Several days ago I was busy prosecuting the weekday routine: home from school in the early afternoon, I'd made a lunch, eaten it, cleaned up, walked the dog, greeted the girls when they got home from school, driven one of them to a park for practice and told the other one, no, Bea's house is, like, four blocks from here, walk, and the two of you can then continue on to Starbucks, if that is your plan. When I was alone again, I made a cup of coffee and settled in to watch Jeopardy, because I already know that Trump is a criminal. The show had begun, Ken was just beginning to interview the contestants, and when he got to the defending champion, an ER doc in Milwaukee, he said something like, "Amy Hummel, you are a graduate of St. Olaf College, in Northfield, Minnesota. Tell me something about the school." Had my full attention now since I spent four years there, though not the same four as the 35ish practitioner of emergency medicine.
"Well, Ken," she said, "St. Olaf has maybe the only fight song in three-four time, so that if you wanted, you could waltz to it."
Ken: "Would you sing it for us?"
Dr. Hummel: "Sorry, I only know the obscene version."
The official version would have elicited some laughs from the studio audience:
We come from St. Olaf
We sure are the real stuff
Our team is the cream of the college's great.
We fight fast and furious, our team is injurious
Tonight Carleton College will sure meet its fate!
Um ya ya! Um ya ya! Um ya ya! Um ya ya!
Um ya ya! Um ya ya! Um ya ya ya!
That this doesn't always make a lot of sense shakes my confidence in the general accuracy only very slightly. Carleton College was our cross-town rival. When I was a student, St. Olaf had some good football teams, and the Carls were weak, weak. Late in the first quarter the score would be 21-0, or worse, and their students would begin chanting
We have higher board scores! We have higher board scores!
before, possibly inspired by a rising blood alcohol content, switching to:
We will never hire you! We will never hire you!
Unless there have been new developments, the Carls are also responsible for the obscene version referred to by St. Olaf's Jeopardy champ. St. Olaf was founded by Norwegian immigrants and is affiliated with the Lutheran church. I have reason to believe that Carleton kids, especially the males, labored under the impression that our campus was infested with blonde goddesses who, however, would not, you know, put out. I had a roommate who assured me they exaggerated the scruples of St. Olaf women, but my goal here is just to shed light on the back story to the Carls' version of our fight song, which commenced
The Lord is our leader
We won't touch our peter
and then proceeded methodically to a bluntly profane twist on the um-ya-ya refrain. If you were favorably disposed toward them, you might say that the Carls were full of the kind of prankishness recommended by an ancient Greek philosopher. Of course by the late 1970s they had jettisoned such accoutrements as cheerleaders and a dance line. I remember a basketball game on a Saturday night, gym packed, Carls on one side, Oles on the other, and at half time the St. Olaf dance line was to perform. They pranced onto the court, arms entwined, little leotards, fishnet stockings, lots of cosmetics, and assumed their position at center court. They formed two lines and stood back-to-back, half facing the Oles, half facing the Carls, who hurled at them catcalls and worse. Unbelievably, there were "technical difficulties," and the music did not start for maybe a half minute or so, with the result that half the dancers could do nothing but grin stupidly toward their tormentors. The delay was sufficient for the random shouted insults to give way to a loud and steady chant of
Take it off! Take it off!
which then persisted through the high-stepping performance, almost drowning out the tinny scratchy music that eventually began playing over the PA. This may have been the last engagement of the St. Olaf dance line.
While enjoying my reverie of past life I kept one eye on the TV, where Amy Hummel was ripping through categories you'd expect a doc to know about (Science Stuff) and others, like Poets and Poetry, for which her ready answers might have impressed even a Carleton grad. Maybe she will hire one to advise about how she might ease the tax burden on her considerable Jeopardy earnings. I understand she eventually qualified for the Tournament of Champions while I was driving kids hither and yon.
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