio with my entire family (father, mother and younger sister) in our old Pontiac, towing a U-Haul trailer carrying hand-me-down furnishings for my room in Welch Hall. Burr arrived alone, carrying his clothing in an old cardboard box. His lone contribution to room furnishings was a rug made from genuine lion’s skin (complete with head).  He said it came from his family’s lodge in some place called “Tahoe”. 

Burr’s blue jeans had holes in both knees, and I remember thinking, “Poor guy, he’s even worse off than I am. Can’t even afford a new pair of pants or a suitcase.”

He said he had just driven himself from the Putney School, from which he had transported an ancient phonograph player-with-megaphone that he called a “Victrola”.  I had never heard of the Putney School and thought the hand-cranked “Victrola” looked like something out of a museum. About a week later, I arrived at our room to find cardboard boxes with the letters “KLH” printed on the outside, which Burr explained were stereo components that he bought because he could not get the “Victrola” to work.

The “KLH” stamp and the tags with David Dean Smith meant nothing to me, and I had no idea what “stereo components” were.  When I saw him fiddling with the many wires running all over the place, I said to myself, “Wow, he so poor he has to buy his record player in pieces rather than in one cabinet like the ones at Lazarus Department Store!” 

I soon discovered that David Dean Smith was a high-end audio store on Elm Street, as well as that KLH components were extremely expensive.

Shortly thereafter, I spied a set of keys on this desk with a leather key holder that bore a blue-and-white emblem with the letters “BMW” at the top. Turns out they were the keys to a new motorcycle. He explained that his cousin, Bill Coffin, was keeping it his garage. I did not know anything about BMW motorcycles, but I did know that anything German was not cheap.

My head was spinning with the seeming contradictions until, one day, Burr looked up from his desk and said, somewhat forlornly, “I have run out of money”.  At this, I said to myself, “Aha! So now we know how he has managed to accumulate all this expensive stuff.  He pissed through all his money in just a few weeks. I knew it!”

I gently inquired, “Burr, what are you going to do?”  He stared down at his desk a moment, and then looked up at me brightly and said, “I will have to write a check, I guess.”