Word: stover
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Died. Owen McMahon Johnson, 73, Yale-educated novelist (class of '01) who spoofed his Alma Mater's social system with 1911's bestselling Stover at Yale; after long illness; in Vineyard Haven, Mass...
...member that somehow has managed to produce alumni of such varied types as Nathan Hale, William Howard Taft and Rudy Vallee. In the person of William Lyon Phelps, it has gushed through hundreds of women's clubs; and in Owen Johnson's fictional character of Dink Stover has fired the hearts of thousands of pre-Hopalong boys. It is the land of the Whiffenpoof, the Boola-Boola, the tables down at Mory's. Waggish non-Yalemen never seem to weary of calling "For God, for Country and for Yale" the outstanding single anticlimax in the English language...
...when undergraduates carried bangers (canes), hired sweeps (servants), and felt it bad form to "talk stand" (discuss marks). They were the days that soon inspired the fictional Frank Merriwell, who would give his all against Harvard ("Old Yale can't get along without him!"), and tight-lipped Dink Stover ("I'll play the game . . . We'll see who'll lead!"), who did the same...
...Dink Stover at Harvard," Michael Arlen adopts the style and, more specifically, the dialogue of the Stover-at-Yale series. In several very clever passages he tosses a few adroit barbs at the CRIMSON...
...questions are, of course, rhetorical. I suspect that your writers have a carry-over Stover-at-Yale obsession from childhood, or that they are congenitally unhappy. For a reporter, by all journalistic canons with which I am acquainted, would shrink from taking one aspect of the life of a community (and even that was treated with liberal superficiality) and generalizing it as the overall picture. A visitor to Cambridge, for instance, might read the Lampoon's recent miscarriage and bruit it about that all Harvard men are intellectual snobs and/or obscene. Upon a perusal of the CRIMSON, he might conclude...