By Lucian Truscott '69, printed in the New York Times
I was in New York recently, helping my 18-year-old daughter, Lilly, a student at the Fashion Institute of Technology, paint her new apartment. To pass the time I was telling her stories about my student days in New York, when I was a cadet at West Point and often visited the city on leave. She had just traveled up to West Point to attend the Yearling prom with a cadet from back home in Tennessee. With that in mind I asked her if she wanted to hear a romantic story about a night when I was a Yearling and went on a date to a prom. She did.
The year was 1967, and I was in town to interview Cardinal Spellman for the cadet magazine, The Pointer, along with two other cadets, one the photographer and the other an ad salesman. After we finished we headed downtown to check into a shared room at the Statler Hilton, near Penn Station. All three of us had been wearing our heavy woolen dress gray uniforms since reveille and we were eager to get into some civilian clothes and make our hopeful presence known at the nascent singles bar scene on First Avenue. I was last in the shower and still in the bathroom when, unbeknown to me, there was a knock on the door and one of the guys answered to find three young women in long formal gowns and elaborate hair-dos standing there with tears running down their cheeks.
"Can we come in?" one of them asked.
Finish the story about a time when Truscott was a dashing young man in uniform with a heart full of romance, "when for a night I was there to rescue a princess in distress and in the best sense of the word, I was a prince."