Author Archives: Eric Leventhal

Clovers

My informant grew up in a town outside of Springfield, Ohio, in a relatively small community.  According to her, there wasn’t much to go out and do, so one of the things she loved to do was pick clovers and knock them into a necklace similar to a Hawaiian lei.  Some of her other friends would also make these necklaces with her.  Also she and her friends use to take these clovers and make them into a sort of potion for the fairies, and in exchange for this potion, they believed that the fairies would grant them three wishes.  My informant says she and her friends used to wish for stuff like having the longest hair of anyone they knew, but later in life they started making their first wish to be for a hundred extra wishes, which made the wishing get out of hand.

While I never made potions for fairies, there were certainly times in my life, especially after watching the movie Aladdin, where the topic of conversation between me and my peers turned into “if you had three wishes, what would they be?”  And almost everyone’s first wish was for a hundred extra wishes, or a million extra wishes, or infinite wishes, or something.  Usually we said stuff like that wasn’t allowed.  We certainly weren’t the wish police or the wish distribution bureau, so we didn’t care about fairness per se, but the point of the game was to see what kinds of things people wanted, so limiting someone to thee wishes was in the interests of a fair personality test.

Valentines Day

While she was at school, my informant partook in a Valentine’s Day activity wherein each child in the class makes Valentine’s cards for everyone, and then makes a box and decorates the box.  Children then go around and put their cards in everyone else’s box.  She said that she was not very good at arts and crafts as a young child and so she thought her box was terrible and plain compared to everyone else’s.  According to my informant, the other children’s boxes had dancers and straws and ballerinas and other fancy figures on the side of the box, and she felt very embarrassed about the state of her box.  Later in life, she said she realized that the other children had fancy boxes because their parent’s helped to make them.

When I was in elementary school, we too participated in the ritual of exchanging Valentine’s day cards.  We made our own box, but we usually just went out and bought a set of Valentine’s day cards at the store, which came in packs of 16 or 20.  Also it was tradition to tape a small portion of candy onto your Valentine’s cards.  Cards were given to every student regardless of the gender of the giver or the recipient.  For us, Valentine’s day was less about the making of boxes and more about getting free candy.

The University of Chicago “C Bench”

At the University of Chicago, there is a concrete bench in the form of a C in front of the administration building.  According to my informant, who attended the University of Chicago in the 1940’s and early 1950’s, you were not to sit on the C bench “unless you were a letterman or had been kissed by a letterman.”  Essentially only athletes and the girlfriends of athletes could use the bench.  My informant says that if someone violated this rule, however, no one really did anything, it’s was just a funny rule.

After some research, it seems that there are two different traditions surrounding the C Bench from different eras.  In the early 1900’s, the C Bench was off-limits for Freshman, and any freshman who sat on it would most definitely be harassed by older students.  Back then, the C Bench was a big social center of campus and lots of people hung out there.  In later years, that tradition appears to have faded and been replaced by reserving the C Bench for athletes and their girlfriends.   At this point in time, however, the C Bench seems to have dwindled as a hot spot for social activity and the  tradition had lost almost all meaning, especially with the school’s shift from athletic focus to academic focus.

http://college.uchicago.edu/story/story-bench

Fraternity Initiation – Pledge Plays

My informant attended the University of Chicago during the 1940’s and early 1950’s, and was a member of the Zeta Beta Tau, or ZBT, fraternity.  While fraternity life was different than it was at other universities and certainly is different now, they had one initiation ritual in particular that my informant remembers.  After they had become fully admitted into the fraternity, the pledges had to put on a play where they got to parody the older members of the fraternity.  Each older member had to be represented at least once during this play.  Also instead of hazing rituals, the pledges had to do tasks around the house like cleaning and other chores.

Personally, I find it amazing that the USC Trojan Marching Band, or at least the alto saxophone section of the TMB, has this very same ritual.  At the end of the Weekender trip, which is the away game against either Cal or Standford depending on the year, the freshman are tasked with putting on sketches about the older members of the band.  Every older member must be represented at some point, which often means that some freshman must pull double duty and do two skits.  The fact that a tradition so similar is still being practiced 60 years later tells me that this tradition is at least somewhat universal.

Wallball variant – Handball

According to my informant, he and his classmates would play a game they called Handball during recess.  The ‘court’ was a specific area in the school between a set of stairs one one side and a railing on the other.  Games were played with a rubber playground ball.  If a player hit the ball at either of these points, that player was out.  Also there was a small hole in the court, and hitting the ball there also merited an out.  Additionally, there was a grey line partway up the wall, and if a player hit the ball above this line, that player would be out.

In a way, this game seems to be similar to regular handball,  where the player must hit the ball against a wall in between a lower and upper line.  However, my informant’s version of the game involved a large number of players, usually 15 to 20 at the start, and had more specific boundaries that can be attributed to the nature of the court they used.  Overall, this appears to be a mix of regular handball and playground wallball.