Harold Koontz Logan – 50th Reunion Essay

Harold Koontz Logan

Date of Death: 2-Apr-1977

College: Davenport

(This memorial was submitted by Nick Bellotto.)

Anyone who knew Harold Logan called him Hop. That was his name, and no one called him anything else. If you asked him how he got this nickname, Hop was happy to tell you: as a little boy, he loved watching Hopalong Cassidy on 1950s television. He wanted everyone around him to call him Hop, and the name stuck.

Hop came to Yale from Tuskegee Institute, Alabama. Because the General Electric Company kept transferring my father from city to city, I had spent the summer of 1965 in Huntsville, Alabama. In that sense, Hop and I noted as freshmen that we were both “from” Alabama.

Hop was deeply troubled, and his time at Yale was difficult. There didn’t seem to be enough help for him at the time. A half-century ago we didn’t have the counseling, support groups, awareness, or even names for some of the afflictions that could beset a student in the 1960s.

Although I spent much of my time at Yale with Hop, I lost touch with him little by little. In 1977, I saw in the alumni magazine that Hop had died. Hop was only 30.