…. So begins a rhyme my mother remembered from her college days in the mid-1950s. “…outdoor (fill in the blank) is now okay!”

It’s that time of year again, when all the pressures of Fall and Spring semesters pile up onto the bottleneck of late spring, with details and deadlines hounding us from all sides.  And yet…all we really want to do is go outside and bask in the sun and soft breezes and feel wonderful.  What’s the solution? Maybe it’s May Day, the one day (or evening) a year where it is traditional for WC students to forget that there are rules and deadlines (if only for an hour or two,) and to merely take joy in existing,

May Day itself dates back to before recorded human history, when early Europeans, Greeks, and Romans celebrated the return of agricultural fertility, extending from crops to animals and humans, during the ‘light’ half of the year with this fire festival.  The first Washington College May Day celebration hearkening back to these early origins was held in 1967 as part of an English class taught by Dr. Bennett Lamond.  With inspiration found in Gerard Manley Hopkins’ poem, ‘Spring,’ Lamond and students set up a maypole, wove ribbons around it, and drank wine.  Later that evening, though……students moved the maypole to the front of Hodson Hall, got naked, and danced, in the first such celebration that would come to form treasured memories and much-shared stories for students of many decades. The history of ‘streaking,’ whether for a political cause, an expression of joy, or a lighthearted prank, dates back to at least the 11^th century in England, when Lady Godgifu (Godiva) successfully bargained with her husband Earl Leofric to lower the heavy taxes on the citizens of Coventry by riding naked through the market square, clothed only in her flowing hair.  The first recorded instance of streaking on a college campus happened in 1804, when George Crump of another Washington College (now Washington and Lee, in Virginia) ran naked through campus.  Later in the century, that college’s president (none other than Robert E. Lee) entered the annals of history as the first such official to publicly endorse streaking as a rite of passage for students.

 

May Day scenes at WAC as portrayed in the Elm: 1986, 1978, 1981, and 1988.

Washington College’s unofficial May Day revels are well-documented in The Elm and Pegasus, with articles, photos, and even comic strips marking the day. For a while, a parade through campus with a trip across Washington Avenue was the custom. During the 1970’s, a Chestertown liquor store offered a free case of beer to the first male and the first female streaker to show up at the cash register. Washington College’s love for the May Day ritual reached a fever pitch in 1978, several years after the streaking trend swept through colleges nationwide. May Day ’78 marked the first arrest of a naked student, ‘Miami,’ caught by Chestertown cops as he and his buddies fled up a grassy bank.  This event and the ensuing student protest outside the police station made national news! May Day revelries at WAC have waxed and waned through the years and have tamed down considerably since the advent of cell phones and the internet.  Times are different now, in so many ways.  It is reported that most revelry now occurs indoors, or at least after midnight.

By the time you read this, Public Safety may have already sent out the traditional “How to stay safe on May Day” email, so we won’t repeat its warnings here.  We will just say that however you choose to observe this ancient, hallowed, many-storied day, try to make a memory of this moment in your life that you can cherish.

 

Spring

Nothing is so beautiful as Spring –

When weeds, in wheels, shoot long and lovely and lush;

Thrush’s eggs look little low heavens, and thrush

Through the echoing timber does so rinse and wring

The ear, it strikes like lightnings to hear him sing;

The glassy peartree leaves and blooms, they brush

The descending blue; that blue is all in a rush

With richness; the racing lambs too have fair their fling.

 

What is all this juice and all this joy?

A strain of the earth’s sweet being in the beginning

In Eden garden. – Have, get, before it cloy,

Before it cloud, Christ, lord, and sour with sinning,

Innocent mind and Mayday in girl and boy,

Most, O maid’s child, thy choice and worthy the winning.

-Gerard Manley Hopkins (1880)

 

And for the love of Godiva, please remember: