Harpur College 1965 Yearbook (Binghamton, NY) - Full Access

So it was that our class (that is - class of '65, this being written from the perspective and point of view of that class, though the trimester renders class lines vague) entered upon the glass and steel and brick modernity of the school which had picked up its strange roots and moved into suburbia completely by the fall Of 1960. It as a very different school - a school without identity, whose older students felt somewhat out of place in Vestal and were alienated and apathetic. There had been fire· the 1960 appearence of Herbert A,;theker had caused apoplexy among r1gid Binghamtonians and the town began to wonder if the gown were not a httle seedy and sick. But it was a new schoOl, and if we frosb did not know what we were capable of becoming, then neither did the rest of the school. Many who entered that year were rejeCts, the QUtca$tS spumed by a score of othei' schools. Give me your tired, your J)90r, your hungry masses yearning to be free, and the Statue of Harpur welcomed beneath her brick folds those who had applied to Harvard and Columbia, Oberlin and Reed - the alienated High-schOOl n agonazed by the thought of always having to explain and what 1 was. The young school attempted to ease their · ing and wrong-headed inferiority complex remained for a t years fOund we had no reason to justify anything, or explaan anything. This class found a student body which was divided unto itself. There were clubbies, and there were sickies, plus a few who tried to hedge, and a great mass of annonymous people. The clubbie-sickie line was rig1d. During the _productiOn of the ·ng Revtew ( ..Hoopla for Our Side") that year, the lanes were broken somewha but ; would take two more ~s for the lines to shatter completely. In the small , -clubbies would gather at their tables, the sickies at theirs. and the uncommttted would search for neutral tables to watch the psychic struggle between the poets and the greaseballs (siCkae view), between those with their feet on the ground and the phonies (clubbie YteW). Thl ~s the stucten body. a schizo· phrenic creature with deep insecurity feelinas. ll