Keeping Faith with the Future

It is easy to imagine that as Fordham Prep's archivist and school historian, I spend a good deal of the day with my head planted firmly in yesteryear, occasionally emerging from the far recesses of the Prep's literal and metaphoric cellars just long enough to shellac the artefacts of some gilded age [that probably wasn't so gilded in the first place] or to catalogue the minutia of some school year long-forgotten.[Ah, yes, lunch menus from ' Aught Five.Coming right up.Is that 1905 or 2005?].To be fair: I have made more than one sojourn back to the Fall of 1887, 1 the supposed semester of Fordham's Rebellio Sciurorum, or Great Squirrel Rebellion. 2And, yes: I have spent several evenings perusing 1963, the 1 Also, during the 1886-87 academic year, after nearly a half-century of candles and oil lamps, Fordham students were given the advantage of a new modern convenience: the electric light!In fact, it is possible that Fordham was the first electrified institution in the Bronx.Rather than waiting for the embryonic electrical grid to reach rural Rose Hill, Fr.Thomas Freeman, S.J., who taught science and math on the College level, installed a Weston dynamo electric machine in the basement of Thbaud Hall and the school began to produce its own power.2They used to tell a story about a Second Division student, or early Prepster, who was confronted one afternoon by a dray of angry squirrels [great word, dray, no?], who were upset with all the construction that had been taking place on Rose Hill in those days.As the tale goes, the agitated rodents naturally demanded Latin homework as tribute from the lad, which he gave fearing for his life, leading to the first utterance in Fordham history of the phrase, "Father, a squirrel ate my Latin homework.