![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/Images\/Bates_Magazine\/Spring03\/jay-burns.jpg\")
<\/p>\n<\/p>\n
Mayoralty and other Bates fads.<\/strong><\/p>\n By H. Jay Burns, Managing Editor<\/p>\n When I first arrived at Bates in 1992, my guide through Bates history was Gene Taylor ’56, a development colleague.<\/p>\n At first Gene taught the simple stuff you might get during the first days of a college course. I heard about Oren Cheney’s vision, about how quirky, unassuming Johnny Stanton defined faculty culture, and about the flimsy, barracks-like Sampsonville apartments that became a community for war-veteran students.<\/p>\n Easy lessons. Kid stuff.<\/p>\n Then one day Gene started talking about this thing called Mayoralty. Sensibility vanished as bizarre word combinations tumbled from his mouth: “Lymelight Lynn…Smilin’ Jack Davis…Mayor Jolly Roger Campbell.” He spoke of convertibles and stagecoaches. He described stage productions mounted from a Broadway-literate student body. Gene seemed to be speaking in tongues. Or maybe he’d become a Batesie Stephen Hawking, exploring a brief time in Bates history. Either way, this Mayoralty thing made no sense in a place that, above all, seemed to prize good sense.<\/p>\n Between Gene’s lessons and this issue’s story about Mayoralty’s demise, by Jack DeGange ’59, I do finally “get” Mayoralty. Yet as I compare that tradition to its distant cousins, the Lemmings fad in the ’70s (page 17), I wonder if the zestiest student traditions defy pat description because they’re prisoners of their eras. In other words, you had to be there.<\/p>\n Mayoralty, for example, flourished and quickly died not because students got lazy (the Student<\/em>‘s explanation). Rather, it died because its enchanting conceit \u2014 that, like a 1950s Saturnalia where slaves and masters reversed roles, Bates students could control campus doings for a few days \u2014 was dashed in the aftermath of a minor off-campus crime. And the Lemmings fad faded in the late ’70s as Bates became more student (or lemming) centered.<\/p>\n That’s why Bates student culture is endlessly fascinating. It’s exclusively you, exclusively Bates. VH-1 can have its Dee Snyders commenting on Pac-Man for “I Love the 80s”; I’m happy with a stack of old Bates Students<\/em>.<\/p>\n H. Jay Burns, Managing Editor<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Mayoralty and other Bates fads. By H. Jay Burns, Managing Editor When…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":221,"featured_media":0,"parent":3034,"menu_order":3,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","template":"","meta":{"_hide_ai_chatbot":false,"_ai_chatbot_style":"","associated_faculty":[],"_Page_Specific_Css":"","_bates_restrict_mod":false,"_dimp_site_id":"","_dimp_override_contact":false,"_table_of_contents_display":false,"_table_of_contents_location":"","_table_of_contents_disableSticky":false,"_is_featured":false,"footnotes":"","_bates_seo_meta_description":"","_bates_seo_block_robots":false,"_bates_seo_sharing_image_id":0,"_bates_seo_sharing_image_twitter_id":0,"_bates_seo_share_title":"","_bates_seo_canonical_overwrite":"","_bates_seo_twitter_template":""},"class_list":["post-3036","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/3036","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/221"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3036"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/3036\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":11303,"href":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/3036\/revisions\/11303"}],"up":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/3034"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3036"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}