IT’S ALL IN THE NAME

JUNE 18, 2024 – Today we drove from Lyme to New Haven. Our destination was Yale University, or more specifically, the Yale University Art Gallery. I’d driven and ridden the route numerous times, but this was the first occasion when I was especially conscious of the names along the way—Clinton, Leetes, Trumbull, Stewart R. McKinney, Jr., Chester Bowles, and Yale himself. I don’t know why this was so. It just was.

I then thought about all the bridges, roads, overpasses, underpasses, school buildings, and campus stadia bearing someone’s name. Reaching back to my grade school days, I recalled all the elementary schools in town: Lincoln, Franklin, Washington—names of Founders and easy to remember—along with St. Stephen’s, the Catholic school, an easy name to remember, though I had no idea who St. Stephen; I was sure, at least, that he had a direct link with a higher power. In the next town, however, but still within our school district, was a grade school with the oddball name of “L.O. Jacobs.” Who the heck was he? As I learned in later years, L.O. Jacobs had been a superintendent of schools. But how many kids who attended that school over the years or people who drove past it, had a clue—or care?

How many people flying up and down our route today, I wondered, had a clue or care about Clinton, Trumbull, et alia?

By the time we zoomed past the (first) Yale University sign along I95, I pondered the “Anderson Center” of Hamline University near our house back in Minnesota. Every kid at that school, I’m sure, knows an “Anderson.” I grew up with all kinds of them and to this day, know lots of Andersons. In Minnesota it’s hardly a distinguished name. But which among the thousands of “sons of Anders” wrote the big check to have one of the most common names among Swedish-American Minnesotans hung on a splashy new campus building? If the donor was looking for recognition, they should’ve changed their name to something more memorable, such as . . . “Harvard” or “Yale.”

Yet, this morning as we began seeing more “Yale University” directional signs, I realized that if I’d ever read or heard, I’d forgotten who “Yale” was. I’d heard of the university ever since my grandparents had given my sisters and me (or was it just my older sisters?) a Yale pennant (among other “East Coast” pennants) for our family’s collection—back when I was a first or second grader. Thanks to that pennant the name “Yale” was easily recalled—especially after one of my sisters explained that the bulldog on the large blue pennant stood for “tenacious education.”

As I grew in sophistication, I knew that “Yale” wasn’t the name of the dog. I wasn’t sure, however, if the university was connected to the padlock company with the same name. Today I figured would be a good occasion to expand my knowledge; to dig deeper; to learn the provenance of “Yale.” I knew that the university was among the very earliest of American institutions of higher learning, so I assumed “Yale” was a prominent colonial; perhaps a scholar or a clergyman after whom this member of the Ivy League had been named.

Google and Wikipedia quickly disabused me of what I thought were logical assumptions. “Yale,” it turns out, was a Bostonian merchant and early—albeit modest by current standards— benefactor of what had been named generically, “The Collegiate School” at the time of its founding in 1701. Yale, whose first name was Elihu, was a member of the East India Company and had made a fortune selling goods under the table—that is, against company policy—to Madras merchants. In 1718 at the request of Cotton Mather (a Harvard grad), Yale donated “nine bales of goods” with a value of £560 (worth about $31,000 today). Cotton Mather (whose father, Increase Mather, had been among the “Founders” of “The Collegiate School”) was so appreciative of Yale’s beneficence that he, Cotton, urged that the college be renamed Yale College. It would morph into Yale University, under which many colleges would bloom and grow.

Ever since, people have straightened their posture upon hearing or reading the name of one of American’s premiere institutions, Yale University.

On the 40-minute trip back to our son’s family quarters in Chester, I reviewed with gratification what I’d learned today about Yale—on the internet and at Yale itself. Most any other Anglicized Welsh name, I thought, would probably have worked as well as “Yale,” though I was less sure of Yale’s first name, Elihu, as in “Elihu University.” This thought, in turn, reminded me of what I’d read the other day by William R. Shirer, the American correspondent in Berlin at the outbreak of WW II. In his seminal work on Nazi Germany, The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, Shirer delves into Adolf Hitler’s genealogy. It turns out that by quirk of fate, Hitler’s grandfather emerged from the woodwork, as it were, just in time before his (the grandfather’s) death to claim paternity of Hitler’s father, who up to that point, had assumed the family name of Hitler’s paternal grandmother, which was “Schicklgruber.” Shirer speculated that without acquiring the name “Hitler,” Adolf’s career would’ve taken a far less destructive path, since “Heil Schicklgruber!” simply wouldn’t have had the same ring as “Heil Hitler!”

Likewise, “Go Yale!” works a lot better than “Go Elihu!”

Oh, and along the way today, I learned that the Yale mascot was a real bulldog named Handsome Dan, which Andrew Graves, a Yale undergraduate and tackle on the football team, bought from a New Haven blacksmith for five bucks in 1889. According to contemporary accounts, Handsome Dan was “enthusiastic and ferocious” and thus, made the perfect mascot for Connecticut’s Ivy League university.

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© 2024 by Eric Nilsson