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Did Bob Hope ever deliver a commencement address at Georgetown?
Bob Hope was awarded an honorary degree by Georgetown in 1962,
the same year that his son, Anthony, graduated from the College.
Gustave Weigel, S.J., professor of Theology at Woodstock College,
was the designated commencement speaker that year. However, University
President Edward B. Bunn, S.J., invited Bob Hope to speak as
well, saying that the audience would not forgive him if he did
not. Hope quipped in response, “I wouldn’t forgive
you either.” He went on to say that he had not been so
thrilled “since the government let me declare Bing as a
dependent” and that he was very proud of his son who had
learned “to write home for money in five different languages.” On
a more serious note, he told graduates and faculty that he did
not want to make light of his degree: “I am thrilled,” he
said, adding, “I have discovered that the most gratifying
kind of education is that which makes a man happy in the knowledge
that he’s a little bit useful to others . . . I’ve
learned that if you give a little of yourself to others, it will
come back in carloads. Today is one of those come-back days.”
It is common for complaints about the quality
of food to be heard on college campuses. What is the earliest
such complaint you have found and what is the most unpleasant?
John Carroll, our founder, voiced complaints about food on
campus in 1812. In a letter written to Georgetown President
John Grassi, S.J., on October 30th of that year, he included
the following admonition: “Never relax in your attention
to the neatness and cleanliness of the College, & the personal
neatness of your scholars; & to their diet. I know it is
good in substance, but I fear, your cook is deficient.” The
memoirs of Francis Barnum, S.J., who was a student here in
the late 1860s, contain particularly disturbing descriptions
of College food. He wrote of breakfast, for example: “This
meal was always eaten in silence and consisted generally of
bread and coffee. On certain mornings hash would be served
which while it was unmercifully ridiculed was nevertheless
greatly relished. Strictly speaking it was not a hash, but
a stew made up of all the meat scraps and served with plenty
of thin gravy. There was a tradition that once a boy found
a mouse in the hash which considering all the circumstances
was not at all unlikely. The dirty dark old kitchen was not
only infested with rats and mice, but was also full of enormous
roaches . . . It would sometimes happen when pouring out a
cup of coffee that the flow would suddenly cease and I have
seen a student calmly run his lead pencil down the spout and
dislodge one of these big roaches.”
Georgetown is celebrating
100 years of men’s basketball
this year. What do we know about our first coach?
Maurice Joyce (1851-1939) coached the men’s basketball
team for its first five seasons, from 1906-1911. He had a 32-20
(.615) record. A man of many occupations, including circus
performer, U.S. Marshall, and boxing coach to President Theodore
Roosevelt, Joyce is credited with introducing the game of basketball
to Washington. Arriving in D.C. in 1892 as director and physical
instructor for the Carroll Institute, a city-wide amateur athletic
club, Joyce used basketball - invented the previous year by
Dr. James Naismith in Springfield, Massachusetts - as a conditioning
tool. Naismith’s rules stipulated that a basketball team
consist of nine players but Joyce began modifying these rules
and dropped the number of players per side first to seven and
then to five. To increase the pool of potential opponents for
his teams, he worked hard to spread the new sport throughout
the region. After Georgetown University completed its new Ryan
Gymnasium (now incorporated into the Royden B. Davis, S.J.,
Performing Arts Center) in 1906, it recruited Joyce, the preeminent
fitness instructor in the region, as Physical Instructor. And,
of course, Joyce brought with him his enthusiasm for the game
of basketball, forming a varsity squad on campus in December
1906.
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