Dead Presidents

More than halfway through a workweek much heavier than the one preceding or to follow: Tuesday likely broke a record for me, seeing four different clients in four different places in four different counties, none of them the one I live in.  It also brought no resolution of the biggest PITA in my life of the moment, and added a new stressbuster late in the day. Both remained unresolved at the end of today, but I was okay by then. Kay Serra and all that.

Much of yesterday among those four was spent taking pictures of assorted goofy things: Getting behind this funeral home van at the Timmy's drive-thru and being glad that at least it wasn't a hearse-




- then noticing this icon on the media display in Eleanor's car (I borrowed it for the day because, four counties) and wondering whether any kid under 25 would know what that symbol was-




- and finally getting to Stop One in Batavia (court is held in the county legislative chambers) and doing what I was told-




THAT hearing went fine. Hopefully tomorrow's will be as good.

But the day also brought news from a county I formerly lived in and drove not far from in yesterday's travels: Cornell's ninth president, inaugurated with much pomp in our first semester, passed away Monday at the age of 93. From the official obit:

Cornell President Emeritus Frank H.T. Rhodes, an unparalleled leader, colleague and friend to generations of Cornellians, passed away last night at the age of 93.  Frank Rhodes led Cornell for 18 years, from 1977 to 1995, nearly unheard of today at major research universities. He presided over tremendous, transformative periods of growth in the university’s research and academic programs, shaping Cornell’s national and international role, and renewing a focus on the importance of teaching.

After stepping down as president, Frank never left Cornell. He continued his influential role as an elder statesman in higher education, with an always relevant voice in matters of national academic and university leadership. Always a scholar, he also returned to his deep scientific roots, researching and writing about geology, evolution, the history of science, and the need to be responsible stewards of the planet we all share.

You might imagine that the cynical campus journalist has other and further memories of the man, who proudly counted himself as a member of our fall 1977 "freshman class." You would be right.  For all his pip-pip-tally-ho-ishness (he was born in Warwickshire, England, the H.T. stood for "Harold Trevor," and he retained his Veddy British accent through his tenure), he was much a creature of the Grumpy Old Men on the Board of Trustees who hired him. He presided over the dismantling of an effective student-influenced university government, resisted calls for university divestment from South African companies, and defaced the campus's gorges with preventive suicide bars on the bridges over them right before our class arrived in August of 1977. (Suicides, of course, went up that fall despite the measures.)

That first semester was particularly nasty, brutish and long- owing perhaps to an earlier than usual Labor Day (classes began then at the time) and a later than usual Thanksgiving break- and with no days off in between, a teeming horde of mostly freshmen marched on his Cayuga Heights home to demand that our name is Vroomfondel a long weekend break in mid-October.  This being Ithaca, mid-October failed to cooperate, making our march a long, cold journey into early evening, but producing one of the most pitiful battle cries ever known to man:

We will stay and freeze our asses
Till Frank Rhodes cancels classes!

Avoiding the engaging mistakes of some of his predecessors, President Rhodes took a more measured approach: he ignored us until we were too cold and/or bored to proceed, and we all went home, and back to class the next morning.

This victory of sorts didn't endear our Prez any more (or less) to the student population. Within a year or so, a comic began spoofing His Royal Presidentness as "Captain Cornell," a superhero of sorts dedicated to truth, justice, and the High Tuition Way!  Alas, the internet offers no evidence of this characterization. It may have run in The Sun, but I'm pretty sure its creator was one of our regulars a couple years ahead of me, Joey Green.

Joey started a side project late in my freshman year called the Cornell Lunatic, a humor magazine which entered the void left by the then-almost-20 year absence of the Cornell Widow. The Lunatic lives on in Ithaca lo these 40 years later, and Joey has gone on to a career of covering awesome television shows and quirky how-to guides.

Yet the one I remember even more fondly seems to have no internet presence at all. A few other Sun writers, thinking the Lunatic was too crazy for them (or, more likely, not crazy enough) came up with their own stab at a humor magazine known as the Cornell Hedonist.  I think I remember one issue making it into print, although I may even be hallucinating that. What I DO remember, quite clearly, was them setting up a table in the lobby of The Straight (the central campus student union, back when you could name a building that;), soliciting some combination of writers, advertisers or subscribers.  To attract a crowd, they warbled out their own version of a Steppenwolf classic:

Borrrrrn to be Heeeedonist.....


If I bought a copy, it didn't survive. Eternal pack rat that I am, it means I probably didn't.

So say a fond farewell to Captain Cornell.  I'd like to hope he wasn't felled by Kryptonite, but since the dude was a geology professor, there would be something fitting about it.

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ETA. Success!  I'd forgotten that the university archived decades of Sun issues and made them semi-searchable. So I was able to confirm that, yes, CC is indeed Joey's creation, and found one of the actual comics and a column riffing on it: