Sex, Class Divide, And Sorrentino Tail At Yale - Gown Meets Town And Gets What's Coming To It

Yale has changed since the days of John Davenport, Puritan missionary unhappy with the increasingly lax morals of the Massachusetts Bay Colony who set off to found a new colony where the precepts, principles, and discipline of John Calvin would be better respected.  New Haven was the perfect place - good harbor, reasonable winters, and complaisant Indians.  The colony thrived and from its founding in 1638 New Haven became a premier city of New England.  In time, and after Elihu Yale founded a religious university there in 1701, residential colleges were named for important historical forbears, and Davenport College bears the name of the man who had first come to New Haven. 

For two hundred and fifty years, New Haven was English, and after the Revolution, American - a place of patrician landowners and financiers and Northumberland and Kent yeomen to work the land and man the thriving port.  Only in the late 1800s did New Haven begin its radical change from a place of Anglo-Saxon manners and morals to one little different from Sorrento, Amalfi, and Naples.  The great migration from the Mezzogiorno to New Haven produced a Little Italy only slightly smaller than that of New York or Boston.  Wooster Square, across the Farmington canal and removed from the New Haven green and Yale, became the center for Italian life and culture. Now New Haven had two cities in one. 

Until the late 60s Yale was still a white Anglo-Saxon place of privilege - the place for the sons of New England's well-to-do.  In those days there was no such thing as 'diversity' and only a smattering of Jews and Italians were admitted each year. 

Yale at the time was an all-male school, so students travelled to the Seven Sisters - girls schools of similar Ivy League reputation and cachet - for dates, sex, and suitable mates. Yet, the lure of all those dark-haired, olive-skinned Italian beauties just beyond the canal was irresistible.  

Paul Farnsworth of the Boston and Newport Farnsworths said he 'had a hankering for guinea poontang', a crude but not uncommon way young men of his breeding and background referred to the Palumbo, Garaffa, and Petrucci girls less than a mile away. 

The New Haven Green, historic burial place for the Davenports, the Potters, and the Longworths and gathering place for Revolutionary partisans whose militias were instrumental in the war against the British, was the modern day crossroads for the two communities.  Italians from Wooster Square came across the canal to shop at Malley's and see the latest Hollywood epics at the Palace and Strand, and crossed the Green in sight of Harkness Tower, the Old Campus, and Silliman College. 

Now, while Paul Farnsworth and his Nantucket-Vineyard crowd wanted some wiry, tangled guinea snatch as a chaser for their usual blonde, silken delights, Maria Paolillo and her girlfriends wanted husbands.  Tired of wife-beaters, garlic, and goomba parading, they wanted the real America, the white, flaxen-haired, well-tailored and well-mannered men of Yale. 

'Watch your Ps and Qs', Maria's mother warned her when she got an inkling of her daughter's intentions. 'Those boys are no good' and went on to relate stories of girls of her generation who got hooked by the idea and snookered by one Yalie after another.  'You know what they're after', she said; and of course she was right.  No self-respecting Boston Brahmin or Fifth Avenue gentleman would want anything to do with them.  She knew because she cleaned up after them in their dining rooms, their residences, and their libraries. 

Maria, however, refused to be cloistered and corralled by a phalanx of fat duennas in black dresses.  Those were Old Country ways and this was America! and so she made her leisurely forays across the canal to park benches on the Green, hoping for a proper Mr. Right to notice her.  At the same time, despite her rebelliousness and hardened attitude towards Southern Italian prudery, she couldn't help but be influenced by it.  As she sat demurely on the bench, legs properly together, blouse buttoned to the top, and cardigan neatly arranged, she knew that there was more to Yale, the Green, and prospective wealthy husbands than met the eye. 

Paul and his classmates, so imbued with the idea of privilege and historical worthiness, assumed that any woman would fall for them immediately, without hesitation, and without restraint.  They had heard stories about Italian fathers with shotguns and elephantine mothers armed with bottles of acid to scar the faces of wayward daughters, but dismissed them as impossibilities - not in this day and age, and certainly not within a stone's throw from the most important university in the world. 

Yale men, tired of their weekends at Vassar, Smith, and Holyoke, and wanting some real pussy – not just fluffy blonde bush from the North Shore - made their forays into the town, the Green.  Not surprisingly there were girls from Wooster Square there who were quite willing to go out with them, perhaps not to give it up on the first date, taught as they were by their grandmothers to give just enough to keep a man’s interest but to keep their corsets laced. These goomba nonnas of course had no idea what was what north of the canal, and their granddaughters dreamed only of sailing in a white, Anglo Saxon moonlight. 

Maria Paolillo met Paul Farnsworth on a park bench on the Green.  He was so charming, so unbelievably attractive, and so rich; and one thing led to another and soon he was inviting her to spend the night with him at the Taft.   He of course had been only trolling when he picked her up.  It didn’t take much with these Wooster Square girls unlike Vassar girls who checked family pedigree as carefully as a Hebrew manuscript in the Dead Sea scrolls.  They wanted to be wooed by someone of superior wealth, charm, and intelligence, but such a man was hard to find and harder to catch given the narrow, crowded milieu in which they lived.  These goomba twats only wanted someone, anyone with money. 

Maria politely demurred at the offer of a night at the Taft, but ended up giving it up in his Trumbull College dorm room anyway. “I can’t believe I’m really here”, she thought to herself as she kissed him and looked out the window at the College’s Gothic spires, manicured courtyard, and ancient window tracery.  Shortly after what had been a marvelous, romantic adventure for her but only a Townie interlude for him, he left her on the curb.

It didn’t pay to get involved with one of them she told her girlfriends, sobbing, missing him, but angry at how she was so shamelessly treated.  “Never again”, she said. 

At about this time Yale had begun to come under increasing pressures from New Haven to invest more in the city - not only in infrastructure, but in human resources as well. It wasn't enough, City officials said, for Yale to hire the men and women who served the elite; it was time for them to recruit talented New Haven students for Yale's undergraduate body itself. The moment had come for New Haven's Italian-Americans to stop serving strawberries, and to eat them.

Yale agreed, but with a prejudice characteristic of the times, assumed that any Italian-American New Haven student would be only suitable for menial work, agreed to admit Richard Puzzi, Alderman Guido Marucci's highly recommended candidate who had been a football standout at New Haven High. At least this slab of hairy meat would make short work of the Princeton line, so fuck the grades. A memo went out to all Puzzi’s professors at the beginning of the year: "Pass this ape".

What the Yale recruiters didn't know - and in their rush to scrape up a bit of detritus from Olive Street - was that this hairy piece of meat was the son of a connected guy. Mario Puzzi had worked his way up in the Gianfredo family and was known in the neighborhood as someone who did generous favors but brooked no disrespect.  The only reason that his son Richard had been admitted to Yale was because of the pressure he put on Alderman Marucci.  It was win-win all the way around - a son at Yale, an Italian finally learning not serving, and even more respect for Mario and his family. 

So, despite her WASP yearnings, Maria returned to her roots and went to Mario for a favor.  Could his son, Richard, now enrolled at Yale, teach that philandering, deceitful prick Farnsworth a lesson he would never forget? 

No one found out how or why the unfortunate Farnsworth got so badly beaten, enough to force him to take a year off from Yale, but rumor mills, ethnic prejudice, and preconception being what they are, it was assumed that Farnsworth's goomba chippy was behind it.

They never once suspected the new Yale Italian fullback who was indeed making mincemeat of the Harvard, Princeton, and Dartmouth lines, but that's the upside of prejudice.  The oaf got admitted to Yale, so that had to mean something. 

All this has changed in the Yale of today of course.  It no longer is the Old World, British colonial place of privilege and wealth that it once was.  It is now 'democratic' with all comers let in.  Diversity - not just the town-gown kind of decades before, but the real kind is the meme.  No need to cruise the New Haven Green anymore.  However with such libertinage something was missing.  No risk, no crossing the canal, no pursuit, and no consequence.  A dull affair; and Yale is now a dumbed down, safe place - a university like all others without cachet, admiration, or privilege.