A few creative Bates souls in the 1970s embraced the lemming as an alt. mascot, a role it would play into the late 1980s.<\/strong><\/p>\n Ah, the misunderstood lemming. You see, they don’t really pitch themselves off cliffs in mass-suicide.<\/p>\n But a few staged scenes in Disney’s famous 1958 documentary, White Wilderness<\/em>, not only reinforced the lemmings myth for anyone growing up in the ’60s and ’70s, but also ensured that any kid from that era would have at least two troubling cinematic memories: (1) those freaky, flying monkeys in The Wizard of Oz<\/em> and (2) droves of lemmings perishing by their own hands, er, paws, in White Wilderness<\/em>.<\/p>\n The White Wilderness<\/em> filmmakers, trying to show what they thought to be true, placed lemmings on a snow-covered turntable to film a migration sequence, then herded them into a river. Call it Lemmingstown.<\/p>\n And at Bates in the ’70s, a few creative souls, wondering what sort of turntable they were on, embraced the lemming as an alt. mascot, a role it would play into the late 1980s.<\/p>\n Paul Faustine ’77 (above, at his Commencement) says the lemmings idea “grew out of some general silliness among a group of writers, artists, and ne’er-do-wells known as Free Lunch. The Lunchies were prone to mixing their more serious work with happily pointless activities. I recall an afternoon spent taping leaves back onto tree branches in an attempt to hold off winter.”<\/p>\n The irreverent premise of the Lemmings, says another Lunchie, Brian Handspicker ’79, was that “like lemmings, Batesies tended to marry within the herd and work themselves to death, and our herd instincts would certainly lead us off a cliff one day.”<\/p>\n