Evolution of Spring Festivals at Penn
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button can be a window to an era. This A one certainly is. Long, wavy red hair and slightly askew shades frame a young man’s face while his lips curl into from a self-satisfied smile. Two fingers rise up to form a peace sign. Atop his head sits the nod to tradition: a revamped skimmer, closer to a floppy hippie hat than the original straw chapeau, adorned with the stars and stripes of an American flag. The slogan, SKIMMER ’71, erases any doubts about our character or his motives: he is a teaser, a throwback to a dying culture and a sign of movements to come. It began in 1949 as Callow Day, named after Penn’s celebrated varsity heavyweight crew coach, Russell “Rusty” Callow. After he to warned that crew would “die out as a major sport” at Penn if something wasn’t done, The Daily Pennsylvanian reported, a “tri- umvirate of well-meaning undergraduates” arranged to have an April day dedicated to watching races and cheering on the Penn crew team. A modest group of students re- sponded, gathering at the banks of the Schuylkill River and wearing the short, Looking back at the (r)evolution wide-brimmed straw hats that were Callow’s trademark. Two years later, when Callow of spring festivals at Penn. left Penn to coach the United States Naval Academy’s crew team, the hat remained and BY VIOLET BARON the event became Skimmer Day. Its popular- ity grew and Skimmer Day’s schedule ex- panded to include a student rally, a poster contest, and a cabaret dance in Houston Hall. of the 20th century, as a “Rowbottom” tolerable level. But in 1963, Skimmer By the spring of 1955, the year that Penn’s [“Yea-a-a … Who?” Jul|Aug 2002]. In a letter coincided with the Penn Relays and with heavyweight crew team won an historic to the Gazette, Martin Griffin C’55 wrote Hey Day, a transitional tradition celebrat- victory against numerous top European that the cops who arrived on the scene ing the junior class’s rise to senior status, teams in the Henley Regatta on England’s around 3 a.m. “swiftly became targets for and students were again overcome by River Thames, Skimmer was in full swing. bottles and other missiles, especially, they “an ineffable, quasi-transcendental pre- A high-spirited crowd danced to a Dixieland seemed to feel, from the Deke house.” dilection to smash,” in the words of the jazz combo playing from the top of the According to the April 25, 1955 Evening DP. A car was pushed into the Schuylkill; grassy riverbank. Many men wore their Bulletin, “44 men and a girl” were arrested, fights broke out in fraternity houses; straw skimmer hats adorned with red and three policemen injured, two fraternity projectiles were thrown at passing cars; blue bands as they sang and danced; one houses (Sigma Alpha Epsilon and Delta students again clashed with police. The or two sported sombreros. This is what Kappa Epsilon) damaged, and a patrol car trolley tracks on Locust Street were set Skimmer became in its prime: a much- “dented.” Both the Penn administration on fire. Many students were arrested, anticipated retreat to the river for singing, and the Fairmount Park Commission and the festival was punitively cancelled dancing, drinking, and celebration. It was “began to express misgivings about the for the following year. “The University an opportunity, at the end of the spring event,” according to an article in the regrets exceedingly the series of rowdy, term, to release the stress of a school year University Archives, and though Skimmer inexcusable, and irresponsible acts last and embrace the joy of the coming summer. activities the next few years were mostly Friday and Saturday by a number of Unfortunately, the celebratory revelry peaceful, the event was cancelled in 1959. University students and their guests and inspired by crew victories over Princeton In the early 1960s, concerts by the likes will take prompt and severe disciplinary and Columbia soon degenerated into stu- of Louis Armstrong were held at Franklin action against those involved,” stated dent-led rioting—known at Penn, for much Field, where drinking could be kept to a the vice president for student affairs. PENN ARCHIVES 56 MAY | JUNE 2015 THE PENNSYLVANIA GAZETTE THE PENNSYLVANIA GAZETTE MAY | JUNE 2015 57 The students’ 1964 answer to Skimmer’s Unlike 1966, when men still had to wear they dedicated to Glee Club Director Bruce cancellation was Remmiks (spell it back- jackets and ties to dinner, and women Montgomery before launching into their wards), an alternative spring event em- had to wear skirts in the library, recalls biggest song, “Ship of the Future.” phasizing the embryonic ethos of peace, Marmon, “by the fall of ’68, spring of ’69, As Skimmer drifted inexorably into love, and harmony—or, in the words of the all of those rules—every one of them—was the past, the energy once reserved for DP: a day of “idyllic joy and beer and gone.” He remembers the introduction of Rowbottoms and raucous crew-team Schuylkill and girls and police and beer drugs and new trends in music and art, cheers flowed into student movements and—oh yes, crew races.” Jazz saxophonist the end of oppressive curfews and the and protests, sit-ins and be-ins, student Gerry Mulligan and the folk duo Bud & introduction of pass/fail, brought forth government petitions and defiant, sym- Travis were the headliners. by the newly formed SCUE, or Student bolic burnings of draft cards and ma- By 1967, recalls Stephen Marmon C’71 Committee on Undergraduate Education. triculation cards. If Skimmer was a WG’81, a member of Penn’s student gov- Disc jockey and radio personality Carol remnant of an old Penn, an old boys’ club ernment during his undergraduate years, Miller C’72, who got her start at WXPN, that preached decorum while practicing Skimmer still featured a “Skimmer con- witnessed the beginnings of a transition otherwise, then its demise was a final cert on campus, and then everyone went to coed living as a female student living stamping out of the life that students down to the Schuylkill for men’s crew in Hill House. She remembers the lag be- were supposed to lead. With the end of races.” The concert was held at the west- tween lax new rules for dorm life and Skimmer, that generation of students ern end of Franklin Field. “Students changes in student behavior and culture. bid goodbye to the people they were sup- would fill the entire field,” adds Marmon, In some ways, she says, it was easier to posed to become and the society that now chair and CEO of Olana Capital, who navigate the intricacies of sexuality and they were supposed to enter with pride. remembers students bringing blankets consent when rules for visitation were “By that time, the alternative was very and drinks. still managed by the University. big,” says Ira Harkavy C’70 Gr’79, then a “There’s sex, and there’s drugs, and “You hear about date rape and all that leader of student movements against the there’s rock n’ roll on the stage,” he says. stuff on campus [today],” she says. Vietnam War and other societal ills, now “It was a mini-Woodstock in the spring “Believe me, it was going on. But when associate vice president and founding di- of ’67 right there.” you had to go back to the dorm [for a rector of Penn’s Barbara and Edward Netter Well, sort of. The drinking consisted curfew], it was pretty easy to get out of Center for Community Partnerships. of “mainly endless cans of beer,” and to a date you didn’t want to be in.” Harkavy and his friends were more con- the best of his recollection there were Speaking of changing mores, Marmon cerned with events reaching beyond cam- “not too many joints,” since “marijuana remembers what may have been “the last pus; like most undergraduate men in those didn’t really hit the scene until the fol- ‘true’ Rowbottom,” which took place dur- years, the stomach-churning possibility lowing fall.” But Marmon does remember ing his sophomore year. One night a group of being drafted to fight in Vietnam was “seeing several couples hooking up, as of men living in the Quad stormed Hill never far from his mind. Marmon remem- we would say today, right on the wet House, then a women’s dormitory, intend- bers Harkavy giving a passionate speech Franklin Field turf.” ing to demand a ransom of intimate cloth- in October 1969 urging the University to That Skimmer weekend did set records ing. To their surprise, the hall’s adminis- lower its American flags to half-mast in for Penn student events: according to a trators had prepared for the intrusion by honor of Vietnam War dead, a motion that DP story, nearly 3,000 students had filled organizing a mixer, which he recalls as the student government passed after some Franklin field that Friday night to watch very nice, “but not what we expected.” controversy—culminating in then-sopho- acts like Smokey Robinson and the more Dorian Dale C’72 burning his ma- Miracles, the Young Rascals, and the By 1971, Skimmer had nearly run its course, triculation card during the student govern- Chiffons. The weekend was packed with morphing from a free-form and some- ment’s plenum. That motion acknowledged socializing and concerts for students, times violent celebration of crew races the fear of the draft and antipathy toward with “cocktail parties” on Saturday and into a campus-based weekend of music, the war that so many undergraduate men Sunday mornings, and fraternity parties drugs, drinking, and frat parties.