Boola Boola, Boola Boola! Had a dance partner that Graduated from Yale last year. The young lady and I bombed in the Lindy Nationals at Hartford in 2000. She got into the party scene at Yale and was spending her weekends at Ballroom competitions in New York City. Had to drop out and come back after a year.
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THE YALE CANDIDATES
Friends recall Howard Dean’s intensity, worldly ways
Mary E. O’Leary , New Haven Register
Dean, as a Yale student, and now.
NEW HAVEN — Howard Dean came to Yale a year older than most of his colleagues, a little more worldly, better traveled and just generally ahead of the curve.
With the turbulent ’60s as a backdrop, what his friends remember most are the good times and Dean was at the center of that — a fun guy, quick to organize a mixer and hang out for a card game.
"He was just somebody, and it remains true, that people liked to be around. You sort of feel good about yourself around Howard. I think it has something to do with his unpretentiousness," said David Berg of New Haven, his good friend from Yale’s Pierson College.
Dean was at Yale from 1967 to 1971, as the war escalated in Vietnam, the civil rights movement advanced, the National Guard patrolled New Haven on May Day and the first women came to the Ivy League campus.
"He was seldom, if ever, a loner. He was always the guy who was getting a group of people together, and he was very inclusive," said Bill Kerns, who is now a family physician in Virginia.
Dean was also the guy who invited you back to his room to finish off the keg that was left over from those socials he helped organize, said good friend Richard Willing, a national correspondent for USA Today.
Classmates, contacted across the country, remember his stamina and the intensity he brought to those late night bull sessions on Old Campus during freshman year and later at Pierson.
"Howard had a huge amount of energy and you would be coming back from lab, ticked off at the world, and Howard would go by singing and buzzed and you couldn’t help but laugh," said Kerns.
His intramural gridiron feats — Dean was an offensive lineman — also came to mind, mainly because he was game enough to take on much bigger players.
"I was impressed that he dove in there and did it because you take a beating playing football like that," said Jeffrey Knight, 53, a marketing consultant in California.
There were oblique references to some "outrageous" things happening in the freshmen dorm, but no one was elaborating.
"He did some interesting things as a freshman I’m not going to tell you about, but I mean, hell, didn’t we all?" Kerns said.
Peter Brooks, 63, sterling professor of comparative literature and French and former master of Pierson, found Dean a "delightful person. Though he was very much of a bon vivant, he also had a serious side which came out a few years later" when he bailed out as a stockbroker and went to medical school.
Dean, the former governor of Vermont and a retired doctor, has surged ahead as the biggest fund-raiser in his grass-roots campaign for the Democratic nomination for president.
The election is to a large extent a Yale affair, with Dean slugging it out with Sen. John Kerry of Massachusetts, class of ’66 and Sen. Joseph I. Lieberman of Connecticut, who graduated in 1964 from Yale College and from the law school in 1967.
Holding up the opposition is President George W. Bush, class of 1968, and while he was a senior when Dean was a freshman, it’s unclear if their paths ever crossed.
Past generations of the families, however, traveled in the same circles. Bush’s grandmother served as a bridesmaid to Dean’s grandmother.
As for politics, there were no indications the guy from the upper East Side in New York was headed for a career in government.
"He was political, but he certainly wasn’t thinking about being a political office holder, let alone a president," said roommate Ralph Dawson, 54, a lawyer with Fulbright and Jaworski in New York.
While the Oval Office wasn’t on his radar screen, Brooks, as the Pierson master, said Dean always had leadership qualities.
"He was a very, and I’m not going to say charismatic, because he wasn’t that, but a very powerful personality," Brooks said. "He had a great deal of curiosity about the world."
On some of the bigger social issues of the day, Dean, like his friends, was anti-war, but not in the vanguard of the movement.
"I’d say that was characteristic of most of the students," said Knight.
"Although he certainly had his political opinions," remembered Larry Horn, who runs a patent business in the Washington, D.C., area.
In that regard, he was a bulldog in defending himself.
"He found amusement in people who pontificated and didn’t have much patience with that sort of thing," said Knight.
"It was certainly interesting to see him in the middle of a heated discussion. That was a very cool thing," said Kerns.
And the verbal jousting went beyond politics.
"I can remember us spending three or four hours one night, totally destroying a bridge game we were part of because we were arguing about some sort of moral relativism," said Berg, a clinical professor of psychiatry at the Yale Medical School, who has remained close to Dean.
One of the other things that made Dean stand out was his request freshmen year to room with African Americans.
Dawson was one of those roommates.
"That was not something I knew at the time," Dawson said. "I think that it’s good that he did that. I learned a lot from him, and I think he might have learned a thing or two from me." He said Dean was never a "patronizer. If you happen to be a person of color, you don’t feel that he is dealing with you in any special kid gloves kind of way," Dawson said.
"Race continues to be an issue in America that has not been resolved and the only way that one can contribute to its resolution is to be sensitive to people of different points of views and races and that’s something that Howard always had," said Dawson, who is helping Dean’s campaign when he can.
Willing said Dean "was aware that there was a world beyond the (Phelps) gate," while Berg remembers him talking to the gardeners on campus the same way he would talk to Yale President Kingman Brewster.
"He was able to cut across those distinctions and just talk to folks," Kerns said.
thA year older than most freshmen, Dean was comfortable with the academic demands of Yale.
While Willing struggled to prepare his first paper well in advance of the due date, Dean pulled his off the night before, while four other roommates smoked and played cards, listening to the stereo in the same small room.
He remembered "Howard typing with one hand and having a fan of about three books all open along his left arm taking the quotes … right in the middle of it all, completely non-pulsed."
"He looked like Little Richard up there, you know, playing with one hand," Willing said. "I think we got the same grade." Willing, who talks to his friend about once a month these days, said Dean was a "preppy in spite of himself in a very unself-conscious way."
During their time at Yale, the college had a good football team, although the quarterback in their senior year was shaky.
At one game he overshot a wide open receiver by about 10 yards, and while everyone else just groaned, Willing said Dean stood up and pointed to the guy from atop the bleachers. "That’s inexcusable," he declared.
"It just struck me as such an endearing and extremely blue chip kind of thing to say — and indeed, it was inexcusable," Willing said.
"That was Howard in those days."
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