Skulls and Keys by David Alan Richards

Author:David Alan Richards
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Pegasus Books
Published: 2017-10-25T04:00:00+00:00

THE FIRST YALE UNIT AND THE SENIOR SOCIETIES

Among Yale’s undergraduates, twenty-eight men would pioneer American military aviation, on their own initiative. Their families’ immense private resources made possible the formation of the First Yale Naval Training Unit, which became the originating squadron of the U.S. Naval Reserve, growing out of little more than a military summer camp hosted by one of a group of sophomores. Leading members of the group in the class of 1918 included Frederick Trubee Davison, Robert Lovett, Kenneth MacLeish, Artemus Gates, and Alan Ames. In the poem titled “On a Memorial Stone” by Kenny’s older brother Archie first published just two years later, he wrote: “And generations unfulfilled,/The heirs of all we struggled for,/Shall here recall the mythic war/And marvel how we stabbed and killed,/And name us savage, brave, austere—/And none shall think how very young we were.”

The boys’ energetic, self-appointed leader was Trubee Davison, son of the managing partner of J. P. Morgan & Co. following Morgan’s death. Trubee had accompanied his father on a business trip to Europe in 1915 and signed on in Paris with the American Ambulance Field Service ferrying wounded soldiers from the trains to the American Hospital there. His classmate and friend Bob Lovett was the son of the chairman of the executive committee and president of the “Harriman System” of the Union Pacific and Southern Pacific railroad lines, and had grown up alongside the Harriman sons Averell and Roland; he was to be voted the “hardest working” and “most brilliant” member of the class at graduation. A third classmate, football star Artemus “Di” Gates, was like Davison and Lovett a member of Psi Upsilon, but Gates’s oldest and closest friend since preparatory school at Hotchkiss was Kenneth MacLeish. Kenny, three years behind Archie, was sometimes asked if he was the brother of the man voted “most brilliant” by his classmates in the class of 1915, and the younger MacLeish aspired to membership in some senior society, although he simply had not had the time in New Haven to match Archie’s spectacular record of campus achievements which had brought a Bones tap.

Davison demonstrated to the Yale community how easy flying was by piloting his own plane from his home at Peacock Point in Locust Valley on Long Island Sound, to appear in New Haven at morning chapel and still attend class on time. Classmates in Psi Upsilon were contacted by his telegram in July 1916, invited to learn to fly under the banner of the Aero Club of America and to train privately that summer while staying at Peacock Point, practicing in flying boats purchased by his father and other donors. By summer’s end, Lovett, Davison, and Gates could solo. Others of the young flyers included John Villiers Farwell III, a star high hurdler, and hockey player Erl Clinton Barker Gould.

Yet to begin their Yale undergraduate careers at this date were even younger aspiring airmen: Trubee’s brother Harry P. Davison Jr. in the summer of 1916 was just leaving Groton

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