Captain Shippee
Jim Anderson, Captain Shippee Congratulations to Jim Anderson on being crowned UConn’s 2009 Captain Shippee at the annual Captain Shippee Contest on March 5. Jim showed how talent, good looks, brains, and great moves all combine to produce Star Quality here at UConn. It’s all in the Daily Campus. Now that the Red Carpet excitement has started to die down and Joan Rivers and her entourage have checked out of the Nathan Hale Inn, I thought I’d assist our new Captain Shippee with a little history lesson:
Shippee Hall
Our Shippee residence hall on the east side of the Storrs campus is named for Lester E. Shippee, a Connecticut native born in 1894 who followed a career in banking, beginning in 1916 when he became the assistant cashier of the Windham County National Bank in Danielson. He was appointed Connecticut’s deputy bank commissioner in 1922 and then bank commissioner in 1927. Shippee’s tenure as bank commissioner extended to 1931 – it was his destiny to oversee the stock market crash of 1929 and the ensuing Great Depression. Very reminiscent of today. Resilient as all Connecticutters, he joined the Hartford-Connecticut Trust Company in 1931 as a vice-president and rose to become president, then chairman and CEO of Connecticut Bank and Trust Company from 1954-1964 (not the current CB&T doing business in Connecticut). Lester Shippee was a member of the University’s Board of Trustees from 1946 to 1959, serving as chair from 1953 to 1959, one of the five founders of the University of Connecticut Foundation, and its first president beginning in 1964. He was recruited to lead the new Foundation by President Homer Babbidge. He died in 1988.
(Sources: UConn Advance; Vance, Carmen & Mullgardt, Brian, “What’s in a Name?: A Fact Book about Resident Halls at UConn” (University of Connecticut, 1998); B. Stave, Red Brick in the Land of Steady Habits 113 (Univ. Press of New England, 2006).)
Our Daily Campus at one time reported that Shippee Hall, built in 1962, was built backwards: the foundation was poured from plans looked at upside-down on the hood of car, and once that was done, there was no recourse but to continue the construction backwards. This certainly-apocryphal story was the explanation for why the sun-bathing porch faces Highway 195. In 2002 DC columnist Dave Pendrys wrote that “Shippee is a wondrous place filled with bathrooms — lots of bathrooms.”
Shippee reamined an all-women’s dorm until 2005, when it became the Honors residence hall and admitted men and women together. This was big news: “Shippee has been all-female for such a long time,” said Dan Doerr, Department of Residential Life (ResLife) housing assignments specialist. Doerr said the all-female dorm had lost popularity over the years.
And contrary to current belief, Lester E. Shippee was not the infamous “Colonel Lester E. Shippee” who now resides on Facebook:
“Colonel Shippee”
I never met a colonel in the Navy. It’s my considered opinion that ‘Colonel Shippee’ is really the Gorton’s Fish Stick Man, in his dress uniform:
® Gorton’s Seafood
So who says History isn’t relevant in today’s world?
