Revolutionary Spirit

Sandy adopts revolutionary garb outside Winch.

Sandy Macdonald 鈥�46 and the bombardment of Winch.

By Laurie Lindquist

A party invitation that his dormmates might have done better to accept.

The study room for Winch 2 is a social room now. Desks and candlesticks are long gone, replaced by couches, a refrigerator, and a hot pot. The spindly steam radiator still clanks from its old corner, and the big bay window, with its fitted wooden seats, still reveals a regal view of the Great Lawn, though now through a cluster of maples, birch, and sycamore. Time effaces the past, but exhilaration overtakes us nonetheless as we enter the room, bent on uncovering the legend of Alexander “Sandy” Macdonald Jr. ’46 and his brass cannon.

In a community rife with people of character, Sandy stood out. A history major who came to 新澳资料 from St. John’s College and Stanford, Sandy was captivated by the American Revolution and the early days of the republic. He was a brilliant musician who could perform Mozart’s operas on the upright piano in Capehart and sing all the parts. And he had pluck. To achieve a period effect on that piano, he inserted thumbtacks into the hammers and pressed newspaper into the lower strings. “He could sing American Revolutionary songs that wouldn’t stop,” recalled Richard Abel ’48. “He was just a remarkable guy.”

“Sandy used to say that the 19th century music was content without any form,” said Frits Brevet ’50. “Rollin Dudley ’46 would say the 18th century was form without any content.” In Sandy’s company, Frits learned to sing “The British Grenadiers”—with additional verses improvised for the Roosevelt administration—and to sip Madeira wine. On festive occasions, Frits recalled, Sandy and others sported paper-bag wigs, cut and curled and sprayed white.

Formal dances found Sandy dressed in 18th-century garb, his hair coiffed with powder or covered with a wig, wearing a jabot at his throat and buckles on his shoes. “He had an absolute coterie,” said Richard. “He was very charming,” said Patsy Wallace Garlan ’48, his close friend. Sandy and Patsy improvised the minuet during band breaks, and Sandy also took a spin with Shirley Georges Gittelsohn ’49, who was adept at making low bows in a full skirt.

CHIP OFF THE OLD DORM BLOCK. A concrete corner in Winch still bears the scar from Sandy’s one-shot fusillade.
Photo by Tom Humphrey

He dated his class papers with the year 1746, or thereabout, and wrote the first version of his thesis—“Columbia or ‘The Prudence of the Fathers’: Being an Account of the American Doctrine of Non-entanglement in the Theory and Deed from earliest Origins, to the Declaration of President James Monroe”—entirely by hand, using a quill pen he sharpened and dipped in ink.

Though the varied stories of Sandy piqued our curiosity, it was the reference to the foot-long brass cannon he kept in his room that served as tinder for an investigation.

“He would fire it off out the window at the height of bachelor parties celebrating the birthday of Thomas Jefferson, or Dolly Madison, or whomever,” Patsy reported. Lewis Leber ’50 said that Sandy issued ultimatums against the residents of Eastmoreland pertaining to their duties and obligations as subjects to the English Crown, and would “enforce the will of the king” by discharging the cannon onto the Great Lawn.

The most dramatic episode in which Sandy and his cannon figured was revealed in marvelous detail 60 years af