Okay, so let me tell you about this little adventure I had, all centered around Moses Brown hockey. It wasn’t exactly what I planned for my week, let me tell ya.
The Initial Spark
It all started pretty innocently. I was digging through some old family stuff, you know, boxes of photos and whatnot. Found an old, kind of blurry picture of my grandpa, and he always used to talk about his school days and playing hockey. He went to Moses Brown, and I got this idea, like, wouldn’t it be cool to find an old team photo or some record of him playing? Just a little something to add to the family history. Sounded easy enough, right? Famous last words.
First Steps Down the Rabbit Hole
So, my first thought was, “I’ll just check their website.” Modern times, everything’s online. Well, I spent a good hour clicking around. Found current teams, sure. Recent stuff, yeah. But anything from, like, way back when grandpa would’ve been lacing up his skates? Not a sausage. It was like trying to find a specific needle in a haystack, only the haystack was digital and didn’t seem to have old needles.
Next up, I figured, okay, old school approach. I’ll call ’em. Found a number for the athletics department. Rang it. Went straight to voicemail. Left a message, all polite, explaining what I was after. Did I hear back? What do you think? Of course not. Waited a couple of days, just in case they were, you know, busy winning championships or something.
Getting the Runaround
After playing phone tag with myself, I finally got a live person in athletics. Super nice, but when I mentioned looking for records from decades ago, it was like I’d asked for the moon. “Oh, um, that’s… really old,” they said. No kidding, Sherlock. They suggested I try the alumni office. Okay, fair enough. New number, new hope.
The alumni office folks were also pleasant. They listened. They nodded (I imagined them nodding, anyway, over the phone). “Hockey, you say? From the… when now?” They mostly had yearbooks, they said, and maybe some general archive stuff, but specific team photos from that era? “You could try the school library or archives?” they offered. See a pattern here? I was becoming a human pinball, bounced from one department to another.
The “Archive” Adventure
So, the library or archives. This sounded promising, like where old stuff should be. I found some contact info. Sent an email this time, figured it’d be easier to lay out the details. Got a reply a day or so later. Yes, they had archives. No, you couldn’t just browse. You needed an appointment. And you kinda needed to know what you were looking for. Which was the whole point of me contacting them – I didn’t know exactly what they had! It was a classic Catch-22.
I explained I was looking for anything related to hockey teams from a certain span of years. They said they’d “look into it” if they had time. Time. Right. I got the distinct impression my little quest for a photo of grandpa in his hockey gear wasn’t exactly top of their priority list.
So, What Did I Achieve?
Well, after all that? I got a polite email a week later saying they couldn’t easily locate specific team photos from that period without more information, but I was welcome to make an appointment to look through yearbooks if I was ever in the area. Yearbooks. Which the alumni office already mentioned.
So, basically, I spent a good chunk of time, made a bunch of calls, sent emails, and all I learned was that finding specific historical sports stuff at Moses Brown, at least for an outsider, is a bit of a mission. It’s not like they don’t have a history, I’m sure it’s there somewhere. But man, they don’t make it easy to find if you’re just some guy trying to connect with a bit of family past related to their hockey program.
It’s just funny, you know? You’d think with a school that’s been around, and a sport like hockey, there’d be some easily accessible pride in that history. Maybe it’s just locked away too tight. Oh well, at least I tried. Grandpa would’ve probably just chuckled and told me to go play some street hockey instead.
