The Monon Bell, History, and Tradition

THE MONON BELL, HISTORY, AND TRADITION

Rick Warner Chapel Talk for November 7, 2002

Thank you very much for the opportunity to speak on the history of the Monon

Bell game. Ironically, I began thinking about today’s subject several weeks ago, prior to the Sphinx Club invitation. I remember the moment well. I was standing where you all are seated today, having just listened to a fine address by another faculty member. I speak of course of the esteemed Dr. David Blix ‘70, whose address that particular morning revealed once again his sensitive understanding of Wabash tradition. On this day the subject was the school song “Old Wabash.”

Dr. Blix argued persuasively that morning that, while there may be some virtue in

GRUNTING the song, surely there is more beauty in SINGING it. It truly is a beautiful tune. Yet I was more struck as Dr. Blix offered us a rather startling revelation about the history of singing this song: in his day as a student (which, to be kind, was not really all that long ago) one did not CLAP while singing the song. This single point was only one of many nuggets revealed in the address, so I filed it away and continued listening, thinking that the idea was of more interest to myself as a historian than to most of the audience. However, at the end of his talk, something astounding happened, which was for me rather emotional. About halfway through our ritual singing of Old Wabash at the rise of Chapel, the audience stopped the traditional clapping. We were left with the pure, unadulterated voices of several hundred devotees. This was, in a word, beautiful. Dr.

Blix’s point had been proven, if accidentally: Old Wabash is a fine song when sung.

Except for football games, I no longer clap.

1 Today I have been asked to talk about the Monon Bell and History. As an historian trained in the late 20th century, I take this charge to mean something more than telling some uncomplicated yet entertaining stories about the past. I will certainly tell a few of these yarns, recognizing of course that they may be well known to my audience.

Having done this, I will move to a deeper level of analysis, one familiar to History majors, especially veterans of the infamous History 497. Dr. Blix’s Chapel was ample evidence that although they are steeped in history, traditions do in fact change. How and why do traditions change? How do we know what we think we know about history and traditions? What do our traditions mean?

Ah, but before heading off into such heady discourse you certainly deserve to hear a few choice tales of Monon Bells of past years. I owe a great debt to numerous alumni who have stepped in to help me resurrect the past with oral histories of their Wabash years. I regret that, due to time constraints, I cannot pass all of these along. While there are several books out (and available at the College Bookstore) which tell some of these stories, I have a great respect for native oral tradition, so the following histories have been gleaned from some 25 recent communications with alums.

As is well known, the rivalry between Wabash and Depauw dates back to the nineteenth century. A game between the colleges in 1890 not only set this rivalry in motion, but reportedly saved the DePauw football program from extinction. It was not until the early 1930s that the 350 pound retired railroad bell was added as a prize for the winner of the annual battle. The first Bell Game per se was in 1931, which DePauw won

13-7. The following year the game was a bitter cold affair that ended in a scoreless tie, when Wabash failed to score from inside the DaPauw one yard line late in the fourth

2 quarter. This game foreshadowed generations of tightly contested Bell games, filled with emotion, powered by teeth-chattering grit. Finally, in 1934 Wabash brought the Bell home for the first time.

Of course, the rivalry has been played out off the field, particularly in the weeks prior to the game. A consistent theme in alumni stories is the guarding of the campus, something that continues until today. Steve Wood ’67 tells me that in his freshman year marauding DePauw students were expected to attack our campus under cover of darkness, to exact revenge for the 1959 heist. The intensity of the rivalry was strengthened by a decade of DePauw wins and ties that did not end until 1965. Freshman pledges were stationed along Wabash and Grant Avenues, visually inspecting each passing vehicle for signs of DePauw students. In Steve’s years there were no assaults, though one can never be sure how many plots were foiled by the presence of Wabash guards. As Jack Hauber ’66 writes, this was “a little like the National Guard who protected the mainland US during WWII…no enemy forces made it through.”

Perhaps the best-known pre-game story from the 1960s concerns the creative Bell heist of 1965. Though I am sure there are very few of you who have not heard this tale,

I’ll tell it again since it is, well, very fun. It seems a sophomore named Jim Shanks made a visit with some other Wallies to the DePauw campus a couple weeks prior to the Bell game. (My neighbor Jack Spurway ’75 clarifies that these were Sigma Chis.) Jim succeeded in passing himself off as a visiting Mexican dignitary, and actually secured promises from DePauw President Kerstetter to fund exchange students from Mexico.

During a tour of the campus with the unsuspecting president Señor Shanks managed to convince his host to show him the famous Monon Bell, despite an aide’s comment that

3 the last time she revealed that information the Bell had been stolen. Knowing the secret hiding place of the Bell, another group of Wabash students successfully lifted it later that evening, as campus security was distracted by Sr. Shanks and company. Wabash finally won the Bell back that year. Coincidence? You decide.

The Mexican heist was a joyous occasion for Wallies. In the post-game celebration they wore ponchos and sombreros onto the field. Jay Fisher ’66 reminds us that the next day, a poster celebrating President Kerstetter’s “No Bell” prize and offer for

$20,000 to needy Wabash students suddenly appeared all over the DePauw campus.

Again, work of Sig Chi pledges.

Other alums have similar stories. Larry Slagle ’56 tells me that his class rented a sign-towing plane to fly over the field with a “Beat DePauw” message during the game.

He also remembers a late night raid in which some Wallies seeded the DePauw field with salt in what was intended to be Wabash letters. My other neighbor Bob Remly ’56 told me that he and some other Delts decided that the famous owl sculpture on the DePauw campus was probably getting chilly one November evening, so they took the liberty of providing it a sticky cloak of glue and feathers. Quentin Dodd ’94 remembers running out on the field with the Pep Band, lying down to form a big W during halfime, fearing that they would be trampled by Tiger fans, but ready to take one for the team.

Dave Bohlin ’61 sent me an entertaining story regarding some floats at the Bell

Game. One of these related to a joke in the late fifties about a man born with a golden screw in his belly. He’s told never to unscrew it, though curiosity finally compels him to grab a screwdriver and slowly “peak” to see if anything happens. In a final flourish he removes the screw, smiling triumphantly for a short moment. Then his back side falls off.

4 The float at one end of the stadium featured the classic Wally Wabash in pork pie hat,

“with one foot on a fallen tiger, holding in one hand a huge screwdriver and in the other, of course, a golden screw.” Dave told me about another float that featured a giant fist with a moving finger, but I’m too shy to be more explicit here about that one.

Up to this point my talk (if I may provide some self-criticism) has all of the elements of a good but not great Cultures and Traditions paper – peppered with pithy quotes from the sources, but lacking analysis. Sometimes analysis waits for the second draft. My purpose here today, however, is not to ignite your passions for the big game; that would be next Thursday’s Chapel. Rather, I wish to UNDERSTAND the passion in this tradition. To help us along in this endeavor, I will enlist the assistance of History’s sister discipline, Anthropology.

Many of the native peoples studied by anthropologists follow a calendar of rituals that, if we can understand their meaning, tell us much about the culture in question. My own research centers on the Cora people of the western Mexican state of Nayarit. The

Coras follow an annual cycle of rituals based around agricultural concerns. In February there is a celebration called Las Pachitas, which commemorates the fecundity of the maize crop. A series of special dances, called mitotes, is presided over by a young virgin girl. There are other festivals with mitote dances, at the start of the rainy season around

Easter, in mid-season and of course at the time of harvest. I believe that the mid-season celebration may relate to the de-tasseling process. For more on that grizzly process of corn castration, I refer you to Dean Ditzler. All of the Cora festivals together are steeped in tradition, in what the Indians call their costumbre or custom. Each year they re-invent their tradition, in a process that they hope will encourage their ancestors, posing as rain

5 drops, to return to the earth. Yet even though this annual cycle of ritual is clearly tied to history, there have been moments in which the tradition has changed. The most powerful of these changes was the 18th century appropriation of Christianity on their own terms.

The Coras have integrated Catholic rituals, such as the passion play they learned from

Jesuit missionaries, into their agricultural celebrations. Tradition changes.

We have our annual cycle here, as well. Some of the highlights include ringing in the new class, initiating a fresh semester, participating in or watching Chapel Sing, experiencing the various rituals surrounding Monon Bell, starting the new calendar year with fresh classes and comps, enduring or enjoying Pan Hell week, learning and/or letting loose during Spring Break, and watching another class being rung out, hopefully on a sunny May day on the Mall. Many of these traditions are quite old, but there are also new ones, such as the Celebration of Student Research. All of these rituals are part of the life cycle of the school, and all of them are steeped in history, not in a simple sense of unchanging tradition but in a dynamic re-invention of tradition often filled with mystery and emotion.

Time out for a personal story about tradition. My interest in the culinary arts dates back to early childhood. As I watched my mother prepare a roast, I notice that she cut off the end and set it aside. When I asked her why she did this, she said “I don’t know, this is just the way my mother taught me.” So I asked my grandmother, and she gave me the same explanation about her own mother. Feeling fortunate to have a living great- grandmother, I asked her why all of the women in my family cut off the end of the roast.

“Well, you see my dear, when we first came to this country, we had only a very short pan…”

6 Traditions should not be followed blindly, of course. Let us then consider the

MEANING of the Monon Bell. Once again, I will enlist Anthropology, specifically the symbolic anthropologist Clifford Geertz, who is familiar to C & T veterans as the ethnographer of the Balinese cock fights. Despite the undeniable violence and impoverishment caused by the cock fights, Geertz argues that a thick description of the ritual can reveal its subtler cultural meanings. In our own case, many of the stories (and realities) surrounding Monon Bell are fraught with violence or the threat of it. We distance ourselves from “that other school” as Greeks vilified “barbarians” and as Aztecs loathed the “uncivilized” Chichimecs. More than one Bell game has ended in fisticuffs, which has prompted some impressive if not excessive security measures. Insulting slogans and Tshirts marked by ungentlemanly sexual innuendo are further proof of this

“us versus them” intensity.

It is my view, however, that we do not need to stoop to this level. The intensity of the twelfth player this fall, our cheering hoard, has been effective by supporting our own team, not by maligning the other. Of course, the DePauw game runs by different rules. I am perhaps overly idealistic to expect Wabash fans to answer the Dannie taunt of

“Wabash s****” not with our traditional obscenity but with a feigned “whatever.” But let us ask ourselves this question: How can we reconcile the rawness of the Monon Bell rivalry with an aspiration to act as gentlemen and gentlewomen?

The answer lies in a rethinking of one of our slogans, “Wabash Always Fights.”

Remember that “to fight” is a transitive as well as an intransitive verb. We can fight some one or some thing, but we can also plainly “fight.” In this intransitive sense, the term approximates “carpe deum,” seize the day. To translate to the Wabash vernacular, one

7 might say that to fight is to “suck it up.” Here I see a valuable link between the intensity of our football and other sports teams and the life of our community. Wabash students are not passive; when faced with adversity they “do not go gentle into that dark night,” in the words of Dylan Thomas. They don’t give up. They always fight. When they are doing their best, they are leading an existence that balances their physical, intellectual and spiritual lives, with an intense drive to achieve their best.

There is plenty of evidence that this balanced intensity is alive, even in reference to DePauw. Students from both campuses are supporting local crisis shelters this week.

They are donating blood, “bleeding for the Bell,” and I encourage you all to do that this afternoon. In Chicago, scores of Wabash and DePauw alums watch the game together in civil if not jocular community. Finally, more than a few Wabash men have married

DePauw students, many on this very platform. In addition to these sublime connections with our rival, there are of course unlimited examples of Wallies fighting for more critical causes than a football game in their lives. Our graduates have done great things, and you will continue to do so, because of the fighting spirit that lies within.

There is a time and season for all things. This week I hope that we can rethink and re-invent traditions, perhaps initiate some new ones. Next week will NOT be the time for

Wabash to think reflectively about the Monon Bell and surrounding rituals. The Balinese do not analyze their actions in the middle of a cock fight. Just do it! Feel the passion! Get in touch with your emotion! Win or lose, Wabash will always fight.

I have tried to argue here that tradition is both set in history yet changes in the present. On balance, however, I would suggest that it changes very slowly. As a way of demonstrating this in closing, let me share with you a letter that I received from an

8 alumnus of the class of 1937, Bill Storr. I was quite moved that this 87 year old man took time to share his memories of the Monon Bell with me, some of which I now pass on to you:

“Most of the Wabash student body was on hand at DePauw when the Little Giants first took possession of the Monon Bell. It was a cold, grey November day in 1934, but we paid little attention to the weather. We were out for blood…rather late in the game

Berns threw a Statue-Of-Liberty pass to Booie Snyder in the end zone. Mueller kicked the extra point and Wabash was ahead 7-0. Late in the game Fribley, an All-State running back from DePauw, scored a touchdown. He was assigned the task of running for the extra point. But Wabash had other ideas. Lloyd “Doc” Joyce, a tackle from Delphi, rose up and smashed Fribley short of the goal line. We won 7-6. We all went wild. We were promised an extra day off at Thanksgiving, and that we got in addition to the Bell for the first time.”

So it began. May it never end. May Wabash always fight.