Spirit of RIT

Kramer: Mr. Steve Walls, who was director of student activities, who tolerated a lot of our really crazy ideas, and he didn’t think this was a bad one. And he said let me try to figure out how you go about buying a tiger. He called Lou DiSabato, who was the director of the Seneca Park Zoo. And Mr. DiSabato said well, only certain people with licenses can get tigers. He got the name of a tiger broker, an animal broker, but then it turned out that we couldn’t keep the tiger. It had to go to an appropriately certified facility. And we called Lou back and said if we buy the tiger will you take him.

There’s this long, pregnant pause, and he said, Yeah. And I said but there’s one other thing: We want to borrow him from time to time. And there was this much longer pregnant pause and he said, well, we’ll work that out.

Page: Skip, can you say a little something about Steve Wall? He was like the angel in all of this.

Millor: Steve was the director of student activities. He came to RIT at a time when the institute needed somebody who was really going to pull things together from the student point of view. He became the one person on the campus that everyone could talk to. He did some really great things. He put together a number of different programs so there was a lot more activity on campus.

Page: He was an advocate for the students. He was very strongly an advocate for the students.

Millor: The thing that is amazing about Steve is the number of hours that he was on campus. He virtually lived on campus and Susie certainly was a widow, or she just came and hung out. But the one thing that you never saw was – you know from your work life that things don’t always go smooth and there’s always pressures and forces that are behind the scenes. He never, ever, ever, ever let anyone have any sense that there was any force or pressure in another direction and you know he had to be climbing up hill all the time because he was new and what he was doing was very different than what had been done before. And I can only imagine the battles that that he must have had to fight in order to do some of the things for all of us.

Kramer: When he showed up, it was like 3 in the morning. And the cage he came in was covered in burlap. And all we heard was this sort of this deep, well, it was a purr, but you knew there was a very large cat there.

Lou DiSabato was there to take charge, because he was going to go back to the zoo initially to be checked out. And the first thing we saw was, they opened up one edge and this paw came out, that was about the size of as my head. Big, fuzzy paw comes out. And Lou said, Oh, he’s going to be a big one. But then what followed was this little tiger.

And everybody was just amazed. He acted and behaved exactly like a kitten.

Page: There were 50 of us that went out and met him at the plane. Steve Walls, Doc Campbell, Dean Molinari who was dean of women . . .

Kramer: We had some cheerleaders with us

Page: Oh, we had a motorcade. And the people who got of the plane wondered what the heck was going on.

Kitchen: I think it was after the tiger arrived we thought, because, the people of course asked, “What is his name?”

Kitchen: Actually, I was in charge of publicity and public relations for student council that year, so, which is part of the whole thing. So we figured, well, let’s make it a contest. I’ve forgotten what the prize was.

Kramer: It was a set of tickets to fall weekend.

Kitchen: I remember being impressed with the name. I thought it was so clever, and yet it was so obvious, you know, and why hadn’t I thought of that? But Andy Davidhazy was the one, but there’s a story behind that.

Kramer: Here’s the story. It’s another Steve Walls story. Steve came up with the name Spirit. He wrote it on the desk: Student Pride in RIT. It was perfect. He looked at all the other entries, but none of them were as good as this. But obviously he couldn’t claim, right? And Andrew Davidhazy, who was a student at the time, now Professor Davidhazy, was out of money for the fall weekend. And unbeknownst to Andy, Steve filled out an application and put his name on it, threw it in the box, obviously whoever the committee was, the group got together, “Oh, this is great.” And somebody went and got Andy and Andy had this wonderful look on his face, like “Oh, really?”

Page: Getting back to Andy Davidhazy, lest anyone think he was a bad guy in all of this, when I was on campus a few years ago, I said, Andy, it was really neat your coming up with Spirit. He said, “No, no. I don’t know where that came from. All I know is they came to me and told me that I had won. But I didn’t do it. Finally, about five years later, I found out that Steve Walls had done it and put my name on it.”

Black: I don’t know if it was his very first appearance, but very shortly after we got the tiger, there was one night, and Wednesday night was when all the fraternities and sororities had their meetings. And I don’t remember who was with me, we took the tiger around to every fraternity house, and all the sorority meetings.

Black: So we took the tiger around. Very shortly after that, or just before that he made his first appearance at a basketball game. At the gym. And it was the largest crowd we ever had.

Kramer: Yeah, the gym was full.

Page: The students really jumped on the idea that we had our own frosh-eating tiger. Just as today, there was a lot of talk about apathy on campus. Denis, you wrote a letter to the editor about how the cat had been the best thing to end student apathy.

Kitchen: RIT was, I think, a unique experience, to come to an urban campus. I mean there were, one thing it was so intimate. There were only 2,500 people in the day school, and there were 6,500 in the night school, I later found out. A huge night school, far outnumbered the day school. But of course the day school was basically full-time students. We started things, too, like special events. I’d been in charge of publicity, I realized that the fraternities loved trophies. They’d do almost anything for a trophy if it was a worthwhile trophy. So I went down to one of these trophy places, and they had a number of used trophies there. I got them to construct one that was something like 33 inches high, or something like that, with walnut on top of a cup and a thing and a tower and a thing on top. And then I did a little drawing of the trophy and pointed out that it was 33 inches high and got that out and we did a marathon dance. And that got some publicity from the community, and that sort of thing, they came over and took pictures of these people dancing all night.

And then we did a canoe race down in the park, Genesee Valley Park. You could do that sort of thing and people turned out for them. We were fighting apathy at the time, and probably, I think the tiger was probably the king of the whole fight against apathy.

Page: Oh, he loved it. In the picture, you can see that both he and I are totally paying attention to the cat. And the cat’s mugging for the camera, and enjoying being scritched.

Kramer: Dr. Ellingson was, I guess the only term that ever has come to mind when I think about him is formidable. He was a classic, 1950s president. I mean, no one every called him Mark. But he would walk around this campus and he knew everybody. He could say hello to you with your name.

Page: Yeah.

Kramer: He was part of the process. In addition to everything else, he’s the guy who hired Steve Walls. He was the man who had the vision that RIT was on the cusp of becoming so much greater. He was the man who ultimately lit all the fuses.

Black: He realized that the tiger was publicity. I’m sure there is still news coverage of the tiger arriving, and there’s television programs, and he was covered when he came to the basketball games, when he went to the hockey games, when he went to the different schools. It was great publicity for the school. Great publicity. And basically free. The students paid for the tiger.

Black: I remember one of the things with the tiger, we’d given him a sneaker to play with. And he’s on this kids’ show, and you (Page) were on it with him I think.

Page: Yes.

Black: And this guy has sneakers on. And there are kids in the audience. And the tiger decides that wants to eat the sneakers. His teeth were sharp.

Page: He was a baby.

Black: He could go through a suit coat and not cut the coat at all but leave welts on you. And he’s biting this guy’s foot on television. And they finally took a break so we could get the tiger off this guy’s foot.

Page: But it was a sad, sad day. And I guess, Roger, you were the one who came up to me and said “We’ve got to go to the zoo.” They had apparently taken a large needle and put it into his bladder and pulled out all the urine that they could. But they knew that was just a short-term thing, that it was going to fill up again. But they cared enough about us to make sure we got out there.

And, to crawl out into that cage with him, and play with him, and know that when we left they were going to put him down – it was profoundly sad.

Kramer: Yeah. Part of our maturing and growing up.

Page: Yeah. I got thinking about this. You know there’s a song about Puff, the Magic Dragon and Honah - Lee? We were all going to go away. Everyone. And he would have been left alone. The people who came behind us wouldn’t have had as close a connection.

So, getting philosophic, it’s sort of like our Marilyn Monroe. He died young, good-looking kid.