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Bates College

What the Insider’s Guide to the Colleges in New England Said in 1972

In 1972, undergraduates at the Yale Daily News published The Insider’s Guide to the Colleges, an entertaining but blatantly sexist description of what it was really like to attend several hundred colleges.

The Yale newspaper continues to publish an annual Insider’s Guide to the Colleges, one far more anodyne and less offensive than its earliest version. Imagine such a publication today describing Trinity College coeds as “unattractive.”

That first Insider’s Guide actually contained the sentence, “One [Trinity] history professor explained, ‘These girls don’t have to worry about being molested. Their faces are their chaperones’.” Really.

Many schools were going coed at the time, and women and minorities clamored for fair treatment. And yet it apparently didn’t occur to the editors of The Insider’s Guide to the Colleges that they might offend female readers with comments like, “The young ladies are especially warm and are reportedly easily convinced of the virtues of losing their virtue.”

Colleges in the early 1970s were loosening their rules in the midst of the sexual revolution. And campuses all over the country were reeling from the unrest of the late 1960s and early 1970s.

So the Insider’s Guide to the Colleges found an audience for answers to such questions as “Do students smoke pot?” “How hard is it to get a date?” “Do the dorms have curfews?”

Yale campus

Insider’s Guide to the Colleges

Tufts, which had gone coed, could be better than Williams or Wesleyan for men because, “There is something discouraging about the wild-eyed, hangdog look students develop at those isolated, all-male institutions,” the Insider’s Guide reported.

Bennington College won praise for its relaxed parietals. About the only rule it had was to ban lighted candles in dormitories.

Back then, people considered Bennington expensive at $5,000 a year for tuition, and you could go to UMass for $1,000 if you lived in state.

Sports didn’t get much attention at UConn.

And something else has changed since then. The Insider’s Guide described “the perennial middle class,” with rising expectations and hopes. It turned out to be not so perennial, after all.

Below are excerpts from the guide about New England colleges.

Amherst College

1250 men.

Amherst men tend to be strapping, athletic, handsome, friendly, preppy types of guys. They study hard but not too much, and they owe much of their image to the prep-school students – a third of the student body. The college held frequent lectures, rock-and-roll concerts, dances and mixers that the students from three nearby colleges attend.

“Another advantage we should mention is the active drug trade in the area – if you’re interested in that sort of thing,” wrote the Insider’s Guide.

Bates

650 men, 550 women.

The authors lumped Bates with small, out-of-the-way liberal arts colleges that had a good reputation. Bates was ‘superintellectual’ with no social life. Lewiston, Maine, was a hole, and the dull campus ‘unceasingly Georgian.’ The male-female ratio at Bates, provided ‘virtually unparalleleld social boredom.’ (But not for the female students, presumably. There were 650 men, 550 women.)

The school won praise for its many academic offerings and Robert Chute, a poet and scientist on the faculty. The administration, though, was characterized as autocrats who won’t retire ungracefully resist change and make everyone else uncomfortable.

Bennington

61 men, 500 women.

Bennngton, wrote the Yalies, was a peculiar place where both pot-smoking and touch football were on the rise. But whether a student would enjoy Vermont’s rural beauty depended on the ability to endure mud – and the near-constant bombardment of music and dance. For the Bennington girl of limited patience, the authors recommended a car – or a jet.

The unstructured college had no grades and no traditional organizations, though the students took their studies seriously. The Insider’s Guide included an anecdote about a ‘coed’ (male student) caught by a female student emerging from the shower naked. She smiled, said “hi” and walked past.

Boston College

4772 men, 1780 women.

Any school in or near Boston got a thumbs up from the authors because of the lively cultural offerings and preponderance of students. They simply described Boston College as Catholic, a university and located in Boston, actually Chestnut Hill. “But 25 cents and 20 minutes on the MTA will get you to Boston,” they note.

Boston University

6,070 men, 8,582 women.

The Insider’s Guide to the Colleges called Boston University a typical big urban university. Hungry hordes of Harvard and MIT men are the bane of a BU man’s existence, noted the authors. The school has strong offerings in political science and fine arts. It’s so big, you can take many course offerings, including an African language. But you can be as forgotten as an MTA schedule.

Bowdoin

947 men, 96 women.

“The premier reform this past year was the welcome arrival to the Maine wilderness of 100 bright-eyed damsels,” reported the Insider’s Guide to the Colleges. Bowdoin attracted intelligent, affluent middle-class types. Ten percent of its students were black as a result of a massive student recruiting program begun by the mostly white class of 1965. Additionally, Bowdoin had considerable academic strengths, strong fraternities and an overemphasis on sports – “albeit out of proportion to any actual quality on the part of the teams.”

Bowdoin

Brandeis

1,100 men, 1,100 women.

Brandeis in 1972 was a New York Times kind of place. High-scoring Jewish kids from New York and Boston apply to Brandeis, along with one Ivy, usually Columbia. A confrontation took place in 1969, when African-American students occupied the communications building in a demand for Afro-American studies. The president gave the students amnesty and tried to reconcile with them. The Yale students called him, ‘an extreme in-vogue liberal.’

Brown

2,800 men, 1,150 women.

Brown had just merged with Pembroke, and Brown men held some antipathy toward the former Pembrokers. The men resented their academic success, and preferred to date women from other schools on weekends, the Insider’s Guide to the Colleges reported.

“The problem with the coeducational experience is those women actually want to learn things,” wrote the Yale students. And yet, they concluded, the Brown experience is far from oppressive.

Main Green at Brown

Central Connecticut State College (now University)

3,417 men, 3,275 women.

What is now Central Connecticut State University was then described as, ‘a hodgepodge of new programs, archaic majors and overcrowded classes.’ CCSC experienced growing pains as it planned to double in size, resulting in, ‘an irritating mixture of the academic and practical. Experiencing growing pains as it planned to double in size.

Clark

958 men, 716 women.

The Insider’s Guide to the College reported that Clark’s fastidious admissions department had done a unique job in picking extremely individualistic people. It praised the school for its psychology and geography departments, and cited the Heinz Werner Institute as one of the finest research centers for developmental and comparative psychology. Clark, the guide concluded, offered a top education and a social wasteland.

Colby

837 men, 697 women.

The Insider’s Guide had no love for Colby, described as having apathetic students, a dissatisfied faculty and not much to do in Maine. The college also still gave preferential treatment to alumni offspring.

Connecticut College

359 men, 1175 women.

Recently shed of its ‘for Women’ name, Connecticut College competed with seven sister schools for students because of its outstanding faculty. And it did it despite lacking the luster of Vassar, the notoriety of Sarah Lawrence or the location of Radcliffe. Doris Day girl-next-door predominated on campus, but the problem is Connecticut College isn’t really next to anything. It cannot escape New London, the guide concluded.

University of Connecticut

7,863 men, 5,159 women.

One student summed up the school in five words. “I like UConn. It’s fun.” It was a typical huge state university, though hugely ridden with strife. One-third of the students left every year for academic reasons. Sports, the Insider’s Guide reported, were ‘little heard of.’

Dartmouth

3500 men.

Dartmouth had earned a reputation as an animal school, full of men who can’t control themselves when they get within a certain distance of woman. One freshman class was said to have more than 100 high school football captains, the guide reported.

But the authors acknowledged change at Dartmouth. Students devoted a recent Green Key weekend to workshops on Kent State, Cambodia and the Black Panthers. Almost as an afterthought, they add Dartmouth offered a superb education with an especially good math department.

East campus, Dartmouth

University of Hartford

1807 men, 1440 women.

U-Har was steeped in the finest traditions of suburbia and the American dream, wrote the Insider’s Guide. Located in the wealthy suburb of West Hartford, it stood among three excellent golf courses. The campus had a bourgeois air, but the student quality was improving and so were the academic departments. Plus, noted the guide, “You can have a good-as-hell time.”

Harvard

4,700 men.

The Yale authors offered four advantages to Harvard: interesting and diverse undergraduates, Boston location, prestige and a fair education without working too hard. Among the disadvantages: graduate students often taught undergraduates. Plus Harvard students tend to be obnoxious big shots. The campus was divided into wonks, jocks and preppies, so it was easy to wash out socially.

Another drawback: Though swarming with girls, Harvard ordered all girls out of the rooms at midnight.

“You can get better higher learning elsewhere,” the authors snarkily concluded.

Holy Cross

2,400 men.

Holy Cross has not wavered in its intent of educating concerned Christian gentlemen, wrote the guide. The school’s social life disappointed, but promised to improve soon with the introduction of coeds in 1973.

University of Maine at Orono

4,025 men, 3,000 women.

Though it offered a course in meat cutting, UMO ranked among the better state universities. And the gap between rules and reality bordered on the unbelievable. Liquor was forbidden on campus, but the ban was observed as well as the speed limit on the Maine Turnpike, noted the guide.

The students enjoyed skiing, and drinking ranked as the most popular activity on campus. In many ways, though, Orono was a relic from another age, when jocks score well and ROTC remained untarnished. Spanky and Our Gang was the last group to play there, and the political and cultural revolution had only begun to penetrate the Maine woods.

Hannibal Hamlin Hall at UMO

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

3,825 men, 250 female.

MIT, a science school, was one of the finest in the country. It had its drawbacks, though. Once girls found you out as a Tech Tool, they won’t look your way. But ‘across a short span of aqueous filth known as the Charles River lies the City of Boston,’ report the authors of the Insider’s Guide. The Boston-Cambridge metropolis included 52 girls’ schools, however, making a 5-to-1 ratio in favor of the men.

At a time when authorities tried to weed out radicals from college campuses, MIT gave refuge to Noam Chomsky. Someone calculated Chomsky cost the school $1 million in government contracts and alumni giving. “We think it’s a credit to the school that they keep him on,” wrote the clearly left-leaning authors of the Insider’s Guide to the Colleges.

Massachusetts State College System

500-4,300 students.

Massachusetts’ state colleges offered a refuge from the modern world, wrote the Yale students. Their seven campuses were sound, secluded, white and straight. As state colleges went, Mass State ranked among the best of the lot. It was good academically, and highly competent in the training of teachers. Campus rules, though, rated ‘puritanical.’

University of Massachusetts, Amherst

8581 m, 6505 f

UMass-Amherst actually boasted lower acceptance rates than Harvard or Yale. Nonetheless, the Yale students dismissed UMass’s average student as ‘boorish, not very intelligent and not very interesting.’ However, some students living off campus were doing ‘amazing things.’ The guide described those amazing things as ‘writing poetry, painting and smoking dope.’

Middlebury

1,000 men, 700 women.

The Insider’s Guide described Middlebury as ‘clean, conventional, self-satisfied.’ Surrounded by cows and farmland, the academically demanding school put students under intense pressure. Middlebury was also famous for its foreign language and literature programs.

The Emma Willard House at Middlebury.

Mount Holyoke

1,750 women.

Mount Holyoke deliberately placed itself in South Hadley, Mass., far from the corrupting influence of uncensored literature, alcohol and men. All that changed, and the school was replacing the ‘creative but frustrated Emily Dickinson image’ with something more progressive, the guide reported. Despite a remarkable offering of student activities, ‘a flock of females in full flight’ might trample someone standing by the bus stop at the main gate on a Friday afternoon.

University of New Hampshire

5,163 men, 3,672 women.

Back in the early 1970s, the conservative Legislature and apartheid-supporting Manchester Union-Leader harbored much hostility toward students and universities, the guide reported. The school had the highest out-of-state tuition in the country and steep in-state tuition. It also had a lousy location, as Durham had no discotheques.

UNH had some pluses: a pretty campus and an excellent philosophy department under Peter Sylvester. Students generally came in the ‘apple-cheeked farm’ type.

Thompson Hall at UNH

Northeastern

9,400 men, 4,600 women.

Northeastern, reported the guide, was large, mediocre and sometimes troubled. But it was also on the way up. The co-op program launched some students into journalism, television and Wall Street, along with ‘palatable’ jobs for many others. On the downside: a location in a high-cost, low-quality, unsafe neighborhood.

Radcliffe

1250 women.

“Many Cliffies are as hip as they are huggable,” the Insider’s Guide reported. However, the old image of Radcliffe as a polite, restrained school for wealthy women hadn’t entirely disappeared.

Moreover, Radcliffe girls were aggressive, and Tillie-from-the-sticks would have had a hard time of it. The school also had a larger proportion of rugged, gutsy, infighting radicals than Harvard.

University of Rhode Island

5,907 men, 4,338 women.

URI fit the description of the state U in every respect, according to the Insider’s Guide to the Colleges. Except, perhaps, that it was a ‘surprisingly dull place aided by gifted administration.’

The book praised President Werner Baum for refusing to turn over a list of guest speakers and their fees to the attorney general. He wanted to search for subsidies of radicals and take away the school’s tax-exempt status. On the other hand, the administration enforced curfew, parietals and a ban on liquor at fraternities. URI also got low marks for its location in Kingston, which had little more than cow pastures, farmland and a pizza place.

URI Quadrangle

Simmons

1475 women.

Simmons tries to train women professionally while giving them a liberal arts background. It had recruited more black and underprivileged students than any other women’s college. The students got very involved in the issues of the day, just not on campus. Located in Boston, they will never lack for dates.

Smith

50 men, 2,450 women.

Smithies, wrote the Insider’s Guide to the Colleges, are “prim, pretty, young, innocent, apple-cheeked, bubbling and dull.” The admissions office prefers girls who more resemble Mary Poppins than Scarlett O’Hara, they noted. Smith offers bookish seclusion, once considered the ideal women’s education. But now, they wrote, people think education is about “people, experiences, excitement and initiation.”

Trinity

1060 men, 530 women.

Trinity, noted the Yale newsmen, had a chip on its shoulder because it got left out of the Little Three Ivies — Amherst, Wesleyan and Williams. So it made up for it in social prestige. Trinity decided to give each man a bedroom, a living room and a bedroom for his valet. Times had changed by 1972, however. Trinity was trying to diversify its student body, which it held to rigorous admission standards.

Tufts/Jackson

2,400 men, 1,100 women.

Tufts got high marks for location and student body mixture. Described as a “good school,” it had proximity to Boston where something cool and something groovy was always going on.

Wellesley

1750 women.

The Insider’s Guide to the Colleges described Wellesley as almost a cartoon of the Ideal Respectable Yet Academically Worthwhile School for Young Ladies. It described many of the girls as Junior League liberals — idealistic, but they don’t do anything about it. The college had topflight offerings in English, history, the arts and languages, but showed weakness in science and math.

Wellesley College

Wesleyan

1200 men, 200 women.

Though Middletown, Conn., offered nothing but boredom, half the students at Wesleyan had cars. The school had the highest percentage of black students in the country – nearly 15 percent – outside of historically black colleges. Though occasionally too liberal for older alumni, Wesleyan then was “one of the most exciting academic centers” in the United States.

Wheaton

1200 women.

The Insider’s Guide to the Colleges had no love for Wheaton, which it described as a suitcase school that offered a solid liberal arts education with little pressure. Norton, Conn., however, was a difficult handicap to overcome.

Williams

1200 men, 325 women.

Williams offered a topnotch education, and would give Yale or Harvard a run for their money if it were bigger. The administration considered teaching more important than research, and prominent political scientist James MacGregor Burns taught there. Williams’ rural location was a drawback, however. Williams students’ parents supposedly sent their sons to college in the fall with a briar pipe and three-piece woolen underwear. Then they could count the days until spring thaw.

Yale

4,000 men, 1,000 women.

You would be correct in assuming the writers from the Yale Daily News would brag on their school. They noted that Yale was the hardest college to get into. They attributed that, in part, to the school’s sensitive and liberal administration which had quelled unrest during a three-week strike related to a Black Panther trial nearby. Its upper-middle-class students longed to fill the shoes of such public servants as Cyrus Vance, William F. Buckley, Jr., or Sargent Shriver. (Certainly Law School students Bill and Hillary Clinton did.)

Old campus of Yale University

They described Yale as a cross between Princeton and Harvard. It had the best English department in the world, the best French department outside of France and outstanding history, political science and biology departments. As far as social life went, Yale had a large “hippie-radical-drug-freak contingent” and “a monarchist party known as the Party of the Right.”

Images: Smith College campus By MonsieurNapoléon – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=64894359; Yale, By John Phelan – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=33181529. Yale campus Yale campus By Namkota – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=50507969.. Wellesley College By Grom – Own work, CC BY 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=6424795. Brown’s Main Green By Chris Rycroft – https://www.flickr.com/photos/[email protected]/51768485409/, CC BY 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=113810038. URI quadrangle By Wasted Time R – en:Image:URIQuad.jpg, Copyrighted free use, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=891529. Thompson Hall Thompson Hall at UNH By AcrossTheAtlantic – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=63031225.. University of Maine CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=1405898. The Willard House in Middlebury By PenelopeIsMe – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=4363690. Bowdoin By Polarbear 11 – Own work, CC BY 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=14571061.

This story about the Insider’s Guide to the Colleges was updated in 2023.

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9 Things You Probably Didn’t Know About Bobby Kennedy

Many viewed the death of Bobby Kennedy in 1968 as the loss of the last great leader. Assassins’ bullets had taken the lives of his brother, President John F. Kennedy and Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. All three men led the struggle against discrimination and poverty, though to varying degrees.

The story of Bobby Kennedy’s life has been told many times: How he became tough and competitive to hold his own among his eight siblings. How his brother named him the youngest U.S. attorney general in history. Then how he evolved into a compassionate populist, an advocate for poor minorities and working-class white people. And finally, how he died at 42 while running for president of the United States.

He thought he’d be killed, not his brother. He learned about John F. Kennedy’s assassination while having lunch at home in Virginia. His reaction:

I thought they’d get one of us, but Jack, after all he’d been through, never worried about it…. I thought it would be me.

But here are nine things you may not have known about Bobby Kennedy.

Bobby Kennedy

1. Bobby Kennedy, New Yorker

He didn’t really grow up in Boston. In 1927, when Bobby Kennedy was two, his father moved the family to a New York City suburb to escape anti-Irish discrimination. Joseph P. Kennedy, though, would become one of the richest men in the United States. (Someone commented he was the only person driven out of Boston in his own railway car.)

The Kennedy family lived in Bronxville, N.Y., until 1938. Then, President Franklin P. Roosevelt appointed Bobby’s father U.S. ambassador to the Court of St. James’s and the family moved to London.

Later, of course, he ran and won a race for U.S. Senate from New York in 1964, amid charges of carpetbagging.

Senate candidate Kennedy at the 1964 Democratic National Convention

2. Not Much of a Student

He flunked third grade. The seventh of nine children, he had a hard time adjusting to school. He attended 12 different schools before graduating from Milton Academy and going to Harvard.

Before entering college, though, he had enlisted in the Navy. In 1944, he started his naval training at Harvard and then relocated to Bates College.

Kennedy (second from left) at Bates. Muskie Archives and Special Collections LIbrary.

3. Barroom Brawler

He got into a bar fight when he turned 21, the first time he ever drank too much. Shortly after his birthday, he celebrated by buying a beer in a bar. Then he bought the house a round. When the patrons began singing ‘Happy Birthday’ to someone else, he smashed a beer bottle over one of their heads.

He got into another bar fight at 30, when as a Senate lawyer he rode undercover with New York City police officers. When a drunk insulted him in a bar, Bobby Kennedy asked him to step outside and hit him in the face, breaking his nose.

4. Philatelist

He collected stamps. So did Franklin Roosevelt. In 1935, Roosevelt learned Bobby Kennedy was a fellow philatelist and sent him some stamps from his collection. FDR’s letter read,

Dear Bob:-
Your Dad has told me that you are a stamp collector and I thought you might like to have these stamps to add to your collection. I am also enclosing a little album which you may find useful.
Perhaps sometime when you are in Washington you will come in and let me show you my collection.

5. Ronnie Beat Down

Bobby Kennedy lost a debate to Ronald Reagan, then governor of California. On May 15, 1967, the two men debated the Vietnam War on television. Reagan believed Bobby Kennedy had gotten him fired as host of the television program, GE Theater, and so he studied hard for the debate.

In the end, Ronald Reagan humiliated Bobby Kennedy. Kennedy stormed out of the studio and said to an aide, “Never again put me on the stage with that son of a bitch.”

6. Spiritual Rivalry

Ethel Kennedy

He dated Ethel Skakel’s older sister for two years before dating Ethel. Ethel had fallen in love with Bobby Kennedy at first sight, but then had second thoughts. When Bobby started dating Ethel after he got dumped by her sister, she thought she wanted to become a nun.

“How do you compete with God?” he asked, but he won the contest.

7. Bobby Kennedy, Amateur

He had no rock climbing experience when he became the first person to ascend Mt. Kennedy, named for his brother after he was assassinated. He joked that his experience amounted to little more than climbing to the top of the stairs at home and shouting for help. In April 1965, Bobby Kennedy broke away from his climbing team and reached the 14,000-foot summit himself as National Geographic photographers took photos.

His brother Ted told UPI:

I wish to point out for the record he is not the first Kennedy to climb a mountain. I climbed the Matterhorn in 1957, which is higher, and I didn’t need the help of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police.

8. Bobby Kennedy vs. Jimmy Hoffa

He hated Jimmy Hoffa, and Hoffa hated him. Bobby Kennedy spent seven years trying to convict the Teamsters Union president for corruption. They once tried to one-up each other about how many push-ups they could do. Hoffa claimed 35, but Bobby Kennedy claimed he could do more.

Delivering Senate testimony on organized crime, 1963.

Hoffa said Bobby had a weak handshake and deliberately misspelled his name ‘Bobbie.’ As Hoffa later recalled, “I used to love to bug the little bastard.”

As chief counsel for the Senate Rackets Committee, Bobby Kennedy dragged Hoffa before hearings in an effort to nail him on perjury charges. As Attorney General he formed a special ‘Get Hoffa’ squad within the Justice Department. In 1964, Kennedy’s Justice Department finally did get Hoffa with a conviction for jury tampering.

9. Clairvoyant, Sort Of

He predicted Barack Obama’s presidency in 1961, but he was off by seven years.

That year, Bobby Kennedy told an audience,

The Irish were not wanted there [when his great-grandfather came to Boston]. Now an Irish Catholic is president of the United States … There is no question about it. In the next 40 years a Negro can achieve the same position that my brother has.

He made the same prediction in 1968, and he was spot on then.

Bobby Kennedy speaking at a civil rights demonstration

This story was updated in 2022. Photos of Bobby Kennedy courtesy of the John F. Kennedy Library and Museum. Featured image By Sven Walnum – https://www.jfklibrary.org/asset-viewer/archives/SWPC/001/SWPC-001-021, CC0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=85646434

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Al Capp Invents Sadie Hawkins Day — Sort Of

Centuries before Al Capp started the Sadie Hawkins Day fad in his Li’l Abner comic strip, women in Scotland and Ireland asked men to marry them during Leap Years.

At least, that’s how the story goes.

The inspiration for Sadie Hawkins Day

Legend has it that in Ireland in the 5^th century, St. Brigid complained to St. Patrick that Irish women had to wait too long to marry. (Irish men being notoriously slow to propose.)

St. Patrick responded by declaring that women can ask men to marry them every four years on February 29.

That probably isn’t true, but it is an old Irish tradition that women ask men to marry them on February 29. Supposedly, Irish immigrants brought the custom to New England.

Long before that, Irish monks brought it to Scotland. In 1288, the Scots enacted a law that allowed a woman to ask a bachelor to marry her, but only in a Leap Year. He would be fined one pound if he refused.

Sadie Hawkins Day

It wasn’t until 1937 that New Haven native Al Capp included the Sadie Hawkins gag in Li’l Abner. moving to November the day women catch a husband. Capp never specified which day in November. Sadie Hawkins Day first ran on Nov. 15, 1937, but over the years Capp featured it between November 19 and November 30.

“It happens on the day I say it happens,” Capp once said. Every year, he claimed, he received tens of thousands of letters from colleges, communities and church groups as early as July asking what day will be Sadie Hawkins Day so they could plan a dance.

In the comic strip, it started as a desperate ploy by Hekzebiah Hawkins, the first mayor of Dogpatch (which Capp used to say was based on Seabrook, N.H., where he had a summer home).

Al Capp self portrait

Hawkins wanted to marry off his homely daughter Sadie. He declared a footrace would be held on Sadie Hawkins Day, and unmarried women who caught eligible men had to marry them, ‘and no two ways about it.’

National Fad

Sadie Hawkins Day dances quickly became a national fad. In 1939, Life magazine reported girls chased boys in 201 colleges.

By 1949, Capp estimated 50,000 organizations sponsored Sadie Hawkins parties and dances.

Bates College in Lewiston, Maine, held a Sadie Hawkins Day dance in November 1947. A proclamation stated that all the Bates ‘gals what ain’t dated but craves somthin’ awful to be can ask any unhitched man to go to dance Saturday.’ Men had to accept, ‘no two ways about it.’ The gals had to pay the admission, two cents for every inch of the man’s waistline.

The University of Vermont created a Sadie Hawkins-like event called MERP — “Men’s Economic Recovery Program.” For a week, women paid their dates’ expenses.

Scragg Shag

In 1948, the Arthur Murray Studios on Boylston St. in Boston staged a Sadie Hawkins Dance, introducing new dances based on the comic strip, including “The Skunk Hollow Hop, “The Daisy Mae Whirl,” “The Scragg Shag,” “The Shmoo Shlide,” and the “Li’l Abner Dip.”

The entire city of Dover, N.H., celebrated Sadie Hawkins Day on May 2, 1951, and Al Capp showed up for it. He said his wife’s kinfolk came from Dover. Mayor Fred Smalley greeted Capp wearing glow-in-the-dark suspenders, patched overalls and a marryin’ suit with a belt in the back. There was a parade, a poster contest and a square dance at City Hall, with plenty of costumes based on the comic strip characters.

Li’l Abner would continue until 1977, but Sadie Hawkins Day began to return to its roots during Leap Year. In 1952, the Harvard Club of Quincy, Mass., staged a Leap Year Sadie Hawkins dance featuring men in drag playing the Dogpatch character Daisy Mae.

Proclamation

The original Sadie Hawkins proclamation read:

KNOW ALL DOGPATCH MEN who ain’t married by these presents, and ‘specially Li’l Abner Yokum:

WHEREAS there be a passel o’ gals what ain’t married up but what craves somthin’ awful to be.

And WHEREAS these gals’ pappies and mammies have been shoulderin’ the burden of their board and keep for more years than is tolerable.

And WHEREAS they is plenty of young men what could marry these gals but acts ornery and won’t.

IT IS HEREBY PROCLAIMED AND DECREED that Saturday, Nov. 19, 1940, shall be known as SADIE HAWKINS DAY

WHEREAS a foot race will be held, and all unmarried gals who chase unmarried men — and catch them — have got to be married up wif each other, and no two ways about it.”

This story about Sadie Hawkins Day was updated in 2020.

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Archaeologists excavate a cemetery of the Red Paint People in Orland, Maine.

The Red Paint People of Maine

Before the first colonists and explorers came to New England, before even the American Indian tribes lived here, there were the Red Paint People of Maine.

We know very little about them, but they did exist in Maine some 2000 to 6000 years ago. And we know they hunted swordfish along the coast from Brunswick to the St. John River.

Red Paint People

Archaeologists excavate a cemetery of the Red Paint People in Orland, Maine.

Since early colonial times, farmers and hunters knew about buried caches of red ochre. In at least one case, a thrifty Yankee mixed some of the coloring with seal oil to make a soft, muted paint.

Harvard Archaeologist Charles Willoughby first began documenting the people in 1892 with visits to grave sites in Bucksport, Alamoosook Lake and Ellsworth.

Phillips Andover archaeologist Warren Moorehead built on Willoughby’s findings in 1913. Moorehead compared later Indian relics to those found at the cemeteries of the Red Paint People. He concluded they were distinct from the later Indian tribes.

Their tools — arrowheads, spear points, knives, gouges — were made differently. And the graves were so old that virtually no human remains existed, just tiny bone fragments.

Presumably, the red ochre (and sometimes yellow ochre) buried in the cemeteries carried some meaning for the people, since it had to be transported quite a distance to be buried. No one, though, has found evidence to show its significance.

Warren Moorehead

Moorehead’s declaration that the Red Paint People were significantly older than other Indians immediately drew criticism. A leading archaeologist at the Smithsonian Institute declared the graves were most likely recent.

Moorehead also theorized that a tidal wave or earthquake may have altered the coast. The ocean then submerged the sites of the Red Paint People’s villages, leaving behind only cemeteries located on higher ground.

Carbon dating would eventually prove Moorehead correct about the age of the Red Paint People. However, the idea of the tidal wave has been discredited.

Later Findings

Later archaeologists found places where Red Paint People lived. They concluded they likely were hunters, fishermen and boat builders, as were later occupants of the land. And they know that burial sites containing red coloring have been found elsewhere in the world, including Europe. Those sites may be related to those in Maine.

An archaeologist named Bruce Bourque excavated a village site on the island of North Haven in Penobscot Bay. Years later, as a Bates College professor, he wrote a book called Swordfish Hunters. In it, he described how the Red Paint People hunted the dangerous and elusive swordfish, and how they created exquisite stone tools and bone ornaments.

But archaeologists still lack answers to questions about the early people who buried red ochre in the ground. They don’t know why they disappeared. And they still don’t know why the red ochre was so important.

This story was updated in 2020.

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The Bates Bedspread of Maine, America’s Favorite Counterpane

The Bates Bedspread, once found in nearly every household, has links to presidents, First Ladies, a famous midwife and countless women who wove white candlewick counterpanes in their own homes.

1950 Bates Bedspread ad.

Though the first Bates Bedspread first sold in 1940, its American ancestors date to the 18^th century. George Washington gave Martha Custis the prototype for the bedspread as a wedding gift. Little did he know the precedent he was setting — or that the giant textile mills that made the bedspread named after him would employ more people than any other company in Maine.

A Bates Bedspread advertisement wasn’t far off the mark when it claimed,

Garlands and stylized flowers with a richly looped hand-woven look make this aristocratic bedspread truly an heirloom.

Candlewicking

Whitework embroidered bedspreads were fashionable when George and Martha tied the knot in 1759, but they became even more popular from about 1800 to 1840. In those days, having a fine white candlewick counterpane helped maintain one’s social standing.

In many places, the way to have an early American version of the Bates Bedspread was to make one yourself.

Candlewicking

Cloth was hard to get, especially on the frontier. The women had to pick, spin, comb, dye and card flax, wool and cotton. Cotton was bought by the pound in early America, according to historian Alice Morse Earle. Women picked out the one by one, carded it on wool cards, then spun into thread.

In Hallowell, Maine (then part of Massachusetts), Martha Ballard wrote in her diary that she had carded cotton on July 27, 1786. Ballard, made posthumously famous by Laurel Thacher Ulrich in A Midwife’s Tale, didn’t weave the cotton cloth herself; she took her spun cotton to her neighbor, Mr. Edson, to be woven.

Carding and Spinning

Most women back then spent endless hours carding and spinning. In 1790, 15-year-old Elizabeth Fuller started a diary from her home on a farm in Princeton, Mass. Entry after entry describes making cloth. “I spun two skeins today” and “I wove five yards today” were typical. In the spring of 1792, she wove for two months solid and estimated she produced 140 yards of cloth.

Some women were expert enough to make candlewicking bedspreads on home looms.

In candlewicking, large running stitches are sewn into a pattern on unbleached white muslin and passed over a small twig. The twig is later removed and the fabric shrunk in hot water, which holds the stitches in place. It gets its name from the soft cotton thread that’s also used as a candle wick.

Elizabeth Perkins Wildes Bourne made one (and probably more) on her loom in Kennebunk, Maine. Her daughter, Abigail Wildes, wove a poem into a coverlet she sent to First Lady Dolley Madison in 1809.

Benjamin Bates

Benjamin Bates, born July 12, 1808, grew up on a farm in Mansfield, Mass. He was the son of a Yankee farmer, merchant and maker of cotton cloth – probably on a home loom.

The Bates Mill complex, home of the Bates Bedspread

He moved to Boston, went into the dry goods business and made a public profession of his Congregationalist faith. He prospered and became the president of the First National Bank of Commerce in Boston, the Union Pacific Railroad and the Lewiston Water Power Company, which built the first canal in Lewiston.

The canal allowed water power to run the machinery in the textile mills that Bates’ money would soon build. Until then, weaving cloth had been a home-based profession. In 1810, for example, 88 percent of the households in Topsham, Maine, told census takers they made cloth. More than half had looms, and some loom owners, like Martha Ballard’s Mr. Edson, wove cloth for their neighbors.

Bates was the biggest investor in the Bates Mill, which opened in 1854. The company eventually built 11 buildings between 1852 and 1923.

Before the Civil War broke out, Bates bought cotton and produced uniforms for the Union Army. He contributed $100,000 to the Maine State Seminary, which renamed itself Bates College without his knowledge. The first girls to graduate from Bates College paid for their own education by working at the mills.

The Bates Bedspread

Bates Manufacturing Company wove its first basic Bates bedspread in 1858. Almost 60 years later, in 1915, Bates expanded and bought new kinds of looms to make Jacquards, crochets, satins, brocades, damasks and Ripplette.

The company grew and grew, and for many years the enormous Bates Mill complex employed more people than any other employer in Maine.

First Yankee farm girls worked at the mills. Then came Francophile Canadians and Irish fleeing the potato famine. No wonder then, why one mill building has a shamrock on one wall, a fleur-de-lis on the other.

Sometime in the 1930s, a Bates representative touring Mount Vernon was impressed with the bedspread George Washington gave Martha. The rep realized such an item could sell, as the colonial revival was at its peak.

The Bates rep also thought the Lewiston mills could make Martha Washington’s counterpane. So Bates designers went to work collecting samples of the antique spreads, visiting Mount Vernon and scouring museums and libraries for information about candlewicking.

Washington’s Choice

After experimenting for two years, Bates produced the first of the legendary Bates Bedspreads and called it George Washington’s Choice. It was made on a specially designed loom in January 1939. The company put the first Bates Bedspread on sale in March 1940.

It didn’t sell. But Bates added a double-knot fringe and made a few adjustments, and the Bates Bedspread caught on. It became a favorite wedding and anniversary gift in the 1940s and 1950s. Like the whitework embroidered counterpanes of the early 19^th century, it was a status symbol – and more. “Loomed to be Heirloomed” was the apt slogan.

Each Bates Bedspread had a ‘pedigree’ at one end of each bedspread that tells its size, style, year of production and loom number. New Bates Bedspreads were later introduced, such as the Abigail Adams and Queen Elizabeth.

Weavers worked seven days a week making Bates Bedspreads, but they couldn’t keep up with demand. It its heyday, 200,000 Bates Bedspreads were sold each year.

Poppy Shills for Bates

In 1948, a future president of the United States made his appearance in a Bates ad. George Bush and his new bride Barbara posed with Joan Walls of Bennington to show that Bates’ fine fabrics were perfect for the discriminating college student. The caption above the photo reads,

Victoria. Chosen by Barbara and George ‘Poppy’ Bush of Yale, and admired by Joan Walls of Bennington. Joan and Barbara wear easy-to-sew campus fashions in Bates cotton. Young marrieds on campus make Bates the beautiful basis of a long-range decorating plan. Indispensable at college, these bedspreads and matching draperies stay fresh and bright through four years of wear and washing. After graduation, they are ready to grace a future bedroom or living room.

(You can see the ad here.)

Decline

As New England’s textile industry moved South, and then overseas, the Bates Bedspread kept the Lewiston mills humming.

By 1990, the 50^th anniversary of the first Bates Bedspread, demand dropped off and only about 35,000 a year were sold. Fred Lebel, Bates’ executive vice president, told the Lewiston Sun-Journal the reason was that so many people had them and didn’t need new ones.

But then he conceded competitors were producing cheaper quality versions of the Bates Bedspread and hurting sales.

In 1992, the City of Lewiston took possession of the Bates Mill Complex after years of unpaid taxes.

Dalton, Georgia

When Bates came up with the first George Washington’s Choice, the company claimed candlewicking was a lost art. Actually it had been thriving in northwest Georgia in a small city called Dalton.

Dalton, which called itself “The Bedspread Capital of the World,” was home to a flourishing cottage industry of tufted cotton products. From the 18^th century, women made tufted cotton bedspreads for their own use.

After World War I, Dalton entrepreneurs set up roadside stands selling chenille robes and bedspreads for tourists driving south along Highway 41, known as Bedspread Boulevard. Later, thousands of men, women and children in Dalton would work on bedspreads at home for national distributors.

In 1942, the Dalton News reported that an early version of a Bates Bedspread from Dalton, Ga., had made a splash when displayed at ‘one of the national bedspread marts.

According to the Dalton News, J.T. Bates of Bates Bedspread Company owned an antique candlewick spread made by his great-grandmother, Eva Deck, in 1789. Deck was 16 when she picked the cotton, spun the thread and tufted the bedspread. The newspaper considered it less beautiful than the Bates Bedspreads her great-grandson’s company sold. J.T. Bates said he would sell

…any other spread for much less than he would this old heirloom, in fact this one is not for sale.

With thanks to Ashley Callahan in Southern Tufts: The Regional Origins and National Craze for Chenille Fashion. This story was updated in 2022.

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Amy Beach, Henniker’s Musical Prodigy

Amy Beach’s parents realized their daughter was a prodigy when she knew 40 songs at the age of one, sang countermelodies at two and composed waltzes at five. As a young child she heard each key in a different color.

Unfortunately, she was born in 1867, when opportunities for a female musical prodigy were limited.

Amy Beach in 1908

Fortunately, her parents didn’t view that as an obstacle.

Amy Beach

She was born Amy Marcy Cheney on Sept. 5, 1867 in Henniker, N.H., to Clara Marcy Cheney and Charles Abbott Cheney, the nephew of Oren Cheney, co-founder of Bates College.

When she was eight, her family moved from Henniker to Boston. Her parents hired piano teachers Ernst Perabo and Carl Baermann. Word of the child prodigy spread. Her parents received offers to manage Amy’s performances, all of which they turned down.

At 13 she met Henry Wadsworth Longfellow and wrote a song from his poem The Rainy Day. It was the first of her many published compositions.

At 16 she made her professional debut as a pianist and performed as a soloist with the Boston Symphony Orchestra. At 18, she married Dr. Henry Harris Aubrey Beach, a prominent physician 25 years older than she. Amy Beach changed her professional name to Mrs. H.H.A. Beach. At her husband’s request she limited her performances to one recital a year, donating the proceeds to charity. He encouraged her to focus on composing music though she’d only had a year of formal training.

As Mrs. H.H.A. Beach she played the role of society wife, but she had few household duties and used her free time to compose.

Success

Amy Beach’s first major composition was the Mass in E-Flat, which was performed by the Handel and Haydn Society on Feb. 7, 1892. It was her first major success and catapulted her into the ranks of America’s foremost composers. That position was confirmed in 1896, when the Boston Symphony Orchestra performed her Gaelic Symphony in E Minor, Op. 32.

She also wrote songs. Ecstasy was so popular the Beaches used the royalties from it to build a large summer home on Cape Cod.

Amy Beach would write 150 works during her lifetime: church music, songs, chamber music and orchestral works. (For a sample of her work, click here.) Fifty-four years after her death, the Boston Pops Orchestra paid tribute to Amy Beach. Keith Lockhart led a concert of her works. Her name was also added to the granite wall on the Hatch Shell along with Bach, Handel, Chopin, Debussy, MacDowell, and Beethoven.

As a young performer

Dr. Beach died in 1910, when Amy was still in her early 40s. She decided to tour Europe for three years, playing her own compositions on the piano. She established her reputation playing with Europe’s finest orchestras until the start of World War I forced her to return home.

New Hampshire Roots

Throughout her life, Amy Beach would stay in touch with her family and friends in Henniker and Hillsboro, N.H., In 1921, she took up summer residence at the MacDowell Colony in Peterborough, N.H. She incorporated melodies sung by a thrush family near her MacDowell studio into two of her most famous piano pieces, Hermit Thrush at Eve and Hermit Thrush at Morning. As a young girl she had contributed to ornithological science by writing down bird songs as she heard them.

Amy Beach spent winters in New York City, where she performed, composed and encouraged young students. Her admirers formed ‘Beach Clubs’ around the country. She visited them during her travels, sometimes performing impromptu recitals. She also wrote about music. During World War II she wrote, “Music must elevate. Because it is spiritual, it must give us courage to live and to fight for those things in life worth fighting for—whether we struggle on the battlefield or in our daily lives.”

She retired in 1940, ill with heart disease, and died on Dec. 27, 1944.

Thanks to More Than Petticoats: Remarkable New Hampshire Women by Gail Underwood Parker. This story was updated in 2022.

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