In December of 1965, back when I was a high school freshman at SMI, I was invited to attend a Rotary Club luncheon as one of the three finalists from my school in the Four Way Test essay contest.  Michele Bazan was the winner and got to read her essay (notwithstanding that 9th grade English teacher Mrs. Going was one of the judges) and Gail Welch ( Read more... )

Something over a year ago I had a post about the Pange Lingua of Thomas Aquinas.  I was not at all prepared for the ensuing controversy.

I gather it brought back sparkling memories from a number of my classmates at SUNY Albany ('73).  Rather than summarize, I herewith excerpt the comments:

Dear Bob ( Read more... )

I'm often asked how a political conservative managed to survive the campus political and cultural wars of the 1969-73 period.  The answer is very simple: by employing the force of ideas, as this Jon Guttman cartoon from the March, 1971 issue of the Albany Eagle, our underground conservative newspaper at the State University of New York at Albany,  ( Read more... )

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Folks who see Meredith Willson's The Music Man are often startled to discover deep in the second act that the lovely near-lullaby ballad Goodnight My Someone is in fact the same melody as the stirring march 76 TrombonesEven with that Great American Musical background, I am still stunned by the revelation that the most beautiful, solemn, mysterious ( Read more... )

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"But this was back in the late 1960s and early 1970s. It was a time of turmoil at colleges and universities.  And I saw some very smart people and very privileged people behaving irresponsibly."
-Samuel Alito 1/9/2006You youngsters can have no idea what it was like to be a conservative Republican on a college campus in that era.  I entered the ( Read more... )