otoh

I watch Gilmore Girls. There. The dirty little secret is out. In fact it is on right now. What would motivate me to divulge this bit of D.O.M.-dom?

In the show tonight they mention a tradition of rubbing the toe on a statue of Dwight Woolsey. I checked on line and found that this is a very recent tradition. According to http://www.yalealumnimagazine.com/issues/98_03/talltales.html:

One of the most striking testaments to the mythmaking powers of tour guides is Theodore Dwight Woolsey’s toe. Some time in the last ten years, someone invented a “tradition” of rubbing the toe of the Woolsey statue on the Old Campus for luck, explaining that students employ this practice before exams. Similar traditions exist at many other institutions, but it’s difficult to find an alumnus over the age of 30 who has ever heard about President Woolsey’s toe. Nevertheless, tour guides spread the story diligently, inviting visitors to give it a try themselves. As a result, the statue, the rest of which is a dull gray-green, has a left toe that has been rubbed shiny, and the story seems for all practical purposes as old as the statue itself.

This struck me as odd because my Alma Mater, Eastern Kentucky University, Has a much longer tradition of rubbing the toe on a statue of Daniel Boone. According to http://www.library.eku.edu/collections/sca/boone.htm that statue was placed there in 1967. I first went to Eastern in 1977 and it was already an old tradition then. I have to assume it started soon after the old boy was placed there. (I didn’t research those “similar traditions at other institutions.” Some of them probably date back even further.) Those Yale posers! They even rub Woolsey’s LEFT toe, the same one is forward on Daniel and bears the polish of all those wishes for luck on exams. Or just to get lucky….