At Good Old Siwash
George Fitch drew on his own years at Knox College to invent Siwash, a boisterous Midwestern school where studying comes a distant second to fraternity schemes, football, and elaborate practical jokes. Collected here are eleven comic stories that first ran in the Saturday Evening Post and were gathered into this 1911 book, loosely bound by recurring figures such as Ole Skjarsen, a hulking Norwegian giant recruited out of a lumber camp who becomes the team’s improbable gridiron hero. Each chapter spins its own tall tale of undergraduate mischief, told in the breezy campus slang of the period. The book helped fix a durable American myth of carefree college life, and “old Siwash” passed into the language as shorthand for any small, spirited alma mater. Fitch’s fondness for the type keeps the humor warm rather than broad.
