Fordham: A History and Memoir, Revised Edition

11 Football Loses, Courtney Wins

11. Football Loses, Courtney Wins The theater is both the largest and smallest of worlds, and what may have stunned a corner of the Rose Hill campus was but a blip on the screen in the daily lives of young men and women who, often holding down full-time jobs, commuted to Fordham’s downtown schools at 302 Broadway. Margaret Garvey, growing up in Brooklyn in the 1930s to the 1950s, read biographies of Jesuit saints and attended the Summer School of Catholic Action directed by Fr. Daniel Lord at Fordham in 1940 and 1941. She left Brooklyn at 7:00 A.M. and, by trolley and subway, made class in Keating Hall by 8:45. There she spent the day in small group discussions with delegates from all over the country, returning to Brooklyn at 4:00 P.M. In 1948, a secretary at a branch of Wall Street Bank, Garvey took the advice of a priest who urged her to go to college, so, in days when the subways were surely safe, she worked full time and commuted to the Fordham School of Education for six years of night and Saturday courses, not to become a teacher, but for her own enrichment. Her classmates included a policeman, a corrections officer, a Jesuit’s mother, and some Franciscan brothers, one of whom became president 227 16950-06_Fordham_227-263 6/4/08 11:45 AM Page 227 of St. Francis College. She still remembers finishing the last page of the last blue book of her poetry course in 1954, putting a period at the end of her essay, heaving a sigh, and taking the subway home for the last time. In a career pattern that proved typical of many women in the church, the next year Garvey entered the convent and got master’s degrees in both psychology and counseling at other universities. She then left the convent and returned to the Wall Street Bank in 1975, married a high-school teacher named Larry Mangan in 1979, and retired in 1990. While Garvey was working, commuting, and studying, many of her School of Education friends were loosening up the all-male social atmosphere of the Bronx—including competing for the Miss Fordham crown. In football season, six to ten finalists, selected by a committee, appeared on the front page of the Ram and balloting got under way. In 1953, for example, the winner was Pat Shalvey, a fivefoot -seven hazel-eyed brunette. President of her Perry Como fan club, daughter of a fire captain, with a brother in Fordham Prep, Shalvey had lived in the Highbridge section of the Bronx all her life. On the day of the big Football Weekend rally, a motorcade bore her down Fordham Road to the gym as she waved to the crowds from her convertible. She appeared on stage with Rameses XVI, latest of a long line of real rams who, for the time being, had survived kidnapping or slaughter by Fordham’s enemies. She was crowned at the Victory Dance, which to the committee’s disappointment, drew only two hundred couples. But Shalvey’s judgment on the honor was clear: “It’s the most wonderful thing that ever happened to me.” If there were too few couples at the dance, it was certainly the fault of the young men who were too lazy or too shy to stop into Keating Hall to meet the new social directress, Mrs. Aletta Lamm. Mrs. Lamm, who had grown up in Saxony as Aletta Baroness von Gundlach, a war bride who had married an American army major in Holland, was determined that every Fordham man could meet the right woman. She staged Sunday-afternoon tea dances in La Lande Lounge in Martyrs’ Court, taught ballroom dancing, kept an extensive card file of young women, whom she categorized as “pretty,”“vivacious,” “good sport,” etc., arranged meetings between the boy and girl at her 228 F O R D H A M 16950-06_Fordham_227-263 6/4/08 11:45 AM Page 228 Pelham Parkway home, encouraged the boy to meet the girl’s parents to check return-home times, and invited dates from out of town to stay overnight at her house. Fordham dances featured society orchestras such as Lester Lanin (1951) and singers such as Ann Crowley, star of Paint Your Wagon (1952). In one beautifully chaotic moment at a freshman dance on April 1953...