Word: tap
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Generations of schoolboys have held their breath at Owen Johnson's description of Yale's Tap Day in Stover at Yale (1911). In the eyes of a few incurable schoolboys, being tapped for Skull & Bones still ranks second only to being President of the U. S. Founded in 1832 by a group of disgruntled Phi Beta Kappa-rejects, Bones is the oldest and most sacred of Yale's six senior secret societies (Skull & Bones, Scroll & Key, Wolf's Head, Elihu Club, Book & Snake, Berzelius...
...about 200 hopeful juniors gather on the grass in Branford College court (until 1933 they stood by the Fence in front of Durfee on the old campus). At the stroke of 5, senior members of the societies, wearing their pins, black ties and blue suits, march through the crowd, tap their men. A tappee hustles (see cut) to his room, followed closely by his tapper, or shakes his head (refusal). Each society picks 15. Tapping usually ends when the Battell Chapel clock strikes 6, but in 1936 Wolf's Head, turned down by 17 tappees, went on tapping long...
...After Tap Day a Bones man takes the veil, spends most of his time with fellow Bones men. Twice each week (Thursday and Saturday or Sunday evenings) they meet for a hearty dinner and secret ritual in a bronze-doored, brownstone, windowless "tomb" in a dark corner of the campus...
Dink Stover protested (before he was tapped) that Tap Day was "ridiculous rigmarole." Twenty years later Richard Storrs Childs, '32 (now publisher of Modern Age Books), also denounced "the Elks in our midst," shortly afterward accepted election to Keys. In 1933 the entire junior class revolted, stayed stubbornly in their rooms on Tap Day. The societies pursued them to their rooms, had no trouble filling their quotas. Next year, Tap Day returned to the campus. This year the Political Union held an unprecedented public debate, resolved (3840-17) that "the influence of the senior societies...
Nevertheless when Tap Day dawned last week, a Dink Stoverish excitement seized Yale's campus. In the News, Chairman Kingman Brewster Jr. scolded: "Just as in the case of the more discreet years, the society question has managed to dislocate life around here to an insane degree. . . . Six o'clock will bring a general sigh of relief and a sudden realization that after all the day of judgment is still a matter for the Gods and not 90 Yale...