To research a recent Core story about the history of the Maroon, I interviewed eight alums from three generations. Their memories ranged from fascinating to shocking to hilarious. I couldn’t include every anecdote, so here are some favorite outtakes.

Red all over

Thumbing through bound Maroon volumes from the early ’60s, I noticed a continuous stream of angry letters to the editor. The November 11, 1960, edition printed three missives with the headlines, “Calls Maroon “Communist,” “Blasts Maroon Coverage,” and “Accuses Paper of Blundering.” The writer of the first letter vented, “It’s absolutely exhilarating to hear someone else call your red rag ‘trash’ and to realize that I am not alone in taking decided pleasure in relegating it to the nearest wastebasket after I’ve finished reading the (ugh!) contents each Friday morn.” Jay Greenberg, AB’63, the 1961–62 editor in chief, recalls the first day of a history seminar. “The teacher went down the list of students, read my name, and said, ‘Oh, are you the idiot who edits the Maroon?’ There were many conservative faculty members at the University, and he was one of them. He thought our activism was crazy.” But if Maroon editors of the early ’60s took criticism, they also knew how to dish it out. “My generation’s fight,” says Greenberg, “was against apathy. I don’t know whether students were thinking about the issues; they certainly weren’t doing anything for the most part. We were trying to stir things up.” Campus administrators were frequent targets, with President George Beadle taking much of the heat. In a blistering 1962 end-of-year editorial, Greenberg assessed Beadle’s first year in office, stating that the Nobel Prize-winning geneticist had “shown interest in creating an efficient machine” but “manifested little concern about where the machine is running.” Both Maroon editors and University administrators seemed to take the harsh words in stride. In fact, says Greenberg, “I don’t remember anyone we locked horns with who wasn’t also supportive of us.” Greenberg and Beadle met regularly, and today Greenberg describes him as easygoing and friendly. The night before his “epic” editorial debuted, Greenberg found himself without a ride to the print shop and borrowed Beadle’s car. After the president read the issue, “he said to me in kind of a jovial way, ‘You borrowed my car and then you wrote that editorial.’”

Malbranche? Malbranche?

Early ’70s Maroons have a great sense of humor, particularly in describing the antics of Students for Violent Non-Action (SVNA), which spoofed the campus scene. I discovered that SVNA had organized a Halloween Pike for Peace, when members speared jack-o’-lanterns on the spikes of the Hull Court archway; a coed skinny dip; a “cake-in” on the quads, and a Flush for Freedom, when, the paper reported, the group asked everyone at the University to “flush their toilets exactly as Nixon was inaugurated. They hoped that if this happened on campus here and all over the nation at the same time, the sewer system would not be able to handle it and the sewage would spill into the streets.” Susan Loth Wolkerstorfer, AB’72, recalls articles about SVNA events always quoted a “Frank Malbranche.” After starting at the Maroon, it took Wolkerstorfer a few issues to realize “that there was no Frank Malbranche—he was a pseudonym for anyone speaking on behalf of the group.” I found an explanation for the name in the February 27, 1970, Reading Eagle. The article chronicles the coed skinny dip, which attracted 147 nude swimmers to the Ida Noyes Pool and was billed as a birthday party for the fictitious Malbranche—who would, of course, be wearing his birthday suit. According to the piece, the pseudonym was inspired by French philosopher Nicolas Malebranche (1638–1715). Anyone know the relevance of Nicolas Malebranche to SVNA? Was there some connection, or inside joke? Perhaps, like the dip, the choice was nonsensical in the name of fun.