Legacy
Jack Kyono, PC ’20, explores his family’s unseen history at Yale.
It was raining on Commencement in 1984, shrouding the Old Campus in damp and grey. Before the ceremony began, thousands of graduates milled about the lawn, finding their seats or waving at friends. The expressions on each of their faces shifted between pride, bliss, and sorrow at the ending of their years at Yale. Somewhere in the crowd, a young woman with blonde hair took her seat, halfway back and two seats off the center aisle.
While the graduates blocked raindrops with umbrellas or mortarboards, a separate and more solemn ceremony was taking place just outside the gates. Four hundred men and women stood quietly, weaving themselves into a line and holding placards which read, “Pay Us What We’re Worth.”
Two men, wearing jackets and ties instead of their usual work uniforms, crossed the picket line and headed towards Old Campus. Though crossing picket lines is a cardinal sin for workers, no one said anything to these two. They stepped through the gates and walked into the courtyard of Lanman-Wright Hall. Rather than stand outside, one of them produced a key from his pocket, and the men stepped out from the rain into Entryway F. Several floors up, the men entered a dorm room recently vacated by some group of young men or women who had just completed their first year at Yale. The two men stood by the window, and waited.
The rain continued, the picket line stood strong, and the graduation exercises began. Some time later, the young blonde woman, my mother, accepted her diploma from A. Bartlett Giamatti, President of Yale. Her father and uncle were the two men who had broken the picket line to watch from afar. They leaned out of the window, trying to see, but the stage faced away from them, and they could only hear muddled words coming from wet speakers.
A Warm Welcome
The first member of my family to work at Yale was my great-grandfather. He was a groundskeeper at the Yale Bowl. My great-aunt Ginny spent years shelving books at Sterling Memorial Library, where my great-uncle Bobby was a guard. My great-uncle Ralph installed the gold leaf on the cupola of Pierson Tower when he was a roofer. My great-uncle Roy, one of the two who observed Commencement from L-Dub in 1984, was a mason. The other man, my grandfather, worked as a welder for 36 years. When my mother received an acceptance letter from Yale on April 15th, 1980, her 18th birthday, it meant the consummation of a family dream that had stretched back for generations.
At Yale, a lot of attention is given to the idea of legacy and the swarming multi-generational ties that many families have to Yale. My own relatives have taught me that family ties to Yale can go far beyond just parents who send their children to their alma mater. Yale, as New Haven’s largest employer, has entire families as workers. When James Baker, the current Facilities Superintendent, arrived earlier this year, he was shocked at the number of family connections among Yale employees. “I was just surprised at how many families have worked here for so long, how many generations have worked here. I was talking to one of my staff members the other day when I was handling something at Saybrook, and the gentleman turned to me and he said, ‘My son works for you.’ I never knew the connection.”
Nearly every member of my family who worked for Yale stayed for at least ten years, and many stayed for much longer. When my grandfather talks about Yale, he loves to mention his longevity. Baker notices this trend among current employees as well. “It’s kind of like their mantra when I meet them for the first time — ‘I’ve been here.’ They don’t say what their name is, where they work — they tell me how long they’ve been here.”
When my mother arrived on campus as a student, her Yale was different than the Yale of her father and aunts and uncles. But her background also allowed her to see more of Yale than her peers — this was her college, yes, but it was also the institution her family had helped build and maintain. And now, my Yale is different from that of my mother. I don’t see relatives at work around campus; by the time I was born, no one in my family still worked at Yale. But I still see myself as the product of both types of Yale legacy, of alumni and of workers. When I see librarians pushing book carts through Bass, or when I’m swiped in at a dining hall, I think of my family.
My grandfather retired in 1990, but today, when I walk around campus, I can still see his fingerprints on everything he built, invisible to everyone else but me. They cover the handrails of Sprague Hall, gripped by the crowd pouring in to see Karl Ove Knausgård’s Windham-Campbell lecture; they paint the gutters on the Wall Street side of Sterling Memorial Library, clogged with autumn leaves as law students hurry along the street below; but mostly, I see them on the greatest thing my grandfather built, the inner Pierson gate, which lies at the end of the York Street walkway. When in the early summer of 2016, I was placed in Pierson College, my grandfather called it fate. On move-in day a few months later, my mother and I walked to the first year reception at the Pierson Head of College house, stopping in front of the gate. I’d seen it a dozen times before, but for the first time in my life, I was allowed to open it.
I’ve only ever wanted to go to Yale, for all the usual reasons, yes, but also because Yale was my family’s partner in a powerful act of symbiosis: for decades, they gave Yale skilled hands and strong backs; Yale gave them, through my mother, a taste of the ever elusive American Dream — a chance at upward mobility.
1984 — A Union Year
It’s been 33 years since my grandfather and great-uncle Roy crossed the picket lines to watch from an L-Dub window as my mother graduated from Yale College. My grandfather had told the union leadership earlier that day, “Whether you like it or not, I’m going right across the line.”
Union drama still plays out at Yale today. Earlier this year, it was impossible to move about campus without seeing the graduate student union Local 33’s occupation of Beinecke Plaza. Walking by their protest, I couldn’t help but tie their demonstrations to the dozens of stories my grandfather had told me about striking. Echoing the past, Local 33 ended their year of hunger strikes and orange tents by picketing the 2017 Commencement. Central to their fight is recognition. While their circumstances differ greatly, the Local 33 movement is about a standard that was just as true for my grandfather and other workers in 1984 — that union recognition is about workers (of all stripes) fighting for the right to say that Yale is their space, too.
In the years my grandfather worked at Yale, recognition often meant being taken seriously at the bargaining table. As a member of Local 35, the union of Yale’s dining and maintenance workers, my grandfather recounts that conflict with the administration was frequent. Contract renegotiation, an ugly but unavoidable process, happened every three years. Often, the administration made such stringent demands that strikes were unavoidable, sometimes lasting months. My grandfather told me, “they used to keep us out long enough so they could save enough money on our salaries to pay us the raise!” One year, during a particularly tense picket outside the President’s house on Hillhouse, Bart Giamatti walked past the line and my great-aunt Ginny, enraged, broke free from the other protesters and chased him down the street.
So when another union, Local 34, engaged in a months-long conflict with the administration in the year his daughter was graduating from Yale, my grandfather was a sympathetic witness. Local 34’s fight in 1984 was, in many ways, reminiscent of Local 35’s dozens of battles in the years prior, many of which involved my grandfather.
Local 34, the coalition of Yale’s clerical and technical workers, was a new union in 1984, founded only in May of the previous year. In the Fall of 1983, the newly-formed union of white collar workers was heading towards its first contract negotiation and my grandfather and Local 35 were ready to stand alongside them.
Local 34’s negotiations began without much drama, but as progress stalled, resentment grew. Their first meeting with administrators was in October; by February, they walked out of their 21st meeting still without an agreement. Criticism for the administration grew. The Greater New Haven Central Labor Council delivered a letter to Bart Giamatti’s desk bemoaning his “primitive approach to negotiations.”
In March, after further stagnation and the discovery of an administration letter describing secret plans to slash workers’ health coverage, a Local 34 strike was imminent. My grandfather and Local 35 voiced solidarity — if one union walked out, the other would follow.
At the eleventh hour, Local 34 and the administration reached a temporary settlement after union leaders made clear that they would not back down. The strikes were called off, and my grandfather could show up to work. But when no further progress was reached, the unions voted to picket Yale Commencement.
It would take a ten-week-long strike in the Fall of 1984 before Local 34 finally won their contracts. As they had promised, Local 35 stood by their white collar co-workers. Lisa Pirozzolo, YC ’86, who covered the protests for the Yale Daily News that year told me, “I had tremendous respect for the dining hall and grounds crew workers who could have elected not to go out on strike with Local 34 but felt strongly enough about the cause that they suffered significantly in order to stand in solidarity. That stood out for me as a very principled thing to do.”
Whose Yale?
At a low point in the renegotiation talks, the YDN ran an article in their March 29, 1984 issue titled “Students make provisions for strike.” Facing the looming threat of a walkout by dining workers, Yale students scrambled for supplies, raiding dining halls for plates and silverware, grabbing whole loaves of bread and handfuls of fruit. Tamar Gendler, the current Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, then a student at Yale College, told the YDN that the stockpiling and looting of food from the dining hall seemed the result of an “. . .announcement of an impending nuclear strike. But it turned out to be just a Yale strike.” Gendler’s tone might not be unsympathetic to the workers, but the entire article functions solely as a demonstration of how much of an inconvenience a worker’s strike would be to the students. For a piece predicated on the actions of workers, there’s barely a mention of the would-be strikers at all.
Visibility for workers at Yale is difficult. Upon completion of the new Pierson gate in 1975, Peter Tveskov, the Manager of the Yale Physical Plant, wrote a letter to my grandfather, congratulating him. But accompanying his praise was recognition of the relatively thankless nature of his job. “It is the sort of work that reflects in a most favorable way not only on your own trade and your personal skill, but also on the many men in Physical Plant whose efforts on behalf of Yale University remain unseen and unknown to the Yale Community, but without which the University could not function.” In another letter of commendation, Albert Dobie, the Director of University Operations, described my grandfather as one of many Yale workers who “over the years, have contributed much to the University but who all too seldom receive recognition of the skills they possess and the work they perform.”
For my mother, it was impossible not to see their efforts everywhere. The workers at Yale weren’t just background figures, they were her family and friends. She remembers, “It felt kind of good, to occasionally have some guys in one of the trucks wave at me and call out my name as I was walking across campus, or some maintenance guy say hello to me in a hallway — I got some surprised and quizzical looks from my fellow students. I enjoyed their confusion as to how I knew all these people.” Occasionally when it rained, passing classmates might have seen my mother getting picked up by my grandfather in a Yale maintenance truck to drive her to her classes up Science Hill.
But occupying a space between her family of Yale workers and her fellow classmates also allowed my mother to see the uglier side of the relationship between them. “The one thing I did see sometimes, which really disgusted and angered me, was people who maybe had never had to clean up for themselves, leaving their bathrooms filthy, or just vomiting somewhere after partying, or even just throwing trash or bottles on the ground, and not giving any thought to the fact that someone else was going to have to clean up after them.”
In their reporting of the Class Day picket in 1984, the New Haven Register quoted one graduating senior who yelled at the protesting workers on his way to Old Campus, “Go away! This is our day!”
Not all students shared this view; Pirozzolo remembers that many were sympathetic to the union’s struggle. Several other graduates, including my mother and Jodie Foster, YC ’84, wore yellow ribbons on their graduation gowns, symbolizing their support. But the words of that angry graduate speak to the greater issue of ownership of Yale; it’s not a stretch to read “this is our day” as really saying “this is our campus.”This tension persists today. It’s both fitting and ironic that the website for Yale employment is called “It’s Your Yale.”
Students occupy a lot of the talking space at Yale, but our ownership of the institution is neither plenary nor perpetual. We share it with people who have been here, and will be here for much longer than us. Yale will only be mine for four years; it belonged to my grandfather for thirty-six.
Good People
My grandfather is 90 now and lives with my grandmother in a condo complex in Branford, fifteen minutes away from the center of campus. Last week, I called an Uber and headed over to visit them. I asked my grandfather to tell me all the old stories again so that I could record them. He told me once more about 1962: President Kennedy was receiving an honorary degree at Commencement, and my grandfather was in charge of showing the Secret Service up Harkness Tower to point out all the good spots to station snipers on campus. And then there was the time when he was assigned to seal all of Yale’s manholes shut during the 1970 trial of several prominent Black Panthers in New Haven in order to prevent potential disrupters from planting bombs in the steam tunnels.
I asked my grandfather if there were any other important stories I didn’t know about. He paused, then said, “One time, I was working on [President of Yale, 1963–77] Kingman Brewster’s house, up on Hillhouse. I’m waiting out front for the truck to come pick me up. And his wife drove out of the driveway, and says, ‘Come on, I’ll give you a ride.’” I smiled, imagining him in the front seat of the Brewsters’ car, dirty in his work shirt, sitting next to the refined Mary Phillips as they drove back to the Physical Plant on Ashmun Street. “They were good people,” my grandmother suddenly said from across the room, “The Brewsters, nice people.”
In the early ’70s, during a strike, my grandfather was one of four or five men picketing outside the Brewsters’ house late into the night. Several hours in, Kingman came out of the house with a six pack of beer and handed it right to him. “You need this more than I do right now.”
After Brewster came Bart Giamatti, who was friends with my great-uncle Roy. Giamatti was a huge fan of the Red Sox, and Roy liked the Yankees; whenever Roy wanted to talk baseball, or anything else for that matter, he would stroll into Woodbridge Hall and say, “I’m here to see the boss.”
My grandfather laughed, sinking back into his seat on the couch. More stories unfolded, stories I had heard a million times before. When I was younger, few of them had stuck. Now as a student, each story is cast in a different light, refracted through the lens of my two-part Yale legacy.
A Name, Remembered
Before leaving, I helped my grandparents put back the contents of a brown cardboard box that they’d allowed me to rifle through. It had been tucked away in the back of my grandfather’s closet, and the papers and newspaper clippings that filled the box had grown brown and brittle with time. I put back documents for their condo complex, and wedding invitations; a 1975 announcement in the Yale Weekly Bulletin about the new Pierson gate; my mother’s high school graduation cap; the funeral notices of Kingman Brewster and of Bart Giamatti (As my grandfather put it, “He smoked like a chimney; cigarettes killed him.”)
I hugged my grandparents goodbye and called an Uber back to campus. I got out on York Street and headed to my room. On the way, I passed through my grandfather’s gate. Before I swiped in and opened it, I stopped for a moment and looked up at my favorite part of the iron work: my grandfather’s initials, so inconspicuous that they can only be seen if you’re really looking for them. Earlier that day, I’d asked him when he’d decided to include the tiny letters G.A., initials that stand for George Albinger. His answer was simple. “I figured, well, I made it. I wanted my name to be known.”
