It was either the Spring of ’60 or ’61. No one can quite remember. Jack Kerouac’s “On the Road” had just been published, and terms like “cat” and “dig” were making their way from Manhattan literary circles up to Middletown, Connecticut, where they soon began slipping into the everyday lexicon at the men’s college up on the hill. The previous summer, says Paul Dickson ’61, a former president of Alpha Delta Phi, everyone had started scrounging up money to go to California, inspired by Kerouac’s legendary travel novel to hit the road without looking back.

“One summer I hitchhiked from New York to California,” Dickson said, who is now a freelance writer with 40 books to his name. “Everyone was doing it.”

The Civil Rights Movement was heating up, and Wesleyan, arguably more so than in the Vietnam era, was on the cutting edge. The school had more money than it knew what to do with and at one point, according to Dickson, was considering free admission for all students. Professors, namely John Maguire, a popular religion professor who wound up in jail for civil rights protests during springtime exams one year, were also catching, if not leading, a wave of artistic and intellectual endeavors.

“In the early ’60s, Wesleyan was in a more leading position than it was in the late ’60s,” said Duffy White ’62, an Alpha Delt alum who returned to Wesleyan in 1968 as a professor and currently chairs the Russian Studies Department. “It was the beginning of the drug movement and Civil Rights Movement as well as the culmination of the West Coast literary movement and Wesleyan was on top of it. Vietnam swept the universities so you couldn’t be in a vanguard position so easily on that.”

In those days, Alpha Delt, which also had some of the school’s star athletes as members, would entertain the likes of Hannah Arendt, Herbert Marcuse, Adrienne Rich and Robert Lowell at semi-regular literary weekends. Some Alpha Delt alums went to Harvard to study with acid-proponent Tim Leary, White says. Robert Frost also spoke on campus.

And so, too came Kerouac, along with renowned counterculture poet Allen Ginsberg (immortalized in “On the Road” as “Carlo Marx”) and beat-predecessor Kenneth Patchen on the wings. Tim Bloomfield ’61, another Alpha Delt member, remembers the moment.

“I do remember [Dickson] and either Kerouac or Ginsberg at the table in the Alpha Delt house foyer,” he said. “[They were] surrounded by students five deep and [Dickson] was on a roll in a hilarious conversation in which he was giving the other guy a pretty hard time, all in good humor and very, very funny.”

As it turns out, it also happened that the Beats’ arrival coincided with Dirty River Day, the annual campus-wide party that Dickson recalls as an epic drinking festival.

“It used to be one of the most exalted days at Wesleyan,” he said. “Every fraternity and social group would build a water-borne craft and go to a reservoir in Haddam for a race. It was one of many big bacchanalian party weekends that we would have.”

Alpha Delt’s team, the Green Scum, had constructed a boat from the unused belly tank of a B-29 bomber, and it was Dickson’s job to drive people to Haddam. Kerouac, as it happened, needed a lift.

“I got to drive Kerouac around,” Dickson said. “He was off his gourd the whole weekend and all these girls from Connecticut College and all over the place had come down. He basically was chasing these girls. He was chasing every girl who was around.”

Apparently, Ginsberg, who also came along for the ride, didn’t get shotgun.

“Ginsberg was in the backseat,” Dickson said. “He was a lot less crazy—Kerouac was the party guy.”

And despite the temptation, Dickson said he did not try to play the role of Dean Moriarty, Kerouac’s “On the Road” characterization of Neal Cassady, the legendary madman known for his ridiculous womanizing, his tendency to routinely drive 120 mph and, in his last days, for driving the psychedelic bus “Furthur,” which was author Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters’ official method of transportation.

“I wasn’t going fast,” Dickson said. “We were in my old Pontiac and we went on some of those not-so-great roads through Durham. I wanted to live.”

Beyond his scattered recollections, Dickson doesn’t really know what else happened the day the Beats came to Wesleyan. He does know, however, that his alma mater seems strikingly different nearly half a century later.

“Back then, it was smaller, more cohesive and more creative,” he said. “It was less precious. Wesleyan’s starting to believe its own press. You’ll get a newsletter from them bragging about how many students they rejected.”

White thinks that some change was bound to happen as generations pass and time goes on. At the same time, he agrees that something has left a bad taste in his mouth.

“Of course things have changed a lot, but I’m kind of disappointed that these days all the elite colleges are under the influence of new wealth that makes it seem like undergraduate school is just a way to develop contacts and a record,” White said. “I think there was more respect for this notion that universities have knowledge that only they can produce. When I was a freshman at Wesleyan, we all assumed our professors were going to teach us some really important stuff.”