Volume 15 Number four
January 21, 1983
The survivors speak
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Publishu Ed Bennett Editor-in-Chid' Andy Court Designu Matthew Bartholomew Business Managu Barbara Burrell Production Managu Hilary Callahan Photography Editor JefT Strong Associate Busintss Managus Darren Gersh • Jane Kamensky• Robert Moore• Associate Editors Geoff Hayward Paul Hofheinz J im Lowe M orris Panner W . Hampton Sides Lelia Wardwell A ssociatt Production Managu Alex Savich Staff Jon Bunge• Tina Kelley• Katie Kressman• Mike Otsuka• Laura Pappano• Marilynn Sager Katherine Scobey• Sally Sloan • Christianna Williams Lisa Yun• •eucted Decembu 7, 1982 Friends: Anonymous Anson M. Beard, Jr. Edward B. Bennett, Jr. Nancy R . Bennett Jonathan M. Clarkt Louise F. Cooper James W. Cooper Peter B. Coopertt GeofTry Fried Sherwin Goldman Brooks Kelley Andrew J. Kuzneski , Jr. Lewis Lehrman Mr. & Mrs. E. Nobles Lowet Fairfax C. Randalltt Nicholas X . Rizopoulos Dick and Debbie Searst Richard Shields Thomas Strongtt Alex and Betsy Torello Allen and Sarah Wardwell Daniel Yergin tnewfriend t t has ~iven a second time
Volume 15
Number four
5
Comment
7
January 21 , 1983
When Falwell came to Yale
by W. Hampton Sides
Only sixteen: women and tenure at Yale
by Leslie Koch
He walked into a lion's den, and left with an applause, and no one could undnslm!d.
A discussion of the problems Yale faces in its efforts to tenure rrwre women.
10
NewsJournal
The spirit of the spirits shop After 15 years, Snoopy at Qualiry Wine had become more than a familiar face.
Backstage at the Rep The Yale Repertory TheaJre's Winterfest features six seminars on the creation and development of a new play.
Moose is loose, again The Oldest Residential College Week9' Dairy of &ra Stiles College returns for another semester of satire.
• 12
Major stories
Cover: Witnessing the witnesses The story
of the Holbcaust Survivors' Film Project, a
by Andy Court
unique effort to videotape Holocaust survivors recounting their experiences. The project's collection of over 250 tapes has kcome Yale's first video archive.
22
Columbus House: a new haven for the homeless
..
by Tina Kelley
New Raven's street people get a new place to sleep aJ night.
30
The food factory
by Lindsay Rodes
A behind-the-scenes wok aJ the people who touch whaJ you eaJ, everyday.
40
Research
45
Books
The paid Samaritans
by Darren Gersh
Some students will rent their bodies out to make a buck and science is the better for it.
The Great Intangibles of college life
by Holly Lyman
YDN's laJest Insider's Guide to the colleges is out, with some interesting changes from previous editions.
The New J ou rnal/j anuary 21 , 1983 3
Playing In Local Bands by Nancy Fales Garrett
lhe"Newjoumal Members and Directors
The disturbing and comic story of a famiJ ' s reunion in the desert Southwest.
Winterfes
436-1600 0
Yale
.nej!erto
Theatre
Student Rush for WIJrdlw;~• Tickets to all performances I. D . es only after 6 (not including F ri. & Sat. eves.) p.m . Weeknights & 12 p.m . Matinees. Subject to availability
H enry C. C hauncey, J r . Peter B . Cooper Brooks Kelley Peter Neill Michelle Press Thomas Strong Board of Advisors
J oh n Hersey Roger Kirwood Thomas Strong Elizabeth Tate (Volume 15, Number 4) Th~ N~w journal is published six times during the school year by the New Journal at Yale, Inc. , Post Office Box 3432 Yale Station, New Haven, CT 06520. Copyright c 1983 by the New Journal at Yale , Inc. All rights reserved. Reproduction either in whole or in part without written permission of the publisher and editor-in-chief is prohibited. This magazine is published by Yale College students and Yale University is not responsible for its contents. Ten thousand copies of each issue are distributed for free to all members of the Yale University community. TM N~wJournal is typeset by the Charlton Press of New H aven , CT and printed by the Trumbull Printing Company of Trumbull, CT. Bookkeeping and accounting services provided by Colman Bookkeeping of New H aven , CT. Billing services by Comprehensive Business Services of H amden, CT. Office address: 105 Becton Center Phone: (203) 436-4525
correction:
R oger K irwood's name was misspelled in our December 1 issue. 4 The New Journal/january 2 1, 1983
Comment When Falwell came to Yale W. Hampton Sides It was a lost war for so many who turned out, a missed opportunity to destroy somebody disagreeable. For others it was only confirmation that a smart politician knows how to juggle his views for a hostile audience. But that night I sensed that there was more to the crowd's reaction than this. I was fairly certain, as I walked out into the wet streets after hearing him, that something had gone awry. Some welllearned confidence had failed, some stale college-boy ideal had played out. And when I saw the other faces it occurred to me that I wasn't the only one who felt it. I could see it in their expressions, could hear it in the flat silence of the lecture hall as it emptied. Jerry Falwell had walked into a lion's den that night, and left with an applause. And no one could understand. . Maybe it was just bad vibes lingermg from Giamatti's freshman address about the New Right last year, but there was something incongruous about Falwell's very presence here on November 11, 1982. After all, this was the "peddler" of coercion th e president had warned everybody about. This was the glaring, smiling symbol of all the crude Middle American values that universities are supposed to renounce a!ld .work against. So from the be~nnmg there was the frown of an tnstitution. The evangelist from Virginia had been invited, but he wasn't exactly welcome. Was this w hy P.resident Giamatti agreed to meet in hts office with Falwell earlier in the day, but was infuriated when a New York Times photographer snapped off a few shots of the two men shaking hands in Woodbridge Hall? What would the alumni say about this in the paper?
But reflecting upon the evening I spent with Jerry Falwell, I think that there was nothing I could call "crude" about the man. I remember only the smoothness of his style, the frankness of his appearance, the gray threepiece. This was no redneck monster no fire and brimstone bumpkin i~ polyester. This was a politician with sp7echwriters and a carefully sculpted hatrcut. We had expected the Bible and got politics instead, had expected hallelujahs and got figures and statistics and a few boring quotes out of Reader's Digest instead. What was worse, we had expected stupidity and provincialism, and wound up with a rather brilliant speaker who knew where he was that n ight.
The conversation began delicately at the pre-speech dinner for Falwell and his entourage. They were serving baked chicken in the T.D. fellow's lounge when University Chaplain John Vannorsdall called for a moment of "optional" prayer. It was to be non-sectarian prayer of course, a minute or two for people so persuaded to bless their food. I glanced up to see Falwell's reaction. He was grinning at his associates as he bowed his head. Optional, non-sectarian prayer. Wasn't this exactly what he wanted to see back in the public schools? Falwell kept grinning. There were just a handful of us at the table with Falwell- a few reporters and P.U. members in coat and tie. We were eating quietly, craning our necks to see, as Chaplain Vannorsdall tried to break the ice. The first topic that
cropped up between the two men of the cloth was nuclear war. Falwell pointed out that his b iggest concern was not the Russian threat, but rather the spread of nuclear weapons into underdeveloped countries. And then, out of nowhere, Chaplain Vannorsdall started quoting from T homas Hobbes' Leviathan, which he had been looking at that day. Vannorsdall said the atom was like the Leviathan, filling mankind with fear a nd compelling us to obedience through its awesome power of destruction. Okay, I thought. It seemed natural enough to me in the setting, this casual sort of scholarly namedropping. Then it struck me that Falwell probably hadn't read a whole lot of Hobbes in his lifetime and that he probably didn't care to hear about him now while he was picking apart his chicken wing across the table from us. What does J erry Falwell have to do with Thomas Hobbes?, I thought. Sometimes books are the handiest way to sidestep direct conversation. Sometimes people need an old frame of reference for explaining something entirely new, just as someone might refer to a verse from the Bible when he doesn't have the answer. But when liberals like Vannorsdall show such predilection for books in times of uneasy conversation, I begin to wonder whether there might be something to all this business about "secular humanism." Maybe it is more than a code word in the Bible Belt, more than the philosophy of Satan at work. Maybe it in fact exists as a kind of high faith, and maybe many of us depend on it for answers. Outside the building while Falwell spoke, a modest-sized gathering of students staged a protest play they called a "secular humanist vigil." They chanted lines by candlelight, condemning bigotry and chauvinism and oppression and nuclear war. They praised the liberties of reproductive right and sexual alternative. In unison, they read from a script reverently prepared by the organizers, drowning out the roars from the lion's den with a methodical hum. They never entered the building. People who went to the vigil said they felt better when it was over. The question ocThe New Journal/january 21, 1983 5
curs to me: isn't this religion , and who's to say it isn't? It was this same humanitarian faith that told me that many of Falwell's beliefs were morally wrong. And because of this, I assumed that he was wrong in a constitutional context, that his opinions were illegitimate, and I dismissed him as an ignoramus. I then made the even greater mistake of assuming that his illegitimacy was selfevident to the planet, because I thought I had seen a bit of the lig ht and h e h adn't, because my words were softer, more elusive than his. I had pretended all a long that the pile of books on the shelf back in the room somehow made me more intelligent than he, and therefore mo re right. I didn't have to think things through. I had read my H obbes, and he hadn't.
When Jerry Falwell came to Yale I think many people discovered that faith alone wasn't .good enough in a political debate. They found they couldn't rely on the babble of humanism to answer the radicals of the right or left. Pluralism. Tolerance. Civilization. Humanity. We all know the buzzwords. They sre the poignant catchphrases ingrained in our minds by our poets, people like Giamatti and Vannorsdall and Coffin. The words sound pretty, and they fall out of the mouth like baby food. We use the words in conversation just as the evangelicals a rgue social issues out of the Good Book . But what does "tolerance" stand for when a Falwell comes and condemns pornography? What does "pluralism" mean when a Falwall comes and 6 The New Journal/january 21, 1983
says abortion is murder? The words are irrelevant, because they exist as a rticles of faith and not as arguments of politics. Falwell believes child pornography is immoral, believes abortion is murder. This is not a matter of sophistication, just conviction. This is how a minister from south ern Virginia can come a nd speak before a throng of presumably bright and politicallyminded studen ts, and confound them all. It's religion getting in the way of politics. But in th e e nd, that's all we really have to go on, isn't it? F aith, feeling, religion, wh atever we choose to call it. And it ultimately doesn't m atter whether that faith comes from Socrates, J esus C h rist o r Russell Baker. Yet we shouldn't let convictions masquerade as -political arguments and assume that others who don't catch on are morally wrong. We shouldn't disclaim the¡ sin cerity or plausibility of som eone else's ideology, or else we fall into the same blind trap, the same selfrighteousness, that I think the Moral Majority falls into. Many people within the liberally edu cated elite try to make the evangelicals understand that they must keep politics a nd religion separate. They think there is something unsophisticated, something unconstitutional even, about a lawmaker allowing his private morality to influence his political stance. Legislating morality, they call it. But they think nothing when they color their politics with their own brand of faith, a faith that is every bit as sacred to them as the Word is to a Baptist pastor. Like some set fundamentalist, they fail to perceive their mora.lity as a morality in a philosophical sense, as some debatable way of looking at the world. The confusion and hypocrisy which result when th ese people presume that politics should be amoral is nowhere more evident than in the rhetorical gymnastics of President G iamatti. The president of Yale has thought it appropriate o n occasion to use the Yale podium for making veiled statements about public prayer and abortion, for example, but has implied that people like Falwell, because they are religious men, should not involve themselves in the political process. The president of
Yale has issued a state m ent pledging financial assistance to draft resisters, but has not permitted a Yale singin g grou p to broadcast the Solidarity anthem over Voice of America because it would constitute a political act. I don't get it. But then there are a lot of things I still don't understand about all of this. The confusion I felt as I walked out into the rainy night a fter the Falwell episode remains for me largely thatconfusion. I remember holding in my hand a book of matches that Cal Thomas, the vice-president of M oral Majority , Inc., had been passing out to the crowd. "M oral Majority Book Burning Matches," it said , with the organization's logo emblazoned in red, white and blue. "See o ffi cial b ook list inside." Cu rio us, I flipped o pe n the matchbook a n d there was only a blank list with numerals where the indexed books should have been a nd a dozen pieces of bald cardboard instead of matches. "That's right . . . there aren't any!!!" it -said, and I could only laugh, because the truth was th at Yale was the only thing that was burned that night.
•
W. Hampton Sides, a junior in Ezra Stiles, is an associate editor f?fTNJ .
The opinions expressed in this section are those of the individual write rs. ThL N~w.fournal welcomes leue n. to the editor. and comment on Yale and New Haven issues. Write to 3432 Yale Station. New H aven. C T 06520. All let¡ ters for publi cation must include address and sil{nature.
Comment
Only sixteen: women and tenure at Yale
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In 1972, you could count the number of Yale's tenured women professors on one hand. There were two. That year, Federal regulations compelled Yale to use affirmative action guidelines in its promotion and hiring of faculty. Today, there are 16 women in the senior ranks of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences-eight times the number a decade ago. But these women represent less than five percent of Yale's 325 tenured faculty members. In more than two thirds of Yale's departments, there are no tenured women at all. Yale has failed to meet its own projection that seven percent of the tenured faculty would be women. The number of women on the junior faculty has actually declined since 1976. Yale rarely awards tenure; some departments may not have open positions for
years. This semester, there is a faculty committee to investigate the problem of "women and tenure." The committee, and the Yale Administrators, need to take a long, hard look at Yale's tenure record, its affirmative action policy and its treatment of women scholars. The first place the committee should look is in Yale's own history books. Although there's recently been a dramatic change in attitudes, Yale's treatment of women scholars was frequently far from exemplary. Until the 1960s, for example, they weren't even allowed in Sterling Library's L&B room. Women have attended the graduate and professional schools here since the 1890s but Yale rarely asked them to join the faculty; it wasn't until 1945 that the Administration permitted a The New JournaVJanuary 21, 1983 7
woman to teach undergraduates. She never received tenure. Yale did not grant tenure to a woman until 1959. The second place to look is Yale's list of open tenured positions. It's very short. Most departments tell their assistant professors that their chances for tenure are slim. According to current statistics, less than seven of the 70 women now on the junior faculty can expect tenure . Justifiably, Yale points with pride to the improvement in the overall number of women on the faculty. But, many departments, including those without any tenured women, face severe economic constraints. In the words of Yale's own affirmative action officer, "the influx of women just started too late ." In the next decade, Yale will extend relatively few tenure offers so it can't see comparable advances in' the number of women. The third place to look is the affirmative action office, but the committee might have trouble finding it. It's located (along with the Women's Studies program) in a small cottage between a parking lot and the alley next to Naples Pizza. There, a staff of two ensures that all of Yale's departments, schools and offices provide equal opportunity in the hiring and promotion of 6, 700 staff and faculty members. Fran Holloway, the office's director, compiles statistics about Yale's promotion and hiring records. She also "monitors" departments' searches for faculty members. But she does not help recruit women and can only "recommend" after a search that a department look again for more women candidates. According to Margaret Ferguson, associate professor of English, "the office doesn't seem to apply much pressure except in the ambiguous role of an after the fact check." Many other faculty members agree that the office has little clout. Historv Professor Donald Kagan charges, "It's basically involved in paperwork." Until this year, thenAssociate Provost Sherry Penney oversaw the office and Yale's affirmative action policy. But, said one faculty member, "the grapevine had it that she wasn't particularly forceful." Yale's affirmative action office shouldn't just be a "numbers 8 The New Journ.il/january 21 , 1983
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cruncher." It needs to be more visible in a department's hiring discussions. It should also, following the Tobin Committee's recommendation, help keep track of the women in each field. The old argument to explain the low number of tenured women is "there just aren't any." Because certain fields have relatively few women, the administrators should insure that all of Yale's departments conduct exhaustive searches for women candidates. It shouldn't look at tenure decisions "after the fact"; a token woman on a list of candidates doesn't mean that a department has fairly considered the women in the field. But, as the committee probably knows, attracting a scholar to a tenured professorship isn't like hiring a file clerk or even an assistant professor. Strengthening the affirmative action office does not entirely solve the problem. Faculty members' attitudes
toward tenure slow pro~ress on the "women and tenure" problem . Departments vigorously defend their autonomy in tenure decisions. Affirmative action, by requiring Yale to "look over the shoulder" of its faculty, is an example of government interference. One case at the University of Georgia demonstrates how intense feeling may be: a professor, dressed in his academic robes, went to jail for 90 days rather than reveal his vote in a tenure decision. The Yale administrator~ aren't eager to step into the tenure review process. Provost William Brainard, who is also a professor of economics, approves all faculty positions an~ searches. With affirmative action, he sees his role as one of "moral suasion." "Is it the Administration's role to inject its own judgment about the qualifications of people?" he asked. "The answer is no." No one would suggest that admin-
istrators should dictate tenure decisions. But tenure needn't be sacrosanct. Yale can interfere with a department which has a questionable record of promoting women without threatening its academic freedom. Many faculty members are unsure of the Administration's whole-hearted commitment to affirmative action and the active recruitment of women. The recent cases in the Economics Department raise doubts about the administration's willingness to put their muscle behind their public rhetoric about promoting women. Within two years two women were denied tenure; they were the first women from the department who were reviewed for tenure. Each had been on the faculty for eight years. Sharon Oster taughl the depa.r tment's most popular course. She is now at Yale's School of Organ¡ ization and Management. Susan Ackerman, along with her husband, former Law School Professor Bruce Ackerman, left Yale for tenured positions at Columbia. Neither the Economics nor the Political Science Department has any tenured women. It may be coincidental that two women in two years didn't receive tenure. Neither charges sex discrimination. For the field, Yale has a relatively high number of women on its junior faculty and in its graduate school. Of the nation's top five Economics Departments, only MIT has 'll tenured woman professor. When Ackerman and Oster were turned down, the Economics Department had open tenured slots and made offers to male professors. Today, there are still two unfilled positions. And, one member of the department suggests that the Administration could hav~ done more to encourage the promouon of women. "This was a golden opportunity. !here was a strong affirmative action •ssue in both the Economics and Political Science Departments," Professor Richard Nelson said. "The Provost could have used the opportunity to put that forth ." "The availability of resources was not the central issue," Brainard said. The Provost's office has money available specifically to encourage the employment of women and minority
scholars. He asserts that , if the Administration had offered money when the department had openings, it would have been "like making a position with someone's name on it." Nelson levels another charge against the Administration . "The economics department was not overwhelmed by pressure from the Administration in these cases." "The administrators went out of their way to say there was no pressure," the department's chair, Merton J. Peck, said, although he had "extensive" conversations with both Brainard and Giamatti. The Provost defends his role and the Administration's procedures. "There was more time spent, more careful review of these cases than average," he said. "The Department acted in good faith." There's no easy answer to the most obvious question: did Ackerman and Oster deserve tenure? Members of the Department weren't willing to discuss the specifics of the decisions. Moreover, there are no absoulte criteria for granting tenure in any department at Yale. Many tenure decisions have generated controversy. But in Oster and Ackerman's cases, the dispute centers on the administrators' role and how the senior faculty perceived Yale's commitment to the promotion of women. Another case, in the School of Art, raises more questions. The School recently awarded tenure to a male professor, after the Provost held "extensive" discussions with the School's Dean about the need for more women faculty. Currently, there are none with tenure, although the School has traditionally attracted many women graduate students. According to one source, several women o n the junior faculty have recently made complaints about unfair treatment.SamiaHalaby, who was denied tenure last year, has now brought a grievance charging sex discrimination. It might be years before the department can consider junior faculty women for other openings. The committee will find that Yale isn't alone in its dilemma improving the low number of tenured women. Women hold less than five percent of
the tenured pos1t1ons at many Ivy League universities. Yale may be different because it hasn't yet received public attention about a sex discrimination in tenure case. Last year, for example, Harvard attracted national publicity when a grievance committee supported sociologist Theda Skocpol's charge that sex discrimination affected her tenure decision. Skocpol, who now has a tenured position at the University of Chicago, argues that schools like Harvard and Yale are less receptive to changing their traditions in order to provide more opportunities for women . "Although Chicago is no feminist place," she remarked, "women hold nine percent of its senior faculty positions." Ivy League institutions, by contrast, don't want to abandon the "old boy" hiring network and ingrained attitudes about tenure and women, she says. Skocpol may be right. At Yale, many doors (not just those in the L&B room) have begun opening for women. But its tradition makes it less receptive to change. There's an affU'Jllative action office but, in the view of many of Yale's own faculty, it has little clout or influence on tenure decisions. There are administrators who are personally committed to the advancement of women but who are not willing to use their offices' power to back their commitment. And there's a senior faculty which, de6pite many individuals dedicated to equal opportunity, still has only 16 women- not enough to form a "critical mass" or "old girl" hiring network of their own to promote women candidates in tenure searches. And now there's a committee which has the potential to be much more than a rubber stamp on Yale's affirmative action and tenure policies. It has the power to investigate all aspects of the "women and tenure" problem. It's charge is to answer the question, "why aren't there more women on Yale's senior faculty?" In the process, it can raise difficult issues and perhaps provide solutions for the second decade of women and affirmative action at Yale.
•
Leslie Koch is a junior in Trumbull. The New Journal/january 21, 1983 9
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Backstage at the Rap
The spirit of the spirits shop After 15 years, he had become more than a familiar face. He was like an institution, a piece of the campus' furniture. He was known by the proprietors up and down the strip as the Mayor of Broadway, the captain of the block from Co-op West to Trumbull College. Others knew him as Dali's Pryde, the streetwise mascot of the Quality Wine Shop who liked to park himself in the crowded doorway ~nd stare blankly as people stumbled tn. But most people knew him as Snoopy. Snoopy died last month at the ripe old age of 105- dog years, that is. Over time the registered Pembroke Welsh Corgi began to lose his eyesight and his hearing, and in December he suffered a pinched nerve in his spine that left him immobile. Reluctantly, Quality Wine Shop owner Elliot Brause had Snoopy put to sleep. "It was the hardest thine I've ever done in my life," said Brause. Snoopy was born on May 17, 196 7. (Ironically, Brause's birthday is May 17 as well.) Snoopy came to work at Quality Wine for the first time 13 years ago. And although people occasionally stepped on him and tripped over him and tried to pick him up in their arms (he didn't like to be picked up), Snoopy never missed a single workday in all those years. He accompanied Brause on every liquor and keg delivery he ever made. He soon became the centerpiece of the. package store's advertising strategy, appearing on T -shirts and in newspaper advertisements. Sometimes Snoopy wore a tutu or a Halloween mask or a Santa's hat. In one ad, which never ran, Snoopy made an appearance as the "quality control expert" for the wine shop, urinating on a "bad" keg. The Mayor of Broadway never took a drink in his life, but he saw more liquor come and go than any drinking man (or woman) would ever care to handle. He presided over the shop with an air of indifference so complete that he sometimes seemed anti-social. He respected students as 10 The New Journal/january 21, 1983
long as they didn't touch him, but he absolutely would not tolerate other dogs on his territory. "He was extremely possessive of the place," remembered Brause, "and quite protective of the block. This was his turf. He never bit or attacked a single person, but he just didn't like other dogs. He would fight off ten dogs at the same time if he had to. We had to glue him together a couple of times, he was so beat up. He had patches on his eye and his nose, and one time his ear just about fell off. But the worst thing that ever happened to him was the day he got mugged by a cat." Snoopy left behind his wife Peppermint Patty, a seven-year-old Corgi, but no children. "At least none that we know of," said Brause. The
wine merchant tried unsuccessfully to mate the two Corgies over the years. But for Snoopy and Patty, it was strictly a Platonic relationship. "I guess Snoopy just didn't want to ruin a good friendship, if you know what I mean," explained Brause. Peppermint Patty doesn't like the life of spirit shop mascot as much as Snoopy did, so she stays at home half the time. "She's not as attuned to the store as Snoopy was," explained Brause, "and she's not as streetwise, either." But Brause will continue to deal in Welsh Corgis, and the Quality Wine Shop logo will remain the same, with the profile of the late Snoopy at the center of it all. "Snoopy was one of the constants of the block, and I guess for some he always will be." · -Shelj. Russell
The Yale Repertory Theatre has always been known for its innovation, and this winter it is continuing the tradition. Starting this Saturday afternoon at 5p.m. the Rep will present a series of six seminars on the "Birth and Development of the New Play" in conjunction with its annual Winterfest program of new plays. This year, the third for the Winterfest program, the Rep is presenting three new plays in progress. Each of these works are still in the process of development. The purpose of the Winterfest is to give playwrights an opportunity to see how their creation appears on a stage and how an audience reacts to it. Of the three plays, two were written by Yale's own: Astapovo br Leon Katz, a professor at the Schoo of Drama, and Coyote Ugly by Lynn Siefert, a third year Drama graduate student. According to Rosalind H ienz, communications director of the Rep, the plays in Winterfest show only part of what goes into the writing and presentation of a new work. It is the rest of the art of creation and development that the six seminars will try to address. "They will try to explain what are the steps between the written script and the play on the stage, what are the processes that go into making a play successful," said Heinz. The first of the seminars, entitled "Blood and Sweat . . . Directing The New Play," will feature a panel of Hal Prince, the Rep's own Lloyd Richards and Gordon Davidson. Future seminars will focus on theatre critics, casting, contemporary playwrighting among other topics. "These discussions should be fascinating for anyone interested in contemporary theatre," said Heinz. "But it will not all necessarily be pleasant to hear. Some of it may be quite disconcerting." The Rep urges those interested in either the Winterfest plays or in the seminars to reserve tickets as far in advance as possible, as the availability is limited.
•-Jim Lowe
Moose Is loose, again It was a year ago this month that Yale's "Oldest R esidential College D aily," the Ezra Stiles Daily Moose Dispatch, published its first issue. Everyone laughed, but no one paid much attention in the beginning to the "plucky, burgeoning young daily." The idea was novel, but the founders of the DMD had a little more than novelty in mind w hen they cranked ou t over fot路ty issues during the semeste r and acquired a loyal following. And now, a fter a semester-long hiatus, the satire tabloid is back in print. A humorous, fictitious newspaper that chronicled events and life in Ezra Stiles College, the Moose made the nigh tly journey from pressroom 3120 E.S. to G nomon Copy to the Ezra Stiles dining h all , where it surpassed the acclaimed salad bar as the leading topic of m eal-time talk. After 34 consecutive issues, Moose staffer Walter M anny '82 and W. H ampton Sides '84 finally h ad to modify the daily production schedule. The Oldest Residen tial College Daily then became the Oldest Occasional R esidential College Weekly Daily, a "revolutionary concep t in printing frequency ." The paper explained the new schedule in a short notice: "The Moose will heretofore appear occasionally daily, and daily, occasionally, and not at a ll , occasionally, although never always not; but not always, however, for it will occas~onally reappear daily, and some~tmes not even occasionally daily, but JUst plain ole daily." Contacted in Cambridge, former publisher Manny expressed surprise at the Moose's resurrection. "Well , I'm thrilled, of course, and naturaUy a bi1 appaUed," comm ented Manny in a telephone interview. "The Moose was always, in my day, the pinnacle of irresponsible journalism, and as an alumnus, I would hope that the paper maintains its sordid position in the ranks of Yale publications." But veteran Moose staffer Thomas McQuillen '84 h as visions for the J:foose that extend beyond Manny's JOurnalistic aims. Asked about these visions, Mclluillen responded 路路y , x; ' ou re forcing my hand. Walter was a funny guy, but he had no v ision. He _th_ought it was enough to be sadtsttcaUy irreverent. Now we are Pursuing a journalistic anti-ethic. Our ultimate aim is the erradication of people's perverse addiction to truth
in all its pitiable forms." "The o nly story we won't print," agrees costaffer Sides, "is anything th at h as its basis in reality. But despite this stipulation, it's still more believable than what you will find in the Yale Daily News." Last year's Moose featu red b ehindthe-scenes coverage o f major disasters ("Stiles Tower Collapses," "Stiles to Cede Gimbel Cup," "Dining Hall Vanishes"), scandals ("Dramat Filches Oil Rig," "Stiles Moose is Really a Mastodon, Expert Determines," "Is R abbit Meat Really R eally Soylent Green?") and athletics ("Mooses Sign Reggie Jackson! Ex-Yank Promises H e'll Capture Tyng for Stiles in '82") But probably the most popular story last year was "Luvbeat: SEX Scandal Rocks College," in which a "roving DMD shutterbu g" photographed an "unidentified gigolo in bed with the A. Bartlett Giamatti Moose, telling an invidious tale of cheap sex, if not tawdry bestiality of the worst possible sort." Aside from supplying rea~ers with the "real scoop" ("Read your NYT today, and get th e inside story later"), th e Moose provided two advice columns, "Deer Moose" and "Ask Salada," as well as its own gossip column, "Sleeping Together." It also featured regular cartoon s by Stiles senior J ohn Zin sser, called "Zinsserines," which b ecame a trademark of the publication. Sides explain s that the idea behind the Moosls was to "make
people feel that if they didn't know what we were talking about, then they'd better find out. And everybody wanted to find out. We'd miss a day and people would be banging on the tables with their forks and knives yelling, 'We wan t Moose!" The new Moose has big plans for the semester. "Yes, we have several returning lettermen," says Sides, "and we're even thinking about going national. And I'd like to put the back issues in a bound volume and sell the book for $19.95 over midnight T.V." Also, there is talk of a Moose pin-up calendar: "Stiles Men of '83: R eal Men Eat Moosemeat." But for the most devoted staffers, the Moose is more than a newspaper; it's a whole way of life. "We don't just write the Moose," explain s McQuillen. "We subjugate all personal identity to it. For instance, we began all our board meetings w ith Walter [Manny] chanting 'See the Moose, BE the Moose.' It's kind of like hot tubs, you know?" "Nothing will change," assures Sides. "All good things don't come to an e nd . We will still be yelling 'Copy!' and 'Put 'er to bed boys' in the middle of the night. The Moose will continue to be outrageous and, of course, w ithou t journalistic scru ples." Adds lVk Quillen, "Who needs the truth when smut is so much more fun ?'路 -Laura Pappano
The Survivors Speak Andy Court
•
12 The New Journal/january 21, 1983
She did not know the names of the people who were coming that night and she was not certain what she was going to do once she had filmed them telling their stories. It was May 2, 1979. Inside a small office near Yale-New Haven Hospital, Laurel Vlock, a short, thin 56-year-old independent television producer, checked the positions of the camera and the chairs. She was fiddling with the armchair in the corner when Eva Benda walked in. "The startling thing for me," Mrs. Vlock recalled, "was that I knew Eva Benda. She was the wife of a Yale professor who had been very, very gracious to me. He was a frequent guest on my television program. And I had met his wife. I had heard her accent but . . . I can only plead stupidity, ignorance. What can I say?" They were in Dr. Dori Laub's office,on the second floor of a brown high rise on Howard Avenue. Mrs. Vlock had brought the camera crew. Dr. Laub, a Yale-affiliated psychiatrist and a survivor of a Nazi concentration camp, found four Holocaust survivors willing to be interviewed, one of whom was Eva Benda. Mrs. Benda sat in the padded armchair Mrs. Vlock had arranged in one corner of the 16'-by- 14' room that just barely accommodated all the people and equipment. The camera focused on Mrs. Benda; Dr. Laub and Mrs. Vlock sat out of the camera's range. "Where are you from?" Dr. Laub asked. "I grew up in Czechoslovakia," Mrs. Benda said. "I went to school there and lived there through my teens." "Do you remember very much?" "Oh, yes. I remember the walks we used to take up to the castle on the hill and then back." M~s . Benda sat stiffiy in the chair. Sh~ IS a short woman with a sturdy bu1ld and a look very different from Mrs. Vlock. Mrs. Vlock has an emotive face- wide eyes with wrinkled pockets and an expression that seems to r~veal some strange mixture of intensuy, impatience and fatigue . Mrs. Benda has much more impenetrable features- a taut face with dark thick eyebrows accenting her features : Mrs. ~enda spoke matter-of-factly, almost Impersonally, about arriving at
Laurel Vlock, co-founder of the proJect Auschwitz, being stripped, shaved whether to stop taping when Mrs. and marched naked past German Vlock, her voice high-pitched and soldiers with machine guns. Only the broken, stumbled over her words: subtle movements of her face, the "1-1-1 . . . I just want to hold you slight tightening of one corner of her and be your family," she told Mrs. lip, the tension in her smile, betrayed Benda. "I don't want you to be alone." the controlled exterior. "Thank you," Mrs. Benda said. •y Mrs. Benda did not cry. But by the appreciate that." time she finished her story, Mrs. Vlock The camera shut down but the and the camera crew were in tears. awkwardness remained. "Nobody The camerawoman was not sure seemed to know what to do," Mrs. The New Journal/january 21, 1983 13
Benda later explained. "To shake hands and say goodbye didn't seem ap路 propriate." But two other surivors, Leon Weinberg and Sally Horowitz, were alread y waiting in the adjoining room . Walking through the waiting room, Mrs. Benda n oticed Mrs. Horowitz had brought her husba:nd along for support. Mrs. Benda recalled, "I didn't like going home alone." Mrs. Vlock knew the next survivor, Leon Weinberg, as an amiable and successful baker in Hamden. He had baked a special cake with raisins and fruit in it for her parents' anniversary several years earlier. "The only thought in them days was hunger," Mr. Weinberg told his interviewers, his watery eyes expressing simple, unsuppressed sadnes!J. "When you're hungry, it gets to a point where you don't mind stealing from your own sister, from your own father. I would get up in the middle of the night and slice a piece o f bread off my sister's ra路 tion." "Leon, I tell you ," Mrs. Vlock said at the conclusion of his story. "When I think of speaking to you in a normal way to order a cake . . . " The last survivor that night was Renee Hartman, an art dealer, writer andJewish activist. Her husband , Yale professor Geoffrey Hartman, later became an adviser to the project. Although she was in her mid-forties, Mrs. Hartman had a very young, innocent face and very fair skin that flushed as the taping progressed . Separated from her parents and abandoned on the streets of Bratislava, Czechoslovakia, by a farmer who would no longer hide her, Mrs. Hartman, then nine years old, assumed responsiblity fo r her deaf sister , then seven. For three weeks, the two girls wandered the streets of this to wn where almost all the Jews, including their parents, had already been transported away to the camps. "I suddenly realized," Mrs. Hart路 man said, "I might have been one of the last Jews in the town. I remember thinking, 'I don't want to be the last one alive .'" In desperation , she and her sister gave themselves up to the Gestapo and were eventually sent to Bergen-Belsen concentration camp. "When I was in 14 The New J ou rnal/janu ary 21, 1983
Renee Hartman camp," Mrs. Hartman said , "I managed to find a roll of toilet paper and I managed also to barter something I had for a pencil. I was writing down everything that was happening to me, m y longings, my fears . At one point this roll was found in o ne o f the searches by the soldiers. I remember seeing the soldier sitting o n the lower bunk reading it and laughin g a nd finding it very amusing. When I rushed up to snatch it, h e pulled it away and said, 'No, this is 1 good for you.' One of the things I remember him saying was, 'She has a wonderful sense of humor.' And I didn't re 路~ mber anything funny in it. I remer ..er saying, 'you may have taken that roll but you haven't stopped me.from writing.'"
Taping ended at about a.m. Laurel Ylock drove to her home in Hamden a n d hardly slept for the next three nig hts. She realized this was the beginning of a much larger project . Although many books, documentaries and audiotapes already depicted the survivors' experiences, no medium actually showtd them telling their stories. To witness each witness's painful excavation of memory , to watch Renee Hartman d emonstrate with her hands ho~ the German soldier unrolled her makeshift diary, was like watching the person relive the event. "I didn't know what to do with this stuff," Mrs. Vlock said . "This wasn't like reading it."
II. The Farband meets in the downstairs room of The Westville Synagogue at 3 p.m. on the first Sunday of every month. They are a lively, jovial group of middle-aged Jewish couples. They speak Yiddish at their meetings and contribute money to the UnitedJewish Appeal, Israel Bonds, and tree-planting in Israel. The Farband's president, William Rosenberg, is a genial, gre~arious man who somewhat paternalistically refersto the members as "my membership." He explained that the Farband is a kind of family. Most of the group's 120 members are Holocaust survivors, many of whom lost all of their real family during the war. Mr. Rosenberg, for example, is the only one of96 relatives to survive; his mother starved to death while he and his six brothers and sisters could do nothing but offer her a glass of water. Mrs. Vlock and Dr. Laub came to Mr. Rosenberg's group on June 3, 1979, to ask for money to edit and make more tapes. Because of the old age of most survivors, Mrs. Vlock told them, it is important to begin taping before there are no survivors left. '"The survivors survived in order to bear witness,"' she said , quoting novelist Elie Wiesel. It was not a new idea for the Farband but it did evoke many contradictory feelings. Some of those present still had trouble talking about their experiences. Most of them discovered when they came to the United States after the war that people did not want to hear what had happened to them. Many, like Sylvia ~tatlender, had not spoken about it smce they came to this country. The only survivor in a family of more than 100, Mrs. Statlender said that not only did others not want to hear but also thought to herself, "It's terrible. What are you going to say?" But she also wondered why she alone survived, and thought that maybe it was because God Wanted her to tell what happened. When Mrs. Vlock spoke, Mrs. Statl':nder cried. To Mrs. Vlock, the audaence looked haunted . •It was very painful for Laurel and it was very painful for my members," Mr. Rosenberg recalled. Before the meeting was over, the Farband
pledged $1,700 to the project. More than 60 of them later agreed to be filmed; approximately 18 of them had never talked about it before. One thing puzzled some of the Farband members: Why would Laurel Vlock, a well-off, American-born woman with a nice home in the suburbs and no relatives from the camps, want to hear about the horrible things that happened to them? Some suspected a profit motive. Others
assumed she wanted to distinguish herself professionally. Still others, including Mrs. Rosenberg, believed she did it because she is "a good Jew." Mrs. Vlock was encouraged to begin this project after the success of an award-winning documentary she filmed on the dedication of the Holocaust Memorial in New Haven. But she had always been deeply concerned about the Holocaust. She was twelve years old when the war broke
II
I '
Menachem Stem
• The New Journal/january 21, 1983 15
out, and because her parents were Jewish activists, it disrupted life in her home. "We talked about this endlessly," she said. "My parents were very upset. There were all kinds of meetings, letters, phone calls. It was part of the fabric of my life.".
~\
III. In November, 1979, Laurel Vlock travelled to Germany, Austria, and Czechoslovakia to see the scenes of the stories she had been told. "I had to feel where these people came from," she said. "I could no longer go on talking to them and have no real sense of the landscape." At Dachau concentration camp in West Germany, she walked through the bleak parade ground . where a monument to the dead now stands but once thousands of the living stood to be counted. "It was cold," Mrs Vlock said. "And I remember the first thing I ever heard was Eva Benda talking about how bitterly cold it can be in Poland in the fall. It was bitter cold. And it was bleak and it was damp. It was miseraQie to walk around there for even an hour, and I was properly dressed. I couldn't stop visualizing those people standing there for hours on end. I thought I understood it at the time that she said it, but I don't really think I understood it until I was there. "The thing that bothered me the most, really gives me the chills: to be in there and to know that everything you knew was outside and nothing that you knew was inside, but this was your world. To be physically near the walls, knowing there was just this thing, this cement, between you and the rest of the world." She also went to Mauthausen concentration camp in Austria- an imposing, cold stone fortress on a hill. Mauthausen was less a monument or a museum, more a concentration camp that had been abandoned. At Auschwitz, there were extensive written and photographic displays. At Mauthausen, there was a small museum but no guides or directions. "There are gas chambers and torture rooms underneath," Mrs. Vlock said, "but no one to show you where they are. You have to find them for yourself."
The six members of Vlock's group wandered through the place. In some spots, people had pasted pictures of lost relatives on the wall alongside wreaths and flowers. Mrs. Vlock found one of the gas chambers; it was a 15'-by-15' square room with concrete walls and a heavy metal door. One light bulb dangled from the ceiling. The gas jets resembled shower heads, but upon seeing them Mrs. Vlock was sure the victims had known they were not shower heads as soon as they had entered the room. Mrs. Vlock came all the way from Vienna to see this place because her son had been there nine years before on a United Jewish Appeal trip for college students. The students walked inside the gas chambers. One of the group leaders switched ofT the light and slammed the door. Mrs. Vlock had read her son's diary describing that experience before she went to Europe. Now, alone in this part of the underground of Mauthausen, she closed the chamber door behind her. She wanted to hear the sound that her son- and the victims- had heard. "But something else came to me at that time, when I was in that room," Mrs. Vlock remembered. "I never
heard it described by anyone else this way. This was a man, a survivor I had taped, who described the clean-up detail he was assigned to. When they would push everyone into the room, it would be filled to capacity. When the doors opened, the room was only onethird full. The reason was that everybody pressed to one corner to get away from the jets and towards where the air was pure. So when they opened up the doors each and every time, all the bodies were pressed into one-third the space." Towards the end of her visit to Mauthausen, Mrs. Vlock felt numbed and then felt guilty about being numbed. But to this day, she said, she remembers the configuration of the grass, the cement paths. She remembers the face of the survivor who told of the gas chamber~. "I can see his face , black hair, gutteral voice," she said. "He was quite matter-of-fact about it." One of her last stops was Bratislava. She went there just to see the cobblestone streets on which Renee Hartman and her sister ran before giving themselves up to the Gestapo. "It's a dreary town," Mrs. Vlock said . "Very grim, gray stone buildings and cobblestone streets." The people did not
16 The New .JournalOanuary 21. 1983
..1
"If anyone had told us the world knew. I'm afraid more people would have commit¡ ted suicide."
talk to her. Aside from the castle on the hill and the few apartment buildings she entered, there was nothing much to see. Still, for some inexplicable reason, she felt better having been there. Walking on the cobblestone streets, just like walking on the paths of the concentration camp, she had this strange feeling: "They had walked t.here."
through." His parents would not take him to meetings with other survivors for fear he would remind the others of the children they had lost. They did not speak of the Holocaust in their home. So Dr. Stern denied it had any effect on him. He lost his accent and became accepted as a native Israeli boy. The film project provided him with a new beginning. "It helped me to come out of the closet," he said. "It IV. gave me a place among survivors." Between February and May, 1980, But now Dr. Stern has another Mrs. Vlock and Dr. Laub interviewed problem . He is not sure how and when about 150 survivors in the Bank of to present his experiences to his two New Haven Building, on Church daughters. "Do I want it to become a Street. One of the first was Menachem reality for them? Should.! put them too Stern, a heavy-set , thick-bearded much in this perspective of mine? It's Israeli who is a visiting doctor at Yale very hard for me to trust people. I have University Health Services. what I call Jewish paranoia. Is it right The crew tested the equipment as for me to give them the same sense of Stern talked about his decision to parinsecurity that I have? ticipate in the project. Until recently, "I think children should first be exhe told them, he had never watched posed to love rather than hate, first inany movies or read any books or even tr<x\uced to tenderness rather than spoken about the Holocaust. Then one violence. My personal story is not imday he decided to watch the TV movie portant. I would like them to get the "Holocaust" with his family. message that they should be caring and "By the end of it," he said, "we were loving and compassionate and underall crying, and my nine-year-old said standing-and you know what? Forto me, 'Hey Daddy, you're crying,' and giving. Forgiving. I said, 'Yeah, you're crying too.' I "My children hearing it from me will asked her, 'Why are you crying here?' have all kinds of feelings involved and she said, 'I cry for all those poor ¡ because I am their father. But some people. Why do you cry?' I said, 'Well , day somebody's grandchildren will I really cry for myself.' She said. 'What come and see us survivors talking and do you mean for yourself?' 'Well, you they will see how we looked, our affect know, I was part of it.' She looked at and our tone, and they will be able to put it in perspective." me and said, 'Daddy, I never knew. Now, Dr. Stern, a man who four Why didn't you tell me?' For once in years ago was denying the Holocaust my life, I was speechless. I realized I had any effect on him, said he would wasn't able to tell her." like to speak and teach about it in the Dr. Stern was five years old when future. He remembered hearing Elie his parents bundled him up, stuck the Wiesel say, " 'There are fewer and directions to a whorehouse in his hand, fewer of us survivors, and I'd hate to be and sent him alone at night through an the last one.' " escape route out of their labor camp "I've always had the feeling that I'd ~ear Cracow, Poland. For part of that be one of the last o nes ," Dr. Stern said. ttme, he survived on his own, begging "It gives me an opportunity to fulfill and stealing with other street children. my legacy ." By some miracle, both he and his parents survived the war, and moved to Israel in 1950. He was one of two v. survivors out of the 4,000 children in The whole time Menachem Stern told that camp. his story, Craig Rogers sat hunched "I was the only survivor my age that over a tripod with his eye in the I ever knew," he said in a recent intercamera's viewfinder. A Bohemianview. "There was no one who could looking , 28-year-old, free-lance understand the things I'd been
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cameraman, who then had long black hair that fell below his shoulders, Mr. Rogers normally did industrial work, corporate-information tapes explaining the features of new equipment. The first night he filmed for the survivors' project, h e found it hard to stay behind the camera. "Most of the time you don't really hear what people are saying or you're just listening for when you should zoom in," he said. "But with the survivors, I didn't want to be bothered with the technical things. I felt almost rude not to be giving my total attention to these people." There were several awkward aspects to the job. For one thing, the camera was designed so that he had to hang his arms around it in an uncomfortable position. ( H e started doing push-ups so that his arms would hold out for a full four-hour session.) More uncomfortable was the job of removing the microphone from the subjects when the taping stopped. They were often shaking or wet with tears and sweat. "Sometimes I really didn't know what to do," he said. "How do you respond to someone who just told you they rode on a cattle car and ate human flesh to survive? You want to hug them. You want to carry them to their car." Most of the time, however, he would remain silent or just say, "Thank you very much." H e couldn't have a long discussion with them while others were waiting to be taped. "And even if I could, what could I say? 'Wow, that's incredible. My life is nothing like yours'? You can't do much to comfort them. You can't say, 'Now, now, that's o.k.'" He kept hearing in story after story that no one in the post-war United States wanted to hear about it. This surprised him but h e encountered some of it himself when he talked about his work. "Don't you think we've heard enough about it?" some people would say. "No, we haven't," he'd respond, "and if you met any of these people, you would agree with me." He remembered a tape he made of a mother and daughter who spent two years in an unheated crawlspace below a farmhouse. They nearly froze in the winter. And the farmer who was
hiding them did not even tell his family they were there for fear they would all be shot. "Are you going to tell me you've heard that too much?" Mr. Rogers asked. "I think it's a story that hasn't been told well enough." After the taping sessions, Mr. Rogers often went to Rudy's bar to wind down. He felt he was coming from a different world but he realized he occupied a middle-ground betwee;:; the survivors and the people at the bar. "I was still Craig Rogers, grown up like Leave it to Beaver in the Midwest. I've had a lucky life. I couldn't blame the people at the bar for being happy. The survivors wer-en't saying they wanted me to be unhappy. They wanted me to be happy and appreciate the life that I had." At the time, he was $5,000 in debt and his personal life had gone to hell. Still "it made it very hard for me to get depressed," he said. "I wasn't in a twofoot crawlspace in the winter. "Now and then, I do see these people in the supermarket and I don't go and say hello to them. The survivors are all over the place. People don't think that these people are still around and that they are people you know. People don't think there was a person on the line and Dr. Mengele pointed that way and their mother went that way. But when you get into a one-on-one situation, you can't just turn it into a TV news story."
VI. As the project grew, Mrs. Vlock faced two frequent questions from friends and co-workers: "How can you stand this?" and "Don't we have enough material?" In her mind, no, even after taping 250 survivors, they don't have enough. She hopes to get at least 1,000 tapes, and emphasizes that because most survivors are already in their sixties or seventies, time is running out. No one is sure exactly how many survivors are still alive but some estimates p lace the number as high as 50,000. If it were physically possible, Mrs. Vlock said, she would have every single story taped. And not just survivors- anyone who had anything to do with the event. She has already travelled to six ctues hoping to get others to start similar projects there,
"There were some people who really had to tell me they couldn't stand to talk about it."
and she has filmed some of the Ameri- relate to the Holocaust, and I don't can liberators who were the first to want to hear anything about it." enter the camps (among them, an Mrs. Vlock said she does not comAmerican doctor whose hair literally pletely understand her emotional inturned white during two weeks there). volvement with the project but she "Each sentence of each testimony ¡ does not believe she is obsessed. She opens up a door," Mrs. Vlock said. has other projects as well, including an With each new story, she finds they are attempt to start a female-owned televiuncovering details that may bring us sion station, and a weekly interview closer to an understanding of what it program on WTNH in New H aven. was like. For example, only one sur- Still, she believes the Holocaust project vivor told her how prisoners in the will probably be one of the most imcamps cleaned their ration tins which portant things she'll do in her life. She were often caked with old food crust; feels a need to leave her mark, and they used their own urine because "This,"she said, "is a contribution I can urine would not contaminate the food. make." Only one survivor told her how people in the camps would spend hours each day cracking the nits from their hair VII. and examining their clothes for them. By November 15, 1982, the day Elie He showed on camera how they would Wiesel spoke at the Law School crack the nits with their fingernails. Auditorium, the Holocaust Survivors This man was the only person to menFilm Project had come a long way. tion such a crude detail, and yet, Mrs. Mrs. Vlock won an Emmy award for Vlock said, he described people as be- "Forever Yesterday," a documentary ing consumed with this activity. using survivor testimony. Through the "These are the unspeakables," Mrs. support of Yale President A. Bartlett Vlock said. "It's not in the books Giamatti and several professors and because it was disgusting. But that was administrators, the collection of tapes what these people were consumed became Yale's first videoarchive in with. They were consumed with those room 331 b of Sterling Memorial Lin asty details of being. Those details brary. It also became the national force the recognition of what this exrepository for video testimony about perience was in a way that nothing else the Holocaust, as several other cities can." began their own projects. Under a Mrs. Vlock said she doesn't enjoy grant from the Revson Foundation, hearing all of these disturbing things. the project received funding to tape "I certainly don't escape nightmares more survivors and buy machines for after filming." Nor does she escape researchers and students to view the phone calls late at night from survivors material. They started looking for adwho can't sleep after a taping session or ditional funds to create an endowment who are anxious about being filmed and for volunteers to help organize the the next morning. She knows she is revast amount of material already colsponsible for causing people to relive lected. painful experiences, but she also knows Although taping would continue for what a catharsis it has been for so some time, the project entered a new many who had kept their stories to phase. How would the tapes be used themselves for so many years. Some for future teaching and research? brought their children to the tapWould they come to mf"an as much to ing-children who had never heard the those who viewed them as those who whole story before. made them? This p roject has affected some of her The Law School Auditorium, which personal relationships as well. "There holds about 500 people, held more were some people who really had tO tell than that number the night Mr. me they coudn't stand to talk about it," Wiesel's lecture, "Knowing and Not she said. She showed one friend a tape, Knowing," inaugurated the videohoping to involve her in the project. archive. People crowded onto the aisles, window ledges, and floor space After watching an hour of testimony, in front of the stage. Eva Benda was the woman told Mrs. Vlock, "I don't The New Journal/january 21, 1983 19
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20 The N ew J ourna l/j a nuary 21 , 1983
there. And Renee Hartman. And Leon Weinberg, . William Rosenberg, Menachem Stern. But so were many Yale students, and to them especially Mr. Wiesel spoke. He had been teaching a special course at Yale that semester on "Literature and Memory." The syllabus began with Jeremiah and en¡ ded with Solzhenitsyn , covering in betweeen the writings of other chroniclers. Elie Wiesel is a gaunt man with sad eyes, and weary cheeks, and a soft, haunting voice. T hat night, he chose to speak sitting down. "Tonight, I think what I would like to do is really to study with you," Mr. Wiesel said. "We'll study one episode about one man about whom almost nothing is known." Simon Dubnov, author of an important history of world Jewry, chronicled until his dying hour the atrocities committed in Riga, Lat¡ via. While soldiers executed J ews by the hundreds in the woods outside the city, and tanks stormed synagogues under siege, Mr. Dubnov sat writing a document that has never been found. One of h is former pupils at the University of Heidelberg became an SS officer and taunted his former professor. "Once he sneered at him and said, 'Dub nov, yesterday I happened to be in the Black Forest. Four hundred and eighty prisoners shot and at least as many Jews. You can rejoice Dubnov! You have already attained equality with the Russians.' 'How many Jews were executed?' Dubnov asked, '480? T h ank you for the information. You see I'm still working and it is important for me to know.'" This same SS officer , Mr. Wiesel said, shot Simon Dubnov on December 8 , 1941. "And here comes a shocking discovery. As a teacher in this school, I can't tell you how this discovery affected me. When suddenly we discovered that most of the killers of the four Einsatzgrup pen had college degrees. They had Ph.D.'s in philosophy and literature. They were doctors. T here were two opera singers. And one of them, God save us all, had a P h.D. degree in Divinity. How could these people wh o went to school ten, fifteen ,
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twenty years to get their doctorates, how could they kill children in the presence of their mothers? Is it possible their education presented no problem to them? Is it possible their knowledge was no obstacle? "You see, friends, all questions relating to the era of darkness as epitomized by Auschwitz and Treblinka may already be found in the story of Riga. The criminals, the victims, the murder, the silence, the role of man and that of his God- it's all there. What is also there is the obsession to bear witness. The stubbornness of the killers to erase Jewish memory was equal only to that of the witness striving to keep it alive." The victims thought the world didn't know , Mr. Wiesel said. Some sacrificed themselves so that one message could get out. But meanwhile, people in the United States read about the German government's policy of extermination in The New York Times. "If anyone had told us the world knew, I'm afraid more people would have committed suicide." The killers knew what they were doing. The world knew what was happening. "I confess to you," he said. "' know now but I do nat understand." . When Mr. Wiesel finished speaktog, the audience stood up and clapped for over o ne ¡ minute. One felt that same rush of emotion as during the curtain call of a moving play. But Elie Wiesel walked quietly off the stage, and when the clapping stopped, there was silence- long, awkward, uncertain silence. Like cameraman Craig Rogers, no one knew what to do.
•
Andy Court, a senior in Saybrook , is Ediwrin-Chiif of TNJ.
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Shelter Tina Kelley
Anthony welts for dinner In the common room '1M strea people depicted in the following small cardboard box. It wasn't much : a article are real, but thtir .names have been changed. June walked up the steps of the ivycovered brick building with the suitcase she had just bought to replace her shopping bags. Behind her was the cold street, in front of her the smell of fresh paint and simmering supper. She walked towards the desk, where the attendant hung up her torn green overcoat, put her suitcase in a closet, and put the contents of her pockets in a 22 The New .Journa.l/January 21, 1983
comb, a bandana, C e rts, a pen , a few sheets of paper. The house manager took her name and age, while a cop frisked her before she could walk down the hall, past the sm oke-filled common room to the dining room in the back . She took a seat at the long table, waiting for six o'clock and spaghetti. Columbus House, the o nly permanent shelter for the homeless in New Haven, opened on N ovember 1, 1982. It wasn't very crowded several days later when June arrived . The desk at-
tendant said people were spending their recently-received welfare checks on booze . It had been a mild fall, so they weren't suffering from the cold yet. Later, June and dozens of other street people would line up each night , hoping to get one of the shelter's 35 beds. Once she is registered and fed , June talks to a night host, a volunteer who spends a few hours at the shelter talking to the guests, playing cards, listening. "I don't like that 30 cent lady," she told Liz, a Yale student who asked her if she knew many of the street people around the campus. "She's a panhandler. She lives off other people's money. Same with those people who fake disablity to be on welfare , the ones who were sick ten years ago and come in and say they still aren't better." June is 44 and once worked as a secretary. She gets $53 from welfare every two weeks. She's tired , goes into the other room to take a nap. The newly renovated building on Columbus Avenue used to be a convent. Now, cigarette smoke envelops the two bare lightbulbs which hang from the high ceiling in the hall. A line of men lean against the blue walls as if they were hanging out in front of the Mall downtown. To the right is the common room with second-hand sofas and chairs along the off-white walls so everyone can watch the television , which is constantly on. Behind is the kitchen, restricted to the staff. A dining room a cross the hall is filled with three long tables and a salad bar from which volunteers serve dinner. Pete is sitting at the far table, piling one spoon on top of another. His hands tremble, especially when he lights up a cigarette , which is often. He looks 60 but is only 45 and wears a navy blue sweater, plaid pants and new shoes. He is one of the better dressed guests. Before coming here, he worked and lived at the Salvation Army but lost his job there for drinking and being in a fight. He~d been hit with a chain, and has angry-looking bruises on his cheekbones, one of which is broken. His right eye is bloodshot; the other stares starkly from his weathered, unshaven face . Still, with a good scrubbing, he could look like your father.
"Prosperity," sneered Pete. "Drunks hate prosperity."
"College," he laughed, talking to Liz. "A long, long time ago I went to college, in Colorado. I came out to New York and got a good job, one that paid." He laughed. "I forget the title I had then, something like supervisor of the whole printing outfit. I had so much money I didn't know what to do with it. It just came in and went out. Boy was that a good time." Pete came to New Haven because of the Shirley Frank Foundation, a center for alcoholics. "See. I'm an alcoholic. Of my whole family, only my mother wasn't an alcoholic." He went on the wagon and helped manage the foundation but returned to drinking. Since the fight a week ago, he's lived with an ex-girlfriend, some buddies, and spent only three or four days on the street. He now takes odd jobs through an employment service and is a regular at Columbus House, although he plans to rent a room of his own when he can save up some of his welfare money. "Where's a good place to sleep when you're out on the street?" another student volunteer asked. "There is no good place," Pete said. "Hey, Ed, gimme a light." Ed is a 46-year-old father of seven who used to be a reporter in Waterbury. He and Pete have been friends ever since they came to New Haven. Before that they lived in New York. "I'd walk around all night, then go to the library to sleep all day. You'd sit with a newspaper facing the librarian so she couldn't see you, and you'd sleep for hours," Pete said. Now the two of them spend a lot of time on the Green. "Yesterday we were in the park," said Pete, "and Ed says to me, 'Look at that squirrel hiding his nuts. When it snows, he won't. ever be able to find them.' And the next day here we were ~ooking all around New Haven for the JUgs Ed's hidden. He can't find them
either, just like the squirrel." The two exchange war stories as if th is were a cocktail party. "I spent the best years of my life in the war, from when I was 17 till 21. Now I'm too old for a paper route and too young for social security," Ed said with a smile. "I should have cut my finger in the war, gotten a purple heart and disability. As it is, they have us working on Veterans' Day. And us veterans." Tonight dinner is served by Stiles College, which along with several other Yale organizations has adopted the shelter for a few dinners a month , cooking, serving and cleaning up for the guests and staff. After d inner a group of students talk to Pete about the city. "Wouldn't you feel safer closer to the Green and to campus, where all the cops are?" Pete looks up at them. His eyes have recovered from their bruises, but not from the long n ights outside, alone. "If the cops saw me there, they'd arrest me as a vagrant," he said. He changed the topic to movies. "If I renew it every six months, I have a lite membership to the Yale Film Society." Soon the group was laughing about old gangster films and comparing favorites. "Anything you're learning in that film course of yours, I could teach you three times as
much," said Pete. "I used to be a junior high E nglish teacher." "You know, at one time I was bringing home $1,000 a week as a printer," Ed said. "Prosperity," sneered Pete. "Drunks hate prosperity. Yesterday afternoon I had $65. Today I'm broke. I gave it away. I gave it to the guys on the street, to the bums. Only I don't like the word 'bum. 'Nobody's a bum. But you help them out, and then when you're down and need something, they'll help you. I must know every dru n k in New Haven."
A new roof Estimates figure the number of homeless in this city to be between 250 and 400. Tonight in the alleys between those stone and metal buildings in the skyline the shelter faces, approximately ten times the number of people staying at Columbus House are making do, sleeping near steam vents, under newspapers, shrinking into them selves against the dark cold. Is this one new shelter a mere token effort, doing nothing to change a faulty social system? "I react strongly to the opin ion that we're just band-aids, not solving the underlying p roblems," said Jack Hasegawa, General Secretary of
Ray and Jeff talclng It easy on the couch.
The New .Journai~January 21, 1983 23
24 The New Journal/january 21 , 1983
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The New JournaJ/january 21, 1983 25
Dwight Hall, who was instrumental in planning the shelter. "Basically it is a very small attempt, but you can justify it. Last year two people froze to death, and one wasn't found until the spring thaw. If we can keep one or !WO people from freezing to death in 1983, then that's worth something, and by having gone through the establishing of Columbus House in a careful and painstaking way, we hope to be a model. We expect to consult other groups opening up shelters, making it easier for the next ones." The many coordinated groups of concerned churchmen, social workers, and private citizens who originally conceived of Columbus House had trouble achieving their goal. The shelter had to be cleared through zoning ordinances and various state and city regulations, not the least of which were the newly changed fire codes, which required first a standpipe, then an external fire excape, then an enclosed internal one. Delays continued through the winter of 1982, when the Fair Haven shelter opened in a local church. This relieved pressure on Columbus House to open, but also showed city bureaucrats the problems of managing a shelter. As renovations proceeded slowly, funding agencies threatened to cut ofT grants. However, the project was saved by people like Donald Baerman, a prominent local architect who donated over 200 pages of plans. Bankers spoke at meetings; treasurers of multi-million dollar firms wrote grant proposals; Yale students planted gardens and painted, and one, Jesse Lerner, moved into the deserted convent to guard it from vandals. Dwight Hall provided two summer interns, Val Pierce and Mark Dolan. Money appeared from churches, grants from the city, and countless individuals. Still, a $250,000 fundraiser will be "essential to get us through the year," said Hasegawa. The shelter's executive director, Cynthia De Louise, hopes to extend efforts to aid the homeless on both large and small scales. "I'd like to expand the staff, but we can't afford to. We're desperately trying to recruit volunteers, especially around the holidays 26 Tht• Nt'W .JournaiOanuary 21. 19R3
an ex-marine, New Haven to loolc for a Job. and during staff vacations," she said. "It's a vast task." DeLouise helped establish the Coalition for the Homeless, which will find additional housing for street people and help the state government accept some responsibility for emergency shelters. New Haven provides them for disaster victims, people whose homes have frozen pipes or no heat, "but our folks face disaster every single evening of their lives," she said. "We're trying to present this to the government, that there's more than just a disaster every so often. For these folks it's all the time. "There aren't even places where people can get on their feet in any way," she said; "we try to provide bottom line care, the most basic opportunity for a street person to maintain himself. He's no good in a job interview if he's unshaven, if he smells bad, if he looks as if he's had no place to go." A bill before the legislature will help the government take financial responsibility for shelters like Columbus House. With extra funds and staff, the fourth floor could be opened up for more guests, but renovations there would cost as much as the other three floors com-
bined, according to Hasegawa, and more volunteers would be needed for more guests to be sheltered. He spoke of Columbus House's two most urgent worries . "I'm afraid of what would happen if we ran out of money before we have a chance for a fair trial," he said, looking out the window of his Dwight Hall office. "That's a major problem. Times are tough and you see more poor people now than ever before. Also, I get so confused about the conflict between public regulations and the attempt just to do something. If the shelter violates a bureaucratic rule , the city'll close it. It's bureaucratic procedure to worry, correctly, about the risk of tragedy with a fire, but would people decide to close the shelter and face the risk of people freezing to death? It's so easy to run afoul of bureaucrats, especially those who give out money. "Otherwise," Hasegawa said, "I think the shelter's got a tremendous future. When you see the staff and the street people who are willing to help out, well, people are out there, and they're ready to support us. The difference we'll make is one person who lives who would've died otherwise.
. JFK or LIIGUARDIA? USE
What if it's a drunk who contributes nothing else to society for the rest of his life? If it's someone in the locked wards of the Connecticut Valley Hospital costing $150 a day just to keep him alive, that's who we save. But that's not a reason not to do it. The alternative is to say 'let 'em freeze.'" Hasegawa also worries about the staffs ability to swallow their compassion and follow the rule that limits the shelter to giving beds to only 35 guests. "People there will toughen up real quick," he said. "I hope they won't become callous, but they'll have to determine the difference between a regular, who they'll know will at least get a roof or a cardboard box, and a kid who's not from around here, who has nothing at all in 34 degree weather. It'll always be the instinct of the volunteers to help them both, but the staff will have to make decisions like this 15 times every single night ." DeLouise worries most about staff burnout, and she tries to ensure that the live-in residential aides get sufficient vacations in order to rest up from the noisy and sleepless nights spent keeping a floor full of street people under control. All of the live-in staff are recovered alcoholics, which enables them to have a special rapport with the guests.
knew no one. "But I couldn't just turn them away, especially when we had room," he said, even though the couple arrived after 9 p.m., after the cop had left and registration ended for security reasons. Although he had to face criticism for his decision to admit the family, Howard said, "I couldn't just kick them one more time. I've been through that myself." Howard's eyes look very tired, his forehead is furrowed. He lives in Columbus House and has to deal with cleaning up after meals, doing the laundry, and making sure that nothing goes wrong among the entire floor of unruly men he oversees. "I have to do something. I don't know if it's going to be at Columbus House or not but I have to do something. Right now I don't want to hear about Columbus House again," he said, thinking about the short tempers and few late nights behind him , and how many more would follow. He looked up past the freshly refinished gingerbread over the door, up into the soft autumn night. "I've been living here since June. When I think of all the work that went into this place, and all sorts of people donating time and stuff for all this to work, I don't know, it restores my faith in people." What's going to happen when it gets really cold, when more than 35 people line up before 4:30, and familiar faces . have to stay outside? "I can't imagine turning people away on a snowy
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Undying gratitude The house manager, Howard McCarthy, used to be a drug addict· but brought himself through a detoxification program. He sits on the stoop in front of Columbus House , smoking a cigarette and looking out across the high school track . "It was a rough day," he said, "and after yesterday worked out so well." The night before, the h03pital had called with a family with two kids, on the way to the de-tox center. They were from Florida and The Nt'w .Journai~January 21, 1983 27
"The difference we'll make Is one person who lives would've died otherwise."
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night ," Howard said. He took another drag from his cigarette, th rew it on the sidewalk, and headed back inside. In the common room, Pete is play· ing poker with a young couple who heard about the shelter through their church, and with Marty, just out of prison and just started on methadone . He has L-0-V-E tatooed on the knuckles of his right hand, H-A-T-E on the left. "OK, here's the stakes," says Pete. "I put up this cigarette," he says taking out a worm-shaped Marlboro from his pocket, "and you put up your undying gratitude for me for teaching you to play. So every time you see me on the street you have to come up to me and tell me I have your undying gratitude, OK?" "But I don't smoke," the wife says. "So I'll get the cigarette. So everyone's happy." Marty shuffies like the pro that he is and tells a few jokes while he deals. In the corner of the room, a pregnant girl, about seventeen, is crying, while a volunteer host listens. "My life has been one long disaster," she says, in her T-shirt with BABY written in glittery letters. Tonight Howard didn't have room for her boyfriend, who had just stopped by to leave the message that he didn't want to come in anyway. "Was he juiced up when he said that?" she asked. He hadn't been. Howard was sitting in the kitchen, leaning back against the refrigerator. "Right now she thinks I'm a creep with a capital 'C', but there's nothing I can do." In the other room, Pete was talking past his cigarette, over his cards. "Sometimes, a good dinner and a good night's sleep can really change people around. I know it's true for me." Pete doesn't want to become a permanent fixture at Columbus House, though. "If I could manage it, I'd be out of here now," he said, talking of his plans for an apartment. "I'd be out of here a long time ago, but I'm lazy. I'm spiritually lazy and I'm physically lazy,too. Tomorrow I have to go to work . You know why? 'Cause I don't have any more money. Otherwise I wouldn't work," he laughed. "I used to be a very successful man. I had everything, a wife, a job, but then I lost it. 'Cause of the alcohol."
28 The N.t·w .JournaVJanuary 21. 1983
..a
What other events send people to the streets? Doug used to be a realestate broker, "but money got tight ," he said. Scottie, when asked what brings him to New H aven, said, "the Connecticut five-cent deposit law . I could earn more money here than I could lifting furniture for three dollars an hour back in New Jersey." For others like Randy, the shelter is just a n overnight stop before a n ew job or a move down south as winter approaches. "Oh, I hope it snows tomorrow," one of the student volunteers said, his enthusiasm dying as he looked up at the faces looking at him . "No you don't," said Randy, who kept thumbing through the classified section. At 9 p.m., the minibus arrives to take students home, and station wagons pull out of the parking lot and head towards the suburbs. The guests file up to the dorm rooms, with fresh linen and bathrobes. Smelling of cigarette smoke, Liz was on the minibus back to Yale . "Fo r the first time, I realized that those people are human," she said. "I was walking home from the library late last night and saw a guy going through the garbage can. Could he have been at the shelter tonight?" Did she plan to volunteer again? "It made me look too closely. I'm not sure that I want to go back." But she did. "What struck me about the people
there wasn't how different they are, but how much we have in common, some sort of human constant we all share. They talk like my parents around the dinner table, and except for last night they're usually in pretty good spir its, not depressin g to be around at aJI." That night had been bad. Someone had stolen June's bicycle. "It was like her Cadillac," said Ed. "It was a ll she had." June sat by herself in the common room watching "Happy Days," occasionally laughing harshly, out of sync with the laugh track . Pete leaned agaimt the wall in the hall. "I went to church today, over to St. Mary's to pray. I was the only one there. I said, 'Hey, it's me again. I know I just come here to ask for things, but God,' " he laughed, " 'I need another break.' " He had been looking for housing all day with no luck. "I can't sleep here at night," he said. "There's so many crazy people here, and I'm gonna be crazy soon if I can't get out . I keep hitting my head against the wall and it doesn't even feel better when I stop anymore." H is breath smelled of chronic oblivion, of too many bottles in brown paper bags. "But don't get me wrong~ he said, "this is a good place. It saved my life ."
•
Tina Ktllry, a sophomort in Morst, rr_~ular contributor to TNJ.
IS
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The food factory
Ground beef flows from the meat grinder .
Lindsay Rodes
30 The New Jou rnal/j anuary 21, 1983
Most people are reaching the fourth stage of sleep as Bart Mansi punches in for work in the basement of Commons. He begins at 3 a.m., sometimes earlier, depending on the day's order. T oday he and his bakers will prepare 1,500 breakfast danish, 9,000 cookies, and about 250 loaves of bread. And they do this everyday, five days a week. By the time the sun rises, each baker
has had a cup of coffee and baked enough bread to supply an army. Soon the first trucks will arrive to send out the fresh baked boods to the college dining halls. But with another five hours to go on the shift, nobody sits down or takes a break. "It's a tough shift, but somebody's got to do it," says Mansi, who has worked as a Yale University baker for 25 years. "It's not a job for a young guy or a single man.
At any hour of the day or night, you can be sure that someone, somewhere, is working on our next meal. iii
They like to go out and party. I used to
~ do that, but in 1978 I had a heart at-
!
tack. Since then I make sure to get at least five hours a night." ~ Mansi and his team of bakers arc } only a few of the hundreds of behindiS the-scenes workers in Yale's immense :: food network. Yale University Dining ~ Hall Services runs 26 dining hall units, two hospital food services, and an elderly nutrition program on a healthy budget of !14 million. Complete with vending machin es, a fleet of and a meats division in the Long WharfTerminal, Yale's food empire is the largest in southern Connecticut. At any hour of the day or night, you can be sure that someone, somewhere, is working on your next meal. In the basement of Commons where Mansi works you will find the real nucleus of Yale's food operations- the machines which clean and shred and skin the fruits and vegetables; the ovens that bake the breads and cookies: the industrial artists who frost and ice the cakes and brownies that make rheir way into every dining hall on the .unpus. Few people realize that 1-c-~hman Commons sits on top of a \ irtual food factory- the bake shop, a vegetable shop. and a king-sized kitcht路n. Tlw lan~e quantities of supplies n路quirc full-time workers to keep rhings well-stocked. And supplies are constantly being delivered and shipped-as much as 14,000 pounds of flour and 11 ,000 pounds of sugar come throu~h the loading dock each year. So ~~hether it's the night of a sports banquet. the freshman Christmas dinner, or a typical meal. the basement is in constant motion. "Things go well because we're all pretty good friends down here," explains assistant manager Mark Girard . .. \'\'e're family, and people rely on one another.~ Girard should know. As coordinator and arbitrator for the different shops in the basement for three vears. vou could call him the father of iht路 "fa;,ily ." ~
A machine that forms perfect hamburger patties 路
The New Journal/january 21, 1983 31
A night with the bakers On the average day the three Commons bakers meet behind the Personnel Office on Ashmun Street and walk to work. The men stick together because they say the streets are not safe. "There arc a lot of crazies out there, you know," says Bob Knox, a University baker for 13 years. "Coming to work one time, we saw a man hanging from the cemctary wall by one leg. He didn't even know where he was. Somebody gave him LSD at a party." The bakers took him down. Another morning the bakers discovered some students climbing on the scaffolding outside Woolsey, and tramping on the roof. The workers called the Yale police. "We didn't want anyone hurt," says Knox. And just recently the bakers said they accidentally interrupted a couple on the street. "What did' we see? What didn't we see, if you know what I mean. And two people of the same sex." It's not unusual for poeple to wander into the basement of Commons late at night following the scent of fresh bread. "Students come in from time to time, so J give !h(·m a few cookies, sure. We aim to please," says Mansi. After desc<·nding inw che basement, the first thing Mansi docs after turning on the lights, is to start the oven. The task is not as easy as it sounds because the gas pilot light is touchy. An airraid alarms sounds when the pilot goes :>lit. "It rings through the basement, LOUD," says Girard. "The manufacturer tOok it apart completely over Thanksgiving break. The problem is that we push the oven, over-use it." But that's hard to imagine. The stainless steel monstrosity is at least 15 by 15 feet and looks like it could heat Rhode Island. Five or six people could fit inside. At 3:15am the bakers begin the long process of making bread. They concentrate on the dough, testing and tasting. It becomes impossible for the bakers to hear each other talk over the AM radio, the two mixing machines, and the hum of the oven . Hand signals and shouts become their means of communicalion. And the small window fan doesn't stop the droplets of perspiration from forming on their 32 The New Journal/january 21, 1983
foreheads, telling them that the oven is ready.
Pony-sized cockroaches The bakers don't need recipes . h's second nature by now. Each of tht•m has worked the 3-11 shift for fiv<' years. Their motions are pretise and practised. Knox whistles as he dribbks it·· ing over the danish. "I gel up pretty early. I usually get up at I 2:30 10 gel ready for work," he says. " I have to gel situated, you know. I'm not one of those people that an get up and go at it straight away." K neading the bread requin·s the most work. It lies on tlw tahk, a dough ey amoeba as big as a man.
Potential penuche bars.
Mansi rips into it with a long knife, separating it like Silly Putty. Tht·y roll the pieces into balls and slather them with e~g batter to make the crust shiny and hard. There are cockroaches. "You should sec some of them," says Mansi. "Ponysized. But it's the same at every bakery, anywhere there's food. They try everything to get rid of them. We keep chis place as clean as possible, but so many people come thrugh here, and bake in this small area that there's bound to be a mess. There's no time to keep everythi n g spotless. Wc'n• busy the whole time. The only chance there is to clean is when the students come in
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Chief Balcer John Mansi can frost a triple layer calce In 30 seconds, Including sprinkles. at night." White powder and splotches of dough lie everywhere. "Anyway, I think we do a ({Oodjob," says Mansi . "We give the kids homestyle and nearly 400 dincrcnt baked ~oods. It's as good as any commercial bakery. " Of course students always like to mmplain about the food, but the bakers have a theory about such peoplt·... It's tough to say why JX'Ople like some things," says Mansi . "You ({CI pros and cons on everything. It can JUst be the person's tastes, too. Some people's tastes are off, vou kno.,v. Maybe they're unhappy or o;omething •?at day, and certain things don't seem rt~tht. But it's not the food it's them."
Once Mansi set out to prove the taste theory. In an experiment, he ({ave his boss a piece of cake to sample . "He hated it. but I knew there was nothing wrong with the cake. So I saved it, that very same cake. And ten days later I gave the s:tme persn another pie<:e. He loved it, so help me God. It just I{OC'I to sho"" that tastes are hard to trust. " Just before 6:00 Mansi brings out three white papers hats like the one-. tht·y wear at McDonald's. Reluctantly, everyone puts one on. "It's the one part of the uniform I hate. But we are supposed to wear them. So just before the manager arrive<; . . . ~
HAPPY HOUR PRICES IN EFFECT ALL EVENING MON.-WED. $1.25 PER D RI N K YALE STUDENT l.D. MUST BE SHOWN
The New Journal/january 21, 1983 33
A contest of smells At about 7:00 the basement is a contest of smells. Evt>ry room is filled with something different. Mushrooms. Radishes. Cheddar cheese. Green peppers. Iceberg lettuce. There arc crates of tomatoes and broccoli and cabbage piled by the elevator. "I can smell something cooking in the kitchen before I can smell what the bake shop's working on," says Larry Freeman, a baker. But inevitably onions win. The vcgatable shop across the hall from the bake shop fills the whole complex with the sharp smell of onions. "Don't even mention them," says one of the workers, disgusted. "If one-of the women who has been working on them comes in to the main office I can ltll," says Rose Proto, a secretary at Commons. "Myself, I can't even go into the room when the
onions arc being p(¡clecl, I cry c;o much." Eva Pennicooke, a 50-vear-olcl pantry worker, has peeled onions for three years because nobody dst• wants to. It's painful and tedious, and, yes. it makes you cry. "After 15 or 20 minutes a film of sulfuric acid coats your face," she explains. "You stop sniffing and crying, but you can't wash your face or it starts all over again. Your have to build up the layer of acid. And standing in the r<.'frigcrator helps some, too." She hums and says none of the work bothers her right now because" she going to Jamaica for a few weeks to visit her husband. "Somcbody's got to do this job." she rationalizes. "Tiw only thing is how embarrassed I get sometimes, about the smt>ll. It is so, so terrible. l'U walk into a public place,
Compressed air Jets help Ere Penecoolce peel onions. 34 T he New J ournal/january 21, 1983
and people will turn to look at me and stare." Still, the job looks miserable. She stands behind a plastic "sneeze guard" which hangs over the pilt> of onions to keep the peels from flying into ht>r face. Using a high prt>ssure air hose, Pennicooke holds the onion and strips away the outer layer of brown skin. She then tosses the naked bulb into a hamper behind her. Doing this for two and a half hours, she can peel 645 pounds. That's more onions than most people will touch in a lifctinw. As recently as a year ago, then: wen: workers who did nothing but cut and shred lettuce for salad bars eight hours a day. That, the manager confesses. was a waste of time. Now Commons receives shredded lettuce from a vendor. "But it's tough to find a good supplier," said Don Mitchell, the produce. buyer. "Last year I ended up sending
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Sliced vegetables being prepared for bagging. back about 1000 pounds a week because it was so discolored." Mitchell, who grocery shops for the University starting at 7am every morning at the Long Wharf wholesale food terminal purchases practically every morsel of food-from produce and meat to sugar and salt - that winds up on your plate. The room looks like a manufacturing plant. The machines that line the walls are strategically placed so that the preparation process can move directly from one operation to the ne~t. There is a vegetable washer, wh1ch looks like a stainless steel casket; a spin dryer which uses centrifugal force to drain away the water and a vacuum packer which sucks air out of the packing bags. Every n ow and them a pantry worker gets careless with the vegetable washer, and ends up wet. "It only seems to happen when you're in a bad ~ood , when you least expect it. That's hfe," says Catherine Ritter, a pantry worker. She has just changed her clothes after pressing the wrong button an.d gettin$ drenched. "The worst t~mg is that it doesn't stop automatically You h ave to go back under the stream of water to turn it off. Double Wet," she chuckles. Except for the onions and heavy boxes, workin g in the vegetable shop seems pleasant. "It's the meat I can't
stand," says P en nicooke. I n the n ext room, meat hangs thawing for use in the kitchen. The blood drains onto the floor as the meat warms. "Smells up the place. It's disgusting," she says.
88,000 chickens One place no official Ya le tour will take you is the Long Wharf Terminal. It's on the far side of route 34, the last stretch along a row of local produce vendors where Yale University Dining H all receives produce and meat every day of the week. The amounts the process each year would stagger the average canrnovr - 88,000 chickens, 38,900 burgers, 44,000 pounds of pork and 8, 700 foot-long dogs. The Butcher Shop at Long Wharf T erminal doesn't smell at all. In fact it seems extraordinarily sterile. Everyone walks around in clinical white coats, hard hats and steelplated boots. T hey all carry clipboards. The butcher shop used to be located under commons with all the oth er operations, but in the last 15 years the process has been streamlined. The funny thing is that you see very little meat. It's all in containers bv the walls, or in cardboard crates o n the ,,hite formica tabletops. It's a far cry from Sinclair Lewis' meatpacking horror. The meat hangs form cast-iron hooks only after a shipment arrives, but the butchers
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Gene Lacabelll examines pork chops.
quickly move the slabs along the ceiling track and into the refrigeration room. Ther supervisors sit in a glass observation booth, marking up orders and checking supplies under the fluorescent light. Occasionally, one of them glances up to survey production. "They're behind closed doors, if you know what I mean ," says Gene Lacobelli, the husky middle-aged butcher who's been in charge of cutting every piece of meat Yale has consumed for the last 17 years. The supervisors don't touch the meat. They don't work with the butchers, or take their breaks with them. As in any bureacracy, the supervisors, manager and expeditors worry about looking good. Every slab of beef and mutton and pork that comes into the Long Wharf terminal arrives in vacuum-sealed packages form Iowa Beef Processors, the biggest meat processor in the world. The new packaging (called Cryovac) saves time and freight costs for the butchers and increases shelf-life of the beef, but it reduces the butcher's job to what Lacobelli calls "portion control." Portion control is a butcher's curse. It is the tedium of watching over a automatic pattie machine as it drops 5000 uniform, flat, five-ounce hamburger patties onto thin pieces of wax
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•
years ago one of the butchers lost a finger. And there are other hazards in ~ the m eatshop. The butchers are required to wear hardhats to protect ~ the m selves from the "ponderous" cuts ~ e of frozen meat which hang pcrcariousu; ly from the hooks. To protect their ~ feet, they wear steel-plated boots. Naturally, Lacobelli says, sanitation is as important as cutting the meat. The butchers stop production everyday at 3:00 a nd start cleaning. It takes the rest of the afternoon to hose down each machine, inside and out, to scrub the walls, to bleach the counrter tops and cement fl oors a nd to squeegee it all dry. "W e use as much water as anything else," says production manager Marya nn Bernick. After all, she says," the FDA inspects every day. The place has to b e spotless. No one is supposed to know exactly paper. "There are things in every job when .Jim Hill , the FDA inspector, will that get boring. Fo r us, it's doing the arrive to sample and stamp the meat. same cuts of meat, "says Lacobelli . "H e's got the power to shut down the Although these machines can be place," says Bernick. " If there's tedious, they can also be dangerous if something dirty o r unsafe, he can halt you're not careful. The band saw that production. But he doesn't do that Lacobelli uses to clip chicken pieces often. H e make suggestions in his and to form pork chops can cut report , and points out things to us." So throu gh frozen meats like jello. A few the tables and walls sparkle.
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The butchers say the only unplea· sam th ing about working at the shop is the cold. The cutting room is ke pt at a cool and humid 55 degrees. Yo u can see your breath. "When you're standing using the knives for a few hours on ~rozen meat, you begin to feel I t - hands first , toes next," says one cutter. So when the butchers take their ten minute break at !O:OOam they head upstairs to the main o ffice for warmth and coffee.
The facts beyond the faces
An anonymous bond It comes together on the serving linemeat, vegetables and bread. Three separate operations end up on a single plate. And although more than a thousand people probably worked to put it there, in all jobs at all hours, you probably don't know a single one of them. You don't know their names. You don't know their faces. It's a strange, ~non ymous bond for people who are, In a way, so intimately connected from day to d ay ..
•
Lirtds.y
R odes, a Junior in Davenport, a regular contributor to TNJ.
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TheNewJournal The New Journal/january 21, 1983 39
Research The paid Samaritans
Darren Gersh
think I have a higher tolerance for gross and disgusting things."
11 /
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Looking for a cure: Gloria, a diabetic, participates In Dr. DeFronzo's Glucose Metabolism Experiment. Matt (not his real name) fought against gagging. The small tube, a fiberoptic bronchoscope, eased deeper into his throat, and the doctor complimented him on suppressing his gags. As the tube passed down his throat, Matt felt discomfort, but there was no pain. His eyes were watering, and he remembers feeling "something strange" in his lungs, "something cruising around down there." His throat was numb, anesthetized with Lidocaine in order to relieve his almost unbearable desire to gag. "They (the doctor and staff) kept complimenting me- 'You're doing beautiful,'- and passing saline solution (to wash cells from the lung), and rm doing a good Lidocaine buzz-like having done coke . . . " At the end of ten minutes, the tube comes out of Matt's lungs, 40 The New Journal/january 21, 1983
and the experiment is over: The doctor has some of Matt's lung cells and Matt has $120. After four hours of X-rays, blood tests and just waiting around reading magazines Matt left. "Each time (he did this experiment twice) I bounced out of the place happy to have survived, and they owed me $120." Like hundreds of other Yale students and New Haven residents, Matt has done an experiment at the Yale-New Haven Medical Center. For a relatively minor amount of work and some discomfort, Matt earned thirty dollars an hour. He can do this experiment, a bronchial lavage and brushing, every six weeks. Although some subjects participate in medical experiments for the satisfaction of helping others, most students do the experiments to pick up some
KAY
quick cash. It is possible that a student could make a pretty good living renting himself out to science. The pay varies with the discomfort of the protocol. You can get $4 an hour for answering questions about your acne, or you can get about $600 for risking a spinal tap. The spinal tap (performed at Connecticut Mental HeaJth Center) is one of the most painful and potentially dangerous experiments. The doctor inserts a needle into the spine and extracts a small amount of the flu id surrounding it. Because the tap alters the delicate balance of fluid in the central nervous system, the procedure results in spinal headaches-headaches worse than most migraines. Not all studies are this painful, but most involve some discomfort. How often can someone be a subject? And are there dangers involved from repeated testing?
Opportunities and risks There are many opportunities to become subjects. Posters requesting paid samaritans are often placed in ~ale Station and neighborhood shoppmg centers. The Medical School's Human Investigation Committee (HIC) alone a,:proves over 250 experiments each year, each requiring ~en or more subjects. So if you're willmg to take some risks, it's not difficult to be accepted into one of these studies. Ralph DeFronzo, Associate Professor of Medicine at Yale, is one of the doctors performing experiments on human subjects. "I wouldn't ask someone to do something I wouldn't do myself," he says. DeFronzo estimates that he has been a subject in 60-70 percent of his studies and that overall he has participated in over 300 experiments. He admits that there is a small risk in every experiment. But he points out that. each experiment involving human ~ubjects is carefully reviewed by HIC. From talking to people (in the medical community) I've found that the Yale Committee is one of the toughest in the country," says DeFronzo. The Committee, comprised of both doctors and lay people, even supervises those ~xperiments performed off campus by ale faculty, staff and medical students.
In order to assure that the doctor's power over a subject is not abused, HIC reviews both the consent form and the scientific design of each exper iment. The non-medical HIC members from the community review the consent form to insure that most people from the community can understand the implication of a particular experiment. The doctor also plays an important role in informing the subject about what he is getting himself into. Dr. DeFronzo, who is not a member of H IC, will often explain the protocol and then have the subject explain it back to him in order to see that there is a complete understandmg. In compliance with HIC guidelines, the doctors informed Matt before he began of the risks involved in his experiment. The consent form listed the possible dangers: "If you participate in this study, you will be exposed to certain risks of physical injury. These include 1) possible lung infection due to retained fluid, 2) spasm of the airways due to the fluid, and 3) minor blood streaking of the sputum (saliva and mucus) as a result of the brushing and fluid washing. In addition, it is possible that in the course of these studies, new adverse effects of this procedure that result in physical harm may be discovered. Medical therapy will be offered at no cost to you for any of the aforementioned physical injuries." In Matt's case no serious side effects resulted from the experiment. For two days after the bronshocopy he had "the deepest sore throat imaginable." He felt tired and brought up fluid from his lungs as the consent form explained he would. His bronchitis was inflamed. However he did not feel that the experiment had been a major inconvenience, and he did it a second time. "I like the people and felt secure in their hands," he explained. Of course the money played an important part in his decision to continue the experiment. "I'm very into having money," he said. Another factor in Matt's decision to do the experiment was his faith in the doctor's ability. Because medical experiments involve complicated technical procedures or knowledge, the patient often feels like an intelligent guinea pig. He has no choice but to ac-
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• cept the doctor's authority. Another subject, Peter, rem arked that "the weird thing is that we have so much faith in doctors that we are willing to do whatever they ask." But P eter (not h is real n ame) was quick to add, "I didn't go into it b lindfo lded." His experiment was a glucose metabolism study. T he doctor injected a h ighly concentrated glucose solution into P eter's arm. After this solution h ad circulated a while, a drug was injected into the blood stream. Blood samples were then taken every fifteen minutes to stud y th e drug's effect on th e bod y's ability to metabolize glucose. After seven hours, Peter had given a p int of blood and received $100. He h ad stayed out all night before th e experiment a nd slept th rough the whole process. After the experiment, Peter felt as if the money was, in fact, free - he thought that his experiment had been harmless and pain less.
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Sally's Story "News o f this free hundred dollars spread fast," he explained. P eter told Sally Sloan '84 abou t the experiment. Look ing for some quick cash , Sally participated in a similar glucose metabolism study for Dr. DeFronzo last October. "I knew perfectly well what I was getting into- they explained it very well," agrees Sloan. Sally's experimen t simulated the metabolism of a diabetic in her bloodstream for a short period of time. Because there are not as many diabetics as normal subjects, it is useful for researchers to acutely alter the situation in the body to make someone who is not d iabetic appear d iabetic for a few hours. Sally was paid $100 for Dr. DeFronzo's study which took five hours. However she slept through most of the experiment. She does remember the doctor inserting a catheter into her leg. As she watched on a television screen which displayed an X-ray image of her body, a small tube was inserted into an artery in her leg. Next, an I. V. was inserted into each arm, and she was given a solution to d rink which tasted like "flat Sprite," o n ly m uch sweeter. Every fifteen m inutes or so the doctor would take a blood sam ple. . Sally doesn't remember the expen· ment too well: on Peter's advice she
TheNewJournal had stayed out late the night before and was very tired. She does remember waking up when an attendant replaced some blood that had been taken from the catheter. He replaced the blood too quickly and she felt an "odd surging" in h er body. After the experiment was over, she couldn't walk very well. When Sally told the doctors this, "They didn't seem too sympathetic." For the next week she had a large bruise on h er leg and small "vampire-like" marks on her arms. Three weeks late r she received her check for $100. I asked her if she was thinking of doing any other experiments. "Funny you should ask that because I was just debating doing a hormone experiment." Clearly though, the testing is not for everyone. Sally thinks that some people might find it unduly stressful : "I think I have a higher tolerance for gross and disgusting and painful things," she says. Whether o r not Sally learned from her experience, the data gathered from her body will help those who are diabetic. The experiment Sally volunteered for contributes to the general fund o f knowledge about diabetes, and hopefully this knowledge will lead to a cure . DeFronzo has many diabetics who volunteer for the testing in order to help him arrive at that cure. Indeed the hope of helping others keeps many of his subjects coming back to do the test again. Rather than go into a m ore lucrative private practice, DeFronzo himself stays with research because he finds it more exciting. "I think that some o f my work has had an impact in clinical manage~ent of people and that's very rewardmg." he says. Medical experiments pay well because they can be uncomfonable and risky. But the discomfort and risk w~ich an experiment poses are a small pnce to pay to cure a disease such as diabetes. Whether o r not Sally and others volunteered fo r an experiment strictly for the cash, someone out there will be thankful.
•
Danm Gtrsh, a junior in Pierson, is
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Books The great intangibJes of college life
Holly Lyman
The Insider's Guide emphasizes the Great Intangibles of college livingsuntan potential, party scene, the typical personality.
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The Insider's Guide to the Colleges: The Yale Dally News at Its best Pity the high school senior. As you relax over winter vacation, he faces a swamp of college catalogues, essays, and deadlines. He must answer questions. like, "what extracurricular activity have you found most meaningful, and why?" In all likelihood, the schools he visited last summer have melted into a single image of lawns and brick buildings. The statistics tell him little about actual college life. He has no idea where he wants to go to college. The Yale Daily News Insider's Guide to the Colleges was written for this student. Unlike conventional college guides such as Barrons and The College Board Handbook, the Insitkr's Guide emphasizes the Great Intangibles of college living -suntan potential, party scene, the typical personality. The latest edition, scheduled to hit the bookshelves by the end of the month also lists 41 types of schools in a College Finder: prestigious, strong party traditions, strong in social sciences, etc. The resulting dossier of student folklore aims to tell the high school senior "what the colleges are really like."
The insider's angle sells. When the staff of the Yale Daily News first produced a college guide in 1969 (publ. 1970), they saw it as little more than a fun way to make a few thousand dollars. Eight editions later, the book has become a small institution. Its success has inspired similar guides, most notably the New York Times Selective Guide to the Colleges. But no one book has earned absolute credibility. Controversy over the Selective Guide's rating system prompted the New York Times to pull its name from the guide's title. And questions remain concerning the validity of the Insider's angle. First, who are the insiders? Most are college newspaper editors. The Guide staff sends each campus paper the last guide article on its college and asks the editor to update it and find someone else to write an additional article. For the latest edition, the staff also arranged for Yalies to send similar mailings to their friends. Students from well over 75 percent of the colleges sent back some sort of written information, according to Jasper Reid ('82), editor
The New Journal/january 21, 1983 45
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of the latest Guide. For the remaining colleges, the guide staff resorted to phone intervi~ws. How accurate is the staff? The old record here is blemished: in the book's fifth edition , someone mixed up the University of the South with Southern University in Baton Rouge. As a re· suit, the book falsely claimed that two black students at the University of the South had been killed during a demonstration. The ensuing lawsuit was settled out of court in 1976 when Berkley Publishing Company (then the guide's publisher) paid $10,000 to the University of the South. Since the fifth edition mixup, however, the guide has grown in size and seriousness. Ithaca College, described in the seventh edition as a party school with an active pickup scene, did sue the guide for defamation, but the guide won handily. Recent editions (including the last) have been edited with care to avoid libel. The book is factually quite correct. The question of bias, however, has remained troublesome. In all of the first eight editions, the guide's writers have lectured against Harvard. They grant the school's prestige, only to dismiss it as a social wringer, a magnet for snobs and bad teachers. The 1981-82 guide, for example, claims, "The problem with all students here is that they are taught to think, talk, and act in a certain way: obnoxious, superior, and self-confident. So they do." And then there's the guide's loyalty to Yale. In the 1981-82 edition, the Yale chapter, by far the longest in the book, reads like an admissions catalogue. No statement in the chapter is actually untrue; but none is critical. While such prejudice may be natural, it casts a shadow over the credibility of the entire book. Now that shadow has been lifted. In the latest guide, the Yale chapter is a model of modesty. Although the authors find much to praise at their school , they refrain from actually gloating and offer some mild criticisms about expense and town-gown relations. The Harvard article is also balanced, even generous. Reading some chapters, it's hard to believe that Yalies wrote this book. Where is their traditional scorn towards small-town conservative schools? The latest
writers even make a show of charity towards Christian fundamental and Catholic schools. For example, "As the administration puts it, Bonaventure strives to 'foster a community of friendship, brotherhood, and mutual service.' Isn't that what a liberal education is ultimately about?" No, but that's a generous way of putting things. Tolerance of other cultures, indeed, informs the entire guide. It finds redeeming features at colleges the average Yalie would snicker at. But don't worry about being whitewashed. The guide remains critical, and sharp. It finds the University of Maryland "truly remarkable in having so much in the classroom that is so bad." A student at Sweet Briar considers her classmates "as diverse a group of debutantes as I've seen." On a grimmer note, the book charges that several schools, including Trinity College at Hartford and the University of Virginia, have racist atmospheres or fraternities. Such charges, Reid said, were carefully verified. No book is perfect. Personally, I · wish the authors had surveyed more students in the beginning. I have sc:veral quibbles with the College Fmder. (Why wasn't Stanford listed under "strong in math or science"? Why didn't Wheaton make the list of women's colleges?) And of course a personal visit to the college should weigh far more in the senior's mind than any guide . .But for a fun starting point, the latest Insider's Guide can't be beat. It's informative. It's objective. And for the terrified, about-to-bej~dged high school senior, it offers a n.ce sprinkling of zaniness: "Above all, what makes going to school at UCSD ltJ:te University of California at San D1ego) exciting is that the San Andreas Fault is close by . . . " I hope that future editions of the guide will retain a sense of humor. Our high school senior, sweating over his no-doze and thesaurus, needs it .
•
Holly Lyman, Yale '82, last wrote for the April issue ojTNJ.
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The Co·op Book Department Helps You
FIND THE BOOK YOU NEED With these Special Customer Services:
7 DAY SEARCH SERVICE Many popular general titles that are not in stock can be obtained in 7 to 10 days or less. No fees or charges. Ask at the Book Information Qesk. SPECIAL ORDERS Direct to the publisher for books otherwise unobtainable. Allow 3-6 weeks; prepayment required; postage charge added. Ask at the Special Order Desk. OUT·OF·PRINT SEARCH SERVICE If a copy is located, the price is quoted first-there is no obligation to buy. Ask at Bod< Information or the Special Order Desk. FOREIGN BOOKS For titles in French, German and Spanish that are not in stock, ask at the Europa Desk.