sullen but not mutinous

[GEORGE THOMPSON]

        Another quotation for Fred Shapiro, one that should appeal to him
since it originated at Yale.  I heard it fom my father, probably 50
years ago, and he probably had just read or heard it.  He attributed
it to Herman Hickman, then the Yale football coach.  Someone, no
doubt a sports reporter, had asked Hickman what his hopes were for
the upcoming football season.  He replied to the effect that his
hopes were the same as they were at the outset of every season: that
the boys would play at least well enough to keep the alumni sullen
but not mutinous.

        Hickman flourished when American society was simpler than today,
perhaps even primitive, and the football coach of an Ivy league
college could become a national celebrity, admired for his wit.  I
well remember him as a panelist on a television game show of the
"What's My Line" type.  This would be in the mid-50s, since we got
our first television in the year that Determine won the Kentucky
Derby (1954), and Hickman died fairly young, in the late 1950s.

        I post this here, rather than recommending it to Fred privately, in
the hope that others will recognize it and respond, showing that it
has or once had some currency, and I will not have to appeal to
Fred's Yale chauvinism to get him to include it.        It is my second
favorite; only my penchant for responding to the question "what time
is it" by saying "the bawdy hand of the dial is upon the very prick"
of 11:35 keeps it from being my favorite.  (You can take the boy out
of the English Department, but can you take the English Department
out of the boy?  Seems not.)

GAT