I will relate a sketchy story I heard half a century ago, retaining the basic details and allowing my imagination to supply particulars. I have chosen to use a pseudonym for the central character. I call him Alfie.

Alfie grew up in a very tough neighborhood of New Jersey. I think it was Hoboken or maybe Bayonne. He was a member of what I will call the Third Street Gang. Yes, I picked that numbered street out of the air. When I try to picture the gang members and their verbal interchanges, I hear in my mind the pronunciation “Toid Street.”

I get muddled mental images of the Sharks and the Jets of Leonard Bernstein’s West Side Story, but I don’t know whether nationality or ethnicity was a factor in the gang’s composition or that of their rivals and enemies. I do know that Alfie had an Italian surname, which leads me to include Mafiosi among the boy’s older relatives.

My so-called facts may have been embroidered by my recently deceased friend Norton, who met Alfie when they were young adults. Alfie had told Nort some hair-raising tales of his early years. The ones I remember most clearly are when Alfie’s mother would give her son some money and ask him to run down to the corner for a loaf of bread or a bottle of milk. Alfie would comply, but not until he had armed himself with a length of tire chain or other easily accessed weapon of self-defense.

So we have a stereotypical young thug and low-life doing what must be done to survive in an east coast war zone.  We’ve heard about it, read about it and seen it portrayed over and over on television. But a major difference creeps into the hackneyed plot

At school Alfie was not a good student; rather he was brilliant, gifted, motivated, superior. I don’t know his IQ or GPA, but he was clearly material sought by top-flight colleges. However, no one would have suspected such intellectual gifts from Alfie’s personal appearance or manner of speaking. Anyone old enough to remember the language and accent of Leo Gorcey of the Bowery Boys will know what I’m referring to. Although Alfie didn’t use any of Gorcey’s malapropisms, his pronunciation was pure Dead End kid. I assume he was the first male in his family to give thought to higher education instead of ways to avoid imprisonment.

Alfie applied to a few universities and decided on Yale when a scholarship was offered.  This was a time when Yale had just begun striving for geographical and cultural mixture in its student body. They wanted to rid themselves of their reputation as a finishing school for the moneyed elite. There had been a cartoon in The Yale Record, of two “preppie” students exchanging conversation. One is asking the other, “Did you go to Andover, or did you just happen to come to Yale?”

Alfie’s extended family was ecstatically proud. An uncle whose racketeering was yielding good income took him to a good barbershop and then outfitted him with Brooks Brothers clothing.  He endured a female relative’s lessons in table manners and etiquette. By the end of his eighteenth summer he was ready to embark on a new existence.

Even more excited than his family were his Third Street Gang cronies. Many of them were habitual truants or dropouts, but Alfie’s academic success had not disqualified him. Instead he had become a hero in whom they took pride. If they had read the Idylls of the King or Le Morte d’Arthur, he would have been their Launcelot or Galahad. But they didn’t do much reading. They knew he would turn out to be “somebody,” and when he “made it,” they were sure he would remember his old buddies.

Alfie had planned to take the New York, New Haven, and Hartford train from Grand Central. He told his mother that he wanted to do this college thing on his own without Mommy tagging along. There was no father in the picture. The gang would not think of their boy having to take a train to New Haven. They were going to drive him and help him move into his dorm room even if it involved stealing a car. They ended up pooling their money to rent a station wagon.

Alfie was two years ahead of me. I knew him by sight and by reputation. I don’t think we ever spoke to one another. During our undergraduate years, Yale was a male-only institution. It became coeducational in the mid 1960’s, after which I would hope that one Freshman Week tradition was terminated. But maybe not.

New Haven, Connecticut, had a large Italian population in the late 1950’s when Alfie and I were there, and I am sure it’s the same today. Town and Gown is the euphonious term used to describe relations between Yale students and the middle- to lower-class full-time residents of the town.  All Yalies in Alfie’s and my day were assumed by the “townies” to be wealthy prep-school school geeks who wore thick glasses and carried umbrellas even in fair weather. Arriving at Yale was not like detraining in at Princeton, or getting off the T or out of a limo in Cambridge to assume residence at Harvard.

During the first days and evenings of freshman week, cars filled with townies would cruise College Avenue between the New Haven Green and the Phelps Gate entry to the Old Campus and the freshman dormitories. The shouted insults were unvaried and unimaginative. “Fuckin’ Yalie faggots.  If you can’t get a girl, get a Yalie.” Those were the most commonly heard insults. Alfie’s arrival in the company of his gang members introduced a novel variation.

As Alfie with his new haircut and new Harris tweed sport coat was removing his luggage from the trunk of the station wagon outside Phelps Gate, a carload of townies cruised past yelling obscenity-laced insults. Alf and luggage were left behind as his friends screeched away and forced the townies’ car to the curb perhaps a hundred yards down College Avenue.  The New Jerseyites hauled the townies out of their car. The verbal exchange described to me by different witnesses involved: “Okay, mother fuckers, let’s get it on. There’s more of you than us but that don’t mean shit. Come and get it.”

“Fuck, man, we thought you was Yalies!”

“We is Yalies, asshole. Now you comin’ or do we have to go after you?”

The locals were no match for the out-of-town boys. Within minutes, bruised and bloodied, they clambered back into their car and departed. Alf’s buddies circled the block to make sure there would be no further threats, then returned to where Alfie, the uninvolved observer, was grinning by the campus entrance.

The New Jersey contingent got some odd stares from other arriving freshmen and their parents as they helped move his belonging into the fifth floor of Wright Hall. There was no elevator in the century-old building. Once established, though not yet unpacked, Alfie bought a few round of beers for his buddies at George and Harry’s before sending them on their way back home.

During mealtimes, Alfie would sit with unknown classmates and attempt conversation. The required jacket and necktie did not aid him in his attempts to fit in. Before arriving at Yale he had worn a necktie (tied by his mother) only once, to a requiem mass for a great aunt. One lunchtime a classmate introduced himself and asked, “Where did you prepare?” Looking confused, Alfie caused smothered mirth among others at the table by asking, “Prepare what?”

He became friendly with one of his Wright Hall roommates, Nort, a Nevada high school graduate who had never been east of the Mississippi before coming to Yale. This was before college visits became a regular thing for high school seniors. Alfie would look out his dorm window at other frosh, all of whom seemed to be longtime friends living confidently and comfortably where they had expected to arrive ever since they were children. “Lookit all dem mahfuhs inna button-down shirts and pants wid a stupid belt ‘n the back, an’ dirty white shoes!” he would mutter. “Dese assholes already got it wired.” Nort became expert at reproducing Alfie’s Jersey dialect.

Alfie and Nort sat next to each other in English 25, a survey course. An instructor had been discussing Wordsworth’s “Prelude” and defining the poet’s term “spots of time,” which “cast one into the infinite.” A student raised a hand and asked if Wordsworth’s  special moments might be similar to those described by Proust in The Remembrance of Things Past. “Who da fuck is Proust?” Alfie asked Nort in a whisper he didn’t realize would be audible to the whole class. Everyone including the instructor burst into laughter. Embarrassed only momentarily,  Alfie raised palms and eyes and joined in the hilarity. “Dis stuff is all new ta me. Youse guys  from Exeter n Andover ’ve already read dis shit coupla times. On’y books I member is Call a da Wild n some pomes by Poe and Henry What’sisname Longfellow.”

As part of his scholarship, had to put in fifteen hours a week at what were known as “bursary jobs.” As a freshman, hashed in Commons, the huge dining hall where all freshmen took their meals and where occasionally special ceremonial events took place. At one such dinner to honor certain emeritus professors, Alfie in his starched white jacket was assigned the duty of apportioning salads from a monstrous sterling silver salad bowl.           

He had had to hustle to get to the Commons from freshman football practice. He blames what happened on a nasty elbow to the head he had taken during blocking drills.

Alfie was at his salad serving position with serving spoon and fork at the ready. Moments before the doors were opened to admit the faculty members, he had a sudden, brief nosebleed that missed his white coat but did not miss the salad bowl. He cleaned himself up with a handkerchief, and rather than throw out the salad bowl’s contents, he tossed the greens to disguise and disperse his contribution to the dressing. The doors then opened and he smilingly began distributing salad portions to the faculty as they came by with their trays. No complaints were reported about the salad.

As Nort reports, Alfie’s rationalization: “What was I sposed t’ do? Have em chuck the whole shebang and delay the friggin’ celebration while they washed the goddamn salad bowl and tore up more lettuce? If it’s good nuff for dumbshit Dracula, it’s good nuff for Yale profs.”

Alfie was advised to give up football because of numerous mild concussions he had received before and since arriving at Yale. He consulted athletic instructors at the Payne Whitney gymnasium for recommendations of a non-contact sport he could play to stay in shape and satisfy his desire for competition. At their suggestion, he took up fencing. He refrained from mentioning that before coming to Yale, he had learned-by-doing some of the ins and outs of combat involving flip knives or switch blades.

I heard snatches of anecdotes about Alfie’s adjustment to being an Ivy-Leaguer. By the time of my freshman year, two years after his, Alfie’s spoken language was still a horror of vulgarity, slang and mispronunciation. Surprisingly, he was able to write academic papers and hour exams in his second language, which was ordinary English.

In fencing as in academics, Alfie was a fast learner. By his junior year he was a Dean’s List student. He stayed with the English major, doubling in Classical Civilization, but he never shed the gutter accents of his New Jersey upbringing. He had special affection for Chaucer because, as he said to Nort, “the sumbitch’s English makes me sound like friggin’ William F. Buckley by comparison.”

In his senior year his skill with the saber earned him captaincy of the Yale fencing team, which automatically brought with it the nickname Scaramouche. He delighted in the irony that Rafael Sabatini’s fictional character was not only a swordsman but also a master of oratory.

Nort and other friends were flabbergasted when Alfie told them, without giving details, that he had been asked to speak at graduation. Nort offered to assist in rehearsal and make suggestions about diction.  Alfie refused, saying, “Fuhgeddaboudit. I c’n handle it.”

He had been chosen as the Ivy Odist. His brief oration in Latin was understood by only a few, but he received an ovation from the student body that outlasted the applause for the valedictorian’s address.

Alfie went on to law school and a successful career mostly in patent law. When last I checked, he was happily married, with grown sons and grandchildren. Recently retired, he lives only a few geographical miles, but in other respects light years, from where he had grown up.

Asked by the alumni 50^th reunion committee to write a reflective essay about how his Yale experience had shaped his life, Alfie wrote movingly of his boyhood, his adjustment to Yale, his law school, marriage, and family. He commented on his volunteer work with disadvantaged youth in neighborhoods he knew so well.

To conclude, he quoted a youth counselor who had told him that if he didn’t get out and  get educated, he’d be looking at the world from behind bars along with the rest of his gang if he made it to age fifty. “The man knew what he was talking about. For the past twenty-five years I have been living behind bars--in a gated community. I look out at my BMW sports model and my swimming pool winking in the sunlight and think of my few surviving Third Street gang buddies.  Fellow classmates, if you can’t put a face to me, let me explain that I go by Alfred in business and Al with my friends. I’m the guy you knew as that trash-talking guttersnipe Alfie.  And Alfie is livin’ high on the hog and fartin’ through silk.