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TIMELINES
July 31 2002
Social
Clubs Enlivened Claremont McKenna College
by
Terry Carter
In
all seriousness, I do admire Claremont. Any part of the Inland
Empire where I can stand for 10 minutes without having my cultural
illusions shattered has my respect. The mix of used books, rare
musical instruments, sidewalk cafes and, of course, the dog park
makes "The Village" a great hangout. Maybe it's the almost
French name. Maybe it's all those colleges -- so many that it's
easier just to refer to them in the collective. Maybe it's just my
own nostalgia. No, it must be Claremont.
Not
that life has always been exactly placid there. Until World War II,
there was the same quiet grove scene as in the rest of the Empire,
although the colleges were a unique factor even then. Like all great
schools, they were working hard at improving their reputation and
image. The war brought the same influx of people to Claremont as to
the rest of Southern California, plus an innovation that made more
impact there, again because of the relatively larger academic community.
That
innovation was the G.I. Bill, a federal law giving veterans
financial help in furthering their education. That was a good thing
-- a great thing, in fact -- but it had unforeseen consequences. It
brought into the halls of academe a group of older people with vastly
more life experience than your average college freshman.
In
a way, the newcomers might have been expected to be model students.
They understood discipline, after all. They had lived on tight
schedules. They had seen enough of the down side of life to
appreciate where education could take them if they studied hard.
Yet
they were also experienced enough not to want to hold still for
rules that seemed needless. They had just spent years living by the
regulations, but they had also been learning how to shortcut those
regulations where possible.
At
Claremont Men’s College, as it was then, there was at first a
generous move toward accommodation. The dean of students through the
1950s was William Alamshah, whom students called Baghdad Daddy
because he was of Middle Eastern descent. (Never mind that he was
Iranian-Syrian, not Iraqi.) Besides being a jazz trumpeter, Baghdad
Daddy was a veteran himself, so his
philosophy
toward his fellow vets was "live and let live."
Kevin
Starr, California's premier historian, goes so far in his 1998 book
"Claremont McKenna College" as to describe the Alamshah
regime as frankly permissive.
In
the 1960s, however, as the Claremont Colleges' collective
aspirations continued to rise, so did those of student radicals
around the world. Determined not to give ground, Claremont McKenna
President George Benson brought Clifton T. MacLeod from the
University of Rochester and made him Dean of Students, with a mandate
to take some slack out of the leash.
MacLeod
had his work cut out for him. His major headaches were three. First
were "floating" TGIF (for "Thank God It's Friday")
parties. Like "floating" crap games, TGIF parties had no
permanent venue. They happened in orange groves, foothill glens, even
vacant lots in town. The only thing that could be depended on was
that alcohol would flow freely -- too freely for MacLeod and
the
Claremont Police Department.
The
other two villains were two social clubs, the Knickerbockers and the
Tortugateers of Prado Dam, tortuga being Spanish for
“tortoise.” They illustrate the different modes of
revolutionary activity. The Knickerbockers were a well-dressed group,
along the lines of preppies. Maybe that was natural camouflage; maybe
it was a more subtle statement that appearance and behavior might be
two different things.
Life
was simpler among the Tortugateers of Prado Dam. To join, you didn't
need a blazer, an ascot or the right shoes. All you needed was a hat.
Any hat. A World War I campaign hat or a World War II "50
mission" hat would do nicely. (A "50 mission" hat
derived its rakish shape and name from the fact that bomber pilots
wore headsets over their hats. Doing this for 50 missions would
definitely alter the hat's intended shape. Strictly speaking, it was
non-regulation but considered very rakish.) Berets, Stetsons and baseball
caps
worked just as well, however.
The
Tortugateers thing worried the establishment. There was supposed to
be some deep sexual innuendo there, but nobody could figure out what
it was -- probably because there wasn't any. The Tortugas are simply
an island group in the Caribbean, so inhospitable that mariners
generally called them the "Dry Tortugas." Getting marooned
there was a fate to be avoided, and the
Tortugateers'
state of semi-dress could certainly evoke visions of castaways.
Here
again is a lovely extended metaphor. The world is all a desert, a
friend of mine once said -- only the amount of rainfall varies. The
Tortugateers seem to have been calling attention to the
self-perceived alienation of "The Lonely Crowd," a book by
Vance Packard that many of them probably read.
Dean
MacLeod wasn't as interested in how the Tortugateers perceived
themselves as in how the world perceived Claremont in general and his
college in particular. The administration generally failed to regard
the Tortugateers' existence as something in keeping with their desire
to raise their college complex to the level of Oxford or Cambridge.
Given
that the Tortugateers were a semi-underground society, the dean was
operating in the dark to some extent. He once threatened to expel
them as a group, but could neither do that nor end the TGIF parties.
The best he got was a name change to "Mara Togas," which
goes unexplained.
By
whatever name, then, the clubs and parties continued, but in
retrospect, MacLeod ruefully admitted that while he was fighting
these "evils," the quality of Claremont McKenna students in
general was improving and that Knickerbockers and Tortugateers in
particular turned out to be very supportive alumni.
TERRY
CARTER is a historian who lives in Corona.
He
can be reached at carter_timelines@hotmail.com.
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