Claude Suhl pens his take on The Vulgarians:

"The Vulgarians, even prior to naming ourselves in New York street gang fashion [ name supplied by Jack Hansen - now deceased who brought Dick Williams up to the Gunks first in 1957 and drove a Triumph and moved to California in the late 60's]

the Vulgarians were ULTRA-ALL-INCLUSIVE !!! Our stated and enacted mission was to provide a safe haven for all and any Fraternity(or Sorority) rejects in particular - although one could also be welcome if one had such affiliations [for example successful lawyer McCarthy of Princeton - but McCarthy publicly rejected membership in a Princeton eating club because a good friend of his who was Jewish was denied membership. Apparently at Princeton these "eating clubs" - I believe that is what they were called - were much more important than frats at other schools (because if you didn't belong, you had to cook your own food on a candle lantern in your dorm, I guess),

so we had nerdiest geeks like Bill Goldner from RPI and Yonkers, charismatic local natural baseball athlete descended from the former producer of the Hudson Valley's best apples - Dave Craft

local Gardiner lady Lynn Tosti, many visitors from Britain-Mike and Judy Yeats, Nick Pott,....- we had grade school dropouts -

a person who earned his PhD in math from MIT before he was 21 [Jim Geiser]- future multi-millionaires and guy who skied with Jean-Claude Killy and sold a bikini to Joan Baez' sister from his North Face store in North Beach, CA- Doug Tompkins.

Too many eternal dirt bags to count - many veterans of scarfing food from the Yosemite Lodge cafeteria as a way of life and sustenance- Army veterans like Ralph Worsfold- West Point grad Army drop-outs like Garry Garret- communist sympathizers, civil rights activists, anti-Vietnam war protesters who after burning all their draft cards tried to lead a brigade to burn down a draft board, an arch traditional conservative who was an MIT Civil Engineer then Lawyer - Bill Ryan ( although he originally was a very curious anti-Vulgarian - we co-opted him eventually I think he would confess) ...................................

To earn membership one merely had to be able to survive in the environment - if you kept coming back, why you were still there-thus you were one of us

The Vulgarians were and still are Egalitarians [I hope] - egalitarians with dirt bag roots [or dirt bag wannabe rub off patina] and a grubby grumpy edge

who had a lot of fun and have made a commitment to keep it up, eh? [perhaps some having had occasional lapses into seriosity and conformity]

why , Vulgarians pioneered stone UN-washed jeans

with holes in the ass and knees

way before Ralph Lauren was born

Vulgarians prowled the lower east side streets in big puffy orange down jackets beneath the towering walls of the steaming, huffing and puffing ConEdison power plant on east 14th street

before Vulgarian protege Doug Tompkins pioneered the North Face and now wealthy ghetto chic -lettes board the subways in their prominently North Face labelled down accoutrements.

some - like Bill Goldner and much later Don Whillans - tried to extend the Ultra-All -Inclusive aspect to cadging FREE drinks. At the recent dinner at the Mountain Brauhaus, Joe Kelsey at our table was having a little problem with the check, because of some mix up about that Mark Robinson had payed for him but from another table - Joe earnestly stated that "hey, I'll just pay for it again - I don't want to be a Bill Goldner" - it all worked out fine BUT note the Goldner reference - Goldner's fame survives - he has a bill paying avoidance mechanism named after him with people still using this appellation to describe such behavior to this day.

Now Whillans is a whole other order of magnitude - he liked to be a bar fighter- he would face people down and gruffly insist they buy him beers - BUT Dave Craft - master of corrective coercion- stood Whillans down - [so did Gerd Thuestad, while naked, about some wool socks - but you will have to ask Burt about that story]-

anyway Whillans had to buy his share of beer - at least when Craft was around.

Quite frequently besides night gatherings there were collective engagements at the base of climbs - lots of harassment was manifested at times - whereby as someone was leading - particularly if they were starting to have trouble - those on the ground might start chanting and beating their piton hammers on the rocks in unison - it was frequently not a very quiet time. But there was also often a rope of two or three going off to just do a climb but , as you mentioned recently, there was always a huge gathering at the Uberfall to come back to.

..... what does it all mean?

I dunno - but it sure was fun"