Fordham: A History and Memoir, Revised Edition

6 Becoming a University

6. Becoming a University One winter Saturday in 1999, I took three young women from my Books That Changed America course, in which we had been reading Jacob Riis’s How the Other Half Lives, to visit the Lower East Side Tenement Museum, an old row house on Orchard Street with three apartments restored to resemble the crowded flats as they had been between 1860 and 1935. On the way back in the car, they asked me if Fordham had a school song; they had never heard one. Did Fordham have a school song? It has one of the greatest songs ever, I exclaimed, and I even sang it for them. They would have done better to have been with little Ed Gilleran, a Fordham Prep student who went on to serve Fordham as an administrator for most of his life. On May 1, 1905, his parents took him to the Carnegie Lyceum, one of the recital halls in the old Carnegie Hall building, for an evening of music and drama performed by the Drama and Glee Club of Fordham University. The Dramatic Society put on a short farce and the Glee and Mandolin Club delivered their songs, featuring the tenor soloist William J. Fallon, ’06, still a few years from becoming one of New York’s most famous and controversial lawyers, known as the Great Mouthpiece. Then another young man came forward and took up the baton to introduce a new song that he had written himself. He was a large, 106 16950-03_Fordham_082-131 6/4/08 11:42 AM Page 106 well-built fellow, a football player, with dark, deep-set eyes and prominent lips and nose. He looked into the faces of his colleagues, raised his hands and brought them back down, and they sang, “Hail, men of Fordham / hail. On to the fray. . . .” The word ram had recently evolved from a slightly vulgar cheer the Fordham boys had chanted at the West Point football game: “One dam, two dams, three dams, Fordham.” “Dam” was sanitized into “ram,” and suddenly Fordham was identified with an animal, a mascot. The composer incorporated the new word into his fight song. As a musician, John Ignatius Coveney was largely self-taught, but he taught himself quickly and well. He played the piano and cornet best—indeed, he once played them both at the same time—but he also picked up the violin, cello, mandolin, and pipe organ, and could sit for hours in his room with his guitar. When a student brought him a violin-shaped, one-stringed instrument he had never seen before, he played that too, immediately. When he wasn’t playing music, he played football, competed on the debate team, led cheers at the games, and wrote verse for The Monthly, which then, in his one disappointment , failed to name him editor in his senior year. Every night in his Dealy Hall room, he said the rosary before midnight. Then, in the dark of the early morning he would suddenly awake with words and music in his head, and where the light from the lamppost cast itself on the wall of his room, he would jot down the words and music. The last line of his song was “We’ll do or die.” After graduation, Coveney survived in the highly competitive world of professional popular music long enough to write a fight song for the Boston Red Sox and somehow inspire the untrue legend that he had ghostwritten “By the Light of the Silvery Moon.” Then in 1911, burned out by overwork, fever, and lack of sleep, he died. In his own way, young Coveney in 1905 had done as much as several generations of Jesuits to give Fordham what any university needs to carry on—a unique spirit, an “identity.” The question raised about Fordham’s history from the beginning— from its first years as a “semi-seminary” for Irish boys run by French Jesuits to its present status as a legally nonsectarian, three-campus collection of colleges in the “Jesuit tradition”—has always been identity. Not that identity was the buzzword of turn-of-the-century 107 B E C O M I N G A U N I V E R S I T Y 16950-03_Fordham_082-131 6/4/08 11:42 AM Page 107 academic debates, nor that the college had what is now called a mission statement, which...