That was Yale’s greeting to Taft of ’78. The welcome to President William Howard Taft, who happened to have been graduated from Yale and not some other university—Harvard, say, or Princeton—came later, when President Sheffield of the Yale Club and President Hadley sent big words over his head and admitted that the character of the man had something to do with his rise in the world as well as the Yale training.
But there were many moments when the graduates put aside the fact that they were entertaining the President. The old men who were graduated a little before or a little after Mr. Taft and had known him in college gravitated toward the dais by twos and threes, laughing and chuckling and poking each other in the ribs. Mr. Taft was on his feet most of the time.
“Bill, I wonder if you remember this one—” and Tom of ’78 or Jack of ’79 would reel off a story or a joke that hadn’t been released maybe for thirty years. There was the story of the little red hen—but it need not be repeated. Mr. Taft remembered it, that was certain.
And while the handshaking and the reminiscences and the old jokes were keeping Mr. Taft busy on the dais, a cannonading of cheers and songs was fired at him from every table in the room. They sang him “The Old Brick Row” and “Yale Will Win,” and when they had run through these they took up “Boola” again and again until the sweep of its rhythm had drawn the voice of every man in the room, including the President’s.[Pg 177]
It was the biggest dinner ever held in the Waldorf-Astoria, which means perhaps the biggest in New York city. Several years ago the Republican Club entertained Col. Roosevelt at the Waldorf and upward of 1,200 men crammed themselves in to eat and drink and cheer. Last night’s broke all the records. There were exactly 1,448 at the tables and more than 100 who came late were not able to sit down at all. Every square foot of space in the grand ballroom except the narrow lanes for the waiters was occupied. The dinner overflowed into the Astor gallery, where elbow room was desired and denied. There were tables in the hallways and tables set in the two levels of boxes—something that doesn’t happen in a generation.
The stage was set with attention to detail shown by professionals. Besides the big drop curtain behind the head table, which depicted the old Brick Row as it was in Taft’s time, they had strung a section of rail fence in front of the table, a replica of the fence on which Mr. Taft used to whittle his initials. The elms of the picture sent their tops as far outward on the canvas as possible, and then the illusion was carried out cunningly by the greenery that underhung the ceiling. The ballroom floor was the campus of Yale, and the illusion was produced pretty successfully.
All through the smilax and vines of the ceiling were thousands and thousands of pink roses, roses past all counting. There were clusters and pots of them on the table tops, hung from the balconies and draped around swinging incandescents, which glowed pink when the lights were lowered. All of these things were accomplished by Noble F. Hoggson of ’88, who got busy in the banquet room at 2 o’clock yesterday morning after a ball had danced itself out.
The following description of a newsboys’ Christmas “feast,” as reported in the New York Tribune, illustrates another type of work which the reporter is called upon to do:
A game dinner where the eaters were game,—that was the newsboys’ Christmas feast, provided last night in the Brace Memorial Newsboys’ Lodging House, No. 14 New Chambers street, by William M. Fliess, Jr. The happiness of poverty without responsibility, of boyhood unchecked, of sporting blood untamed, of divine independence, shone from the eyes of those noisy “newsies,” thrilled in their laughter, barked in their shouts. And envy, not pity, stirred the hearts of the men and women who had left comfortable homes, in immaculate attire, to watch the children of the street absorb their little mountains of food.
No separate courses, no cocktails and caviar, no after-dinner speeches were needed to make that dinner palatable, to separate mind from stomach, to create buoyancy of spirits. A big bowl of thick, steaming soup; a plate heaped with turkey, potatoes and mashed turnips; a cupful of smoking coffee and a whole pie, as round as the smiling face of the sun, greeted each separate appetite simultaneously, and caused no gorge to rise. Not a bit of space was wasted on those long, white tables, flanked by their narrow, red benches. Big bunches of celery took the place of inedible decorations, and appealed infinitely more to the artistic souls of the grimy little guests than would flowers or ferns.