(Ed. Note--The Crimson does not necessarily endorse opinions expressed in printed communications. No attention will be paid to anonymous letters and only under special conditions, at the request of the writer will names be withheld.)
To the Editor of the CRIMSON:
A reprint in "The Stentor" of Lake Forest college of your story on R.B. Williams and his criticism of Mr. Hawes "Twenty Years Among the Twenty-Year-Olds" has come to amuses me. As an alumnus of Lake Forest college wholly out of sympathy with Mr. Williams and his clumsinesses, I thought that you might be interested in knowing some of the funnier things about him.
I am enclosing his picture. He has removed his Bessie-the-sewing-machines-girl spectacles, and in the flesh the hair is carroty-red and the freckles are many. You will not fail to take note of the elegant pompadour: the hair stands straight up.
Let Mr. Hawes not be unduly flattered at the attention the dean payed to him. It was nothing more than a minor outburst. The chief Williams' objects of attack are these:
1. Salad forks, butter knives, napkins, tablecloths. (Unnecessary; lead only to snobbery, please sense of possession, too much actual trouble to negotiate in a hurry.)
2. Opera. (A silly pastime for nitwits, a colossal waste of money, a sensually excruciating experience, second-rate compared to burlesque.)
3. Modern dormitories and fraternity houses. (Too pleasant, too easy for living, too comfortable; they should be of the bleak-attic type, well-roached, wide-cracked, simple, for he-men.)
4. Formal dress. (A hangover from less-advanced days, a gross uncomfortableness for fools to endure, too sleek.)
The Williams motto is: Let his Talk be The Talk.
A famous Williams expression (not exactly sic): Too many students are too busy trying to run the college to have time to be students.
A well-seen Williams sight: The dean thundering along in his 1926 Dodge, bought second hand from a tired-out alumni secretary.
A high-handed Williams Habit: spending hours in his classes talking out of the window about everything in everyone's province but in that of the work prescribed in nasty does to the classes.
Subject of many a session behind curtained windows: disconnected telephones. The dean in scored roundly by freshman and senior alike as an Iowa Yokel rudely out of his Iowa mud-puddle, as a discouraging specimen of what a little learning will do to cold-hoppers. They hope that thinking persons will not allow the Williams label to be pasted on the college.
General opinion on the Lake Forest campus: This most recent spatter of mud is an effort to attack the smiles of Dakota universities, jealous of the place of the East, to get them into a position to favor his application for a job. Puddling would be bigger there... Very truly yours, Timothy Perry.
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