amused themselves clothing it with undergarments or painting it various bright colors. Once it turned up on the Hamilton Female Seminary lawn with its outstretched hand pointing to the window of the most popular girl there. It appeared again in 1884 at the Class of 1887’s “Burning of Livy”
after which it passed into Professor Taylor’s custody only to be rediscovered in the fall of 1899 by Harry Emerson Fosdick, ’00, and Herbert W. Marean, ’01. Familiar with the Amherst Sabrina tradition, they decided to institute a similar custom at Colgate to foster college spirit. After they had buried their find in a “secret”
place on Bonney Hill they drew up rules for the passing of “the bird”
from class to class and turned him over to the juniors. Thereafter, until 1919 when the faculty abolished the tradition, a series of wild escapades ensued as rival classes battled with each other over possession of the statue and putting it on display at their banquets and at public occasions. Some of the choicest memories of alumni of these years center around this custom. Dr. Fosdick, writing in the Alumni News, confessed in retrospect twenty years later “I am inclined to think that I did no great service for my Alma Mater by starting all the rumpus that followed. It was a college man’s lark and Marean and I enjoyed getting the thing under way. We had no prevision, however, of the developments that were to follow.”
Student publications improved notably at the turn of the century, especially in design and art work. From 1902 to 1904 the Madisonensis covers featured considerable art nouveau. The Salmagundi after 1905 was notable for drawings by Ernest Hamlin Baker, ’12, who, even as an
Picture of Old Gymnasium
