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Oh, I forgot to say you are absolutely right about Uncle Terry. As an aside, he sent us all a letter when we were too vociferous at Basketball Games asking us to be more polite. Afterwards, the students began to chant "we beg to differ" in response to bad ref calls. He signed it "Uncle Terry". Dick Brodhead doesn't have the gravitas to cook his grits.

OT:

I was there and I remember that! (I arrived in Sep. 75 and finally finished in Dec. 84. I went to my five-year reunion and had never left.) If you were class of '85 we were probably at the same graduation ceremony in May '85. I believe the objectionable cheer was Bravo Sierra (as the military folks would say). We had been using it for years until the universal TV coverage made it impossible. Where else and who else could have gotten all those people moving in the same direction with a simple open letter. Brodhead would have had to have formed a bunch of committees to tell him what to do and then been unable to implement anything.

At my undergraduate graduation in '79, a group of guys I knew sneaked into Wallace Wade (things were way looser then) and strung a horizontal wire from one end of the open horseshoe to the other. During the middle of Terry's speech they had it set up so that a banner pulled out horizontally along the wire behind Terry and those on the podium but in front of the graduates and their parents. The banner read "Go to Hell Carolina". Of course, Terry didn't see it at first and was wondering what was going on with the hubbub in the crowd. When someone tugged on his robe and pointed it out to him he had some perfect bon mot just on the spur of the moment. I wish I could remember what it was.

If I had had the nerve, I wanted to repeat the stunt last weekend and pull it out when John Hope Franklin was wallowing in the racial events of the 1920s. The banner would have read "INNOCENT - NO LYNCH MOBS ANYMORE".