This was Yale in the days before co-education, when the school still enforced a coat-and-tie rule in its dining halls, and a structured extracurricular schedule.

More than anything else, George W. Bush was involved in athletics. Though his father had played varsity baseball for the Bulldogs, the younger Bush stuck to intramurals--football, baseball and others.

On weekend nights, Bush headed to his fraternity, Delta Kappa Epsilon, known as the Deke house.

Reputed to contain the "longest bar in New Haven," the Deke house eventually elected Bush its president. A home to campus jocks including the eventual professional football player Calvin Hill, Deke would provide music from the likes of Wilson Pickett and beer of a slightly lesser quality.

"We'd all go over there and get plastered, or go to our rooms and get plastered, or go to some college function and get plastered," says long-time Yale friend Russell Walker, now an attorney in Oklahoma City. "We all hoped some woman would find it attractive."

Bush, his friends say, was not the heaviest drinker on campus. He "wasn't a teetotaler and he wasn't a lush," says his roommate of four years, Robert Deeter.

Still, Bush was bent on having a good time at Yale. Walker remembers walking home with Bush one night when his friend suddenly shouted, "Let's rock and roll--you rock and I'll roll!" Blocks away from campus, the someday Texas governor began to log roll down the street.

Then one Christmas, in the process of trying to round up a Christmas tree for the Deke house, Bush and some fraternity brothers cast their eyes on a wreath hanging in front of a local store. The Deke house could use just such a wreath, they decided.