University of Virginia Library

'She Had A Girdle On'

Yalie Recounts Baldwin Weekend

Reprinted From The Yale Daily News

At 11:30 Friday night before
last, a chrome-covered Continental
Trailways Bus pulled up in front of
the Hotel Taft. Inside, as they had
been for the past 10 hours, were 46
girls from Mary Baldwin College, a
liberal arts school for 700 females
located in Staunton, Virginia.

One might naturally begin to
wonder why 46 girls would climb
into a chrome-plated Continental
Trailways bus and journey 600
miles to New Haven - in the
middle of the term. The answer
goes back many weeks, to a night
when Berkeley-man Howard O.
("Woody") Hunter III, 1968, was
conversing in his room with his girl
friend, Denced Fendig, 1968, who
is a Mary Baldwin girl from St.
Simpson Island, Georgia. Hunter is
a Georgia man himself, and he, and
a few friends began to discuss the
difference between Southern and
Northern girls.

Miss Fendig argued that the girls
below the Mason-Dixon line were
"so different," different in the way
they dress, "in the way they
think," and "gee, in their whole
outlook on life."

"But precisely how are they
different?" Miss Fendig was asked.
She couldn't explain; in her heart,
she knew they just were.

"Then I had an idea," she said.
"How wonderful it would be just to
bring up a whole bus-load of girls to
prove how different they are!"

One of Miss Fendig's first
actions on returning to Baldwin was
to post a list. Whoever wanted to
come North to see those Yale men
was invited to sign. Within an hour,
there were a hundred signatures.

But 100 was too many, and Miss
Scheel was designated head selector.
"We sort of discussed
questions," she said, though she
wouldn't say just what questions
students had to fill out on their
application for the trip. She was
looking for "adaptable" people,
geographically-mixed girls who mixed
well rain or shine, North or
South, and who could come up
with three pretty good adjectives to
"describe their ideal fella."

Mary Baldwin College was
founded in the 1840's. Baldwin
girls repose in yellow-brick Georgian
style buildings, are content
with a sociology department of one
elderly gentleman, and attend compulsory
chapel twice a week and
compulsory church services on
Sunday.

But though there have been no
student protests over the exclusive
make-up of the student body, it
would be wrong to conclude that
Mary Baldwin girls aren't activists.
One or two years ago, for example,
they rioted in the dining hall when
"Spam Balls" were served. "Spam
balls," said one Baldwin girl, "are
horrible." No Spam balls have been
served since.

Gradually the door of the bus
opened, and the girls began to file
out. Wild cheering greeted the first
four or five, and then the shouting
tapered off as girl after girl emerged
into the misty night air.

Soon the lobby of the Hotel
Taft was filled with scurrying
Yalies, talking their talk and
carrying baggage to and fro. The
girls, reportedly, had honed their
accents during the bus ride: "I'm so
glad to be heah"; "Aren't you just
the cutest thing!" they would
exclaim, filling the Taft with soft
sounds of the South.

Reports conflict about what
transpired during that first evening
in the Taft: "I never knew that
Yalies could be so objectionable,"
said one Yale man. "You should
have seen them, staggering around
in the halls as if they were drunk
throwing beer around and sort o
seeming to say, 'You came up here
to get seduced by us, so g with it.'

"They loved us," said another.

Many of the girls from Mary
Baldwin, however, didn't want to
sit around in a hotel on their first
night. They wanted to "go places,"
for, after all, this was a weekend for
excitement and experiment -
though the type of experiment you
can tell your friends about.

"Ah'd just love some marijuana,"
one told her amazed escort
during a snack in the corner booth
of a local restaurant.

The girls were up bright and
early the next morning for their
tour of the Campus. They marched
over to Berkeley for breakfast and
then lined up with the several Yale
men who had signed up a few days
before as "guides."

If you saw a line of 46 girls
marching single file and almost
in-step anywhere between Berkeley
and the Art and Architecture
Building two Saturday mornings
ago, those were the Mary Baldwin
girls. "You just have such a darling
campus," one of them said after the
trip. But the time for sight seeing
was nearing an end; there were
plans for serious mixing in the
works.

There was not one but two band
performances scheduled for that
day, and if you happened to drop
over to the Berkeley common room
that afternoon, you would have
seen the Mary Baldwin girls and
their dates dutifully bouncing up
and down to the great big sound of
the East Coast Journeymen.

Whiffenpoofs elect Tom Colwell,
1968, spend much of the afternoon
collecting funds to create his
specialty, called "Purple Death,"
and the rest of the afternoon
drinking it: "Purple Death" consists
of two bottles of Tom Collins, a
fifth of 151 proof rum, and a half
gallon of mountain red Claret.

"It's fantastic," he would tell
friends, his eyes agleam. "You can't
taste a thing, and then suddenly it
hits you, WHAM!"

As evening approached, Baldwin
girls wandered in and began to
imbibe the Purple Death.

One minor detail had escaped
the notice of the makers of the
Purple Death. It had been widely
assumed that drunkenness would be
a novel experience for a Mary
Baldwin girl, and strange and
perhaps exciting things would take
place during the evening. The Yale
men, however, had not kneed on
the University of Virginia, where
Mary Baldwin girls often party.

At U. Va., so the legend goes,
the men like the women soft and
their liquor straight. It is not
authoritatively known whether
Mary Baldwin girls are soft, but it is
now established that they can hold
their liquor. It is true that one girl
said at the main reason she hated
the compulsory church services on
Sunday was that after her Saturday
nights "I always felt ready to vomit
when I drank the wine for communion";
but, nonetheless, most
Mary Baldwin girls were not hung
over on Sunday morning, and they
actually seemed to have survived
the night better than their male
counterparts.

By night time the ethnic purity
of the Berkeley gathering had been
ruined by one or two stray townies
and an unknown number of female
representatives from the right wing
Republican convention drifted in,
leaving their name tags and other
flotsam on carpets for the Sunday
morning sun to see.

For those who couldn't squeeze
into Colwell's room, the East Coast
Journeymen were breaking it up in
the dining hall, and the professional
refreshment server (black) worked
frantically as grasping hands
snatched up Dixie cups from his
table.

At midnight, a Mary Baldwin
girl was explaining how her school
had made the College Bowl (a T.V.
quiz show for college kids which
Baldwin lost); and several flights
down WYBC-chairman Jay
Feldman dashed out of Colwell's
room and made the toilet bowl,
after which he lay down on the
bathroom floor and refused to be
moved, forcing friends to post a
sign on the door requesting the
public not to step on him.

Midnight. The Mary Baldwin
girls began to drift back to the Taft,
dates in tow, and at least one
induced her Yale man into bed.

"I spent the whole night with
her in bed," he said the next day,
"and it was a farce. She wanted to
be assaulted so she could say, 'No.'

"All I wanted to do was go to
sleep, and I was too" tired and too
drunk to leave, though she
wouldn't have let me if I tried. But
she wouldn't let me go to sleep. All
night she kept poking me. All night.
Seven hours.

"But I refused to assault her,"
he went on, a trace of pride
returning. "I refused to let her say
no and gratify her ego.

"Anyway, she had a girdle on."

But what, after all, of that
difference between Southern and
Northern girls? "I really think
they're different," mused Colwell;
"It seemed to me that they really
couldn't cope with the Yale weekend."

The reason that they couldn't
cope with the Yale week-end, it
seemed to Colwell, was that "we
weren't so blatant about being
gross, as I understand they're used
to; it left them out at sea, it
demanded more intelligence on
their part, and, well, they aren't
quite as quick as the girls at
Smith."

It further seemed to Colwell
that the morality of the Mary
Baldwin girls "king of an unthinking
thing: ingrained on them over
the years and they couldn't explain
it, only react."

"I had a lot of fun," he said,
"but a lot of that is because the
guys around here are so great, and
the party was so great."

Others talked about the Baldwin
girls' "lack of depth," how "if you
wanted to talk about anything
deeper than your class year and
what you're taking, they got
scared."

"It goes back to this whole thing
about Southern womanhood," said
Paul Pilkonis, 1969, who is
rumored to have become engaged
to a Baldwin girl. "They were much
more inhibited and less aggressive
than Northern girls, but then again,
they are more frank, and friendly
and outgoing.

Pilkonis' date, for example,
walked up to a New Haven police
officer and asked him to smile. She
was upset, she explained to him, by
the "indifference" she had observed
during her brief stay in the North,
and she wanted to go home with
the feeling that "people here are
equally as friendly as in the South."

The cop gave her a wan grin.

The girls, for their part, were
coming to feel that Northern boys
were different from Southern boys.
Saturday night, a subversive
Smithie had convinced one or two
Baldwin girls that Yale men were all
the same, and a few couldn't help
noting that none of the men at
U.Va. "ever had to pretend they
were drunk."

But the girls seemed happy as
their Continental Trailways bus
pulled up for them early Sunday
afternoon.

Miss Scheel, the girl's chaperone,
said that the weekends at the
University of Virginia were "just so
trashy...drunken brawls and orgies"
and this weekend has been a
welcome relief. Miss Scheel herself
went out with red-haired William-Howard-Taft-expert
Claude Barfield;
and while there is no way of
knowing whether Barfield, an assistant
professor of history, represented
her "ideal fella," she was
reported to have been "snowed" by
him, and Barfield said that he had
had a "very pleasant time." They
had lunched at Kasey's, and then
attended lacrosse and rugby games
later in the afternoon.

"Look at all the faces," Miss
Scheel exclaimed as the girls drifted
into the bus on which they could
spend the next nine hours. "Happy
faces!"

"You can always tell the girls
from Mary Baldwin," one of them
piped up, "they're always suntanned
and smiling."

"You can just tell they had a
great time," said Miss Fendig, as she
and Hunter stood together, proud
as parents, grinned at the farewell
scene.

"And I know the boys like it,"
Hunter volunteered. "It was a big
success. A campus policeman told
me that he though this was the big
social event in Yale College so far
this spring."

"There weren't any unpleasant
ones, all very good mixers,"
mumbled one Yale man as the bus
moved out, signifying the end of
another weekend in the mad march
through time to the Summer of
1967.