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A 74th Reunion
January/February 2007
by Jake Halpern ’97

Jake Halpern '97 writes for the New Yorker, the Boston Globe, and the New Republic. His latest book is Fame Junkies: The Hidden Truth Behind America’s Favorite Addiction.

One evening last summer, I rendezvoused with Alexander “Pat” Murphy '32 at his 74th reunion. Murphy is 96 years old. He graduated in an era when dorm rooms came with maid service, athletes routinely walked naked through the halls of the gym, and the Sterling law buildings, Sterling Memorial Library, and the Hall of Graduate Studies had just been built.

Technically, the 74th Yale College reunion doesn’t exist. Yale offers each of its college classes a 65th reunion, but after this, remaining alumni of all classes attend the “senior reunion,” which is inaugurated each and every year over dinner at Mory’s. Of all the Yalies who regularly attend the senior reunion, Murphy is among the oldest. At 96, he is an able-bodied man with strong shoulders, a stocky torso, and a very firm handshake. He lives in Branford, Connecticut, with his 84-year-old second wife, Catherine, whom he married eight years ago. Their home is situated on a wooded peninsula known as Killam’s Point, where Murphy’s family has lived for generations. (His middle name is Killam.) “I was born in the next house down the road and I haven’t moved more than one hundred yards over the course of my entire life,” Murphy told me. “The only time that I lived anywhere else was during my four years at Yale.”

Inside the front room at Mory’s, which was hung with countless sepia photographs from the 1800s of Yale athletes dressed in puffy turtleneck sweaters, Murphy found a dozen or so Yalies who had also graduated roughly three-quarters of a century ago. “Greeting and salutations!” declared Dorsey Whitestone '39. “Come in and sit down." Whitestone was a veritable youngster by the standards of the group, but he was quick to tell one and all that he'd had the privilege of attending even older reunions with his father, Class of 1908.

The dinner at Mory’s is usually followed by a night of dancing, and at these galas, Alex Murphy is famous for tangoing and fox-trotting with every man’s wife until the band packs up and calls it quits. It’s a tradition that dates from his undergraduate days. “I was founder of the Society for the Prevention of Wallflowers,” he said. “During school dances I made it my business to ask all the shy girls to dance.”

This year, Murphy’s recently broken hip kept him from dancing, but he was able to walk quite well with the aid of a three-legged cane. A swimmer and football player in college, Murphy is proud of the fact that when he was 87—“just a few years back”—he competed in tennis and the hundred-yard dash at the Senior Olympics in New Hampshire. He likes to declare, matter-of-factly, that he plans to live another ten years. (As his wife puts it, “Alex’s estimated time of departure is not until one hundred and five.”) And he plans to continue attending Yale reunions until the end.

At the dinner, Murphy and others looked for surviving friends and classmates. Men reminisced about their days at Yale. Bob Kelly '37 remembered the secondhand clothes dealer in front of Yale station: “He always said the same thing to us—Five bucks for your jacket! Five bucks for your jacket! Some guys would sell a jacket, blow the money, then get a new jacket from home and do it again.”

A waiter interrupted to ask if anyone wanted a drink. “We all do!” roared one man, enthusiastically.

Two former roommates from the class of 1939 revived a long-running argument. “I used to listen to the Glenn Miller Band and you told me it was 'pure corn'!” griped one.

“It was!” replied the other, laughing.

Murphy took a seat next to 91-year-old Bill Hart '36, and the two started talking business. “My first job out of Yale was at Woolworth’s Five and Ten, working 70 hours a week for 20 bucks,” recalled Murphy. “And I was lucky to get it!”

“I got a job surveying roads for three dollars a day,” said Hart.

“I did that too,” said Murphy. “I surveyed the Merritt Parkway. Though, of course, it was just a country road back then.”

“You must have been a young man,” said Hart.

“I was,” said Murphy. “I was.”

Toward the end of the evening, a band of former Whiffenpoofs who call themselves SLOT—for “Seems Like Old Times”—began to sing. All had graduated in the 1940s. One red-faced member of the group had two plastic tubes protruding from his nose and an oxygen tank in his left hand. “We all fought in the war,” announced Bill Oler '45E, the group’s pitch. “I fought at Okinawa!”

“I fought in Burma!” declared his brother, Clark Oler '49. “We came back to Yale ready to get our degrees and to sing!”

They sang beautifully, several melodious old tunes I’d never heard before. Then, for a finale, all ten men struggled to their feet to sing “The Whiffenpoof Song.” “This is a sacred moment,” said one. “Are you ready?” A hush came over the restaurant as their quavering, still-honeyed voices warbled into the night. Diners set down their forks. Waiters paused mid-stride. Tears trickled down more than a few faces as the group sang: “We will serenade our Louis / While life and voice shall last, / Then we’ll pass and be forgotten with the rest.”

The room burst into applause.

“Thank you,” bellowed the man with the oxygen tank. “And goodnight!”  

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