“College gets new alma”
Written in fun, long-
Toledo Blade – May 16, 1988
NEW YORK (AP) – In 1933, Brooklyn College staged a competition to choose an official anthem. The winner began with these inspirational lyrics:
“On campus green, with towers of marble
Lifting white spires in the air.
Oh, Brooklyn is our Alma Mater,
And she is wondrous fair.”
Not to mention wondrous gullible. Those lyrics, it turns out a half century later, were a joke, and the college has decided to adopt a new alma mater.
In 1933, the college was a new, working-
But a professor decided that the college needed an alma mater.
The contestants included Sylvia Fine, who would later marry entertainer Danny Kaye and become a songwriter, and Robert Friend, who would later become a serious poet.
Miss Fine, an earnest music student, wrote her score in the style of a 19th century German university anthem. Mr. Friend, a rebellious young leftist, wrote his lyrics to parody the genre and sarcastically acknowledge the school’s gritty surroundings.
But Mr. Friend’s satire was lost on the college community, even though his classmates Irwin Shaw once described the old campus as “a scatter of buildings which we shared with running packs of lawyers, [and] lofts whose previous tenants had gone broke. There was a burlesque hall you hurried past on your way from Victorian Poetry to Economics 1.”
Over the years, the song’s words and music came to be credited, incorrectly, to Sylvia Fine Kaye, who never cared for them. She cleared up the misconception at a college awards luncheon two years ago, and offered to write new music and lyrics that would acknowledge the college’s move in 1936 to a pleasant new campus with trees and grass.
But there was a problem: She was reluctant to proceed without Mr. Friend’s permission, and no one knew where he was.
There things stood until two months ago, when college president Robert L. Hess was in Jerusalem at a Brooklyn College alumni reunion.
In walked Mr. Friend, who recoiled when Mr. Hess hailed him as the “Alma Mater” lyricist.
“Please, I really want to forget about that,” Mr. Friend said.
“I decided I would write a parody of alma maters,” he said. “Brooklyn College had just opened, and I thought [a traditional alma mater] was terribly inappropriate. Who needed it?”
He told Mr. Hess: “I wish you’d get a new alma mater.”
Back in New York, Mr. Hess notified Mrs. Kaye, who produced a new song entitled “A Field in Flatbush.”
Its opening lines:
“On a former field in Flatbush,
Now a campus lush and green,
Proudly stands our Alma Mater,
Ever lovely and serene.”