Dr. Cool And The Magic Question

When Thomas Gainsborough painted his famous Blue Boy in 1770, he also did a model in pink. The color blue was not chosen because he was a boy. When Dr. Hal Cooledge told us the magic question in his Art History class at Clemson in 1975, the first thing out of his mouth was a shout..."and the answer does not involve Blue Boy or Pinky."






On January 27th, 2011, Dr. Hal Cooledge passed away at the age of 88. He wasn't here long enough. He was one of the most intelligent, entertaining, talented, and wonderfully quirky individuals I have ever known. He was a Harvard graduate in Chemistry and worked in oil research, but took a different path after the Texas City explosion in 1947, returning to school in architectural history and art. He was hired in the Architecture Department at Clemson University in 1956 and I grew up with the visual of this remarkable professor....snow white crew cut (which he told us turned white almost overnight after the Texas explosion), black and metal (think Malcolm X) eyeglasses, and bow tie. When he opened his mouth, no matter what words came forth, they sounded like a well presented Shakespearean performance. He could teach, he could write, he could act, he could play the piano beautifully, and he was an excellent fencer, becoming Clemson's first fencing coach. I watched him perform in many local Little Theatre plays, encountered him in libraries and restaurants, and watched him perform in a Burt Lancaster movie filmed in Clemson in 1971, winning the only speaking role chosen from locals. Then around 1974, I really lucked up and ended up with him as my professor for Art History in summer school at Clemson. For two hours every day for about 6 weeks, I sat mesmerized as this man reared back in a chair in short sleeve shirt and bow tie, chain smoking bummed cigarettes from students while he shared a very small part of his mind with us. During the mid morning breaks, we began to refer to him as Dr. Cool. I still credit him with stirring up the love of art within me. But it was actually more than a love of art he inspired, it was the magic of knowledge from a man who seemed to know something about most everything.

On the first morning of class, Dr. Cooledge casually informed a sleepy auditorium of students, that he would give any student who could come up with the answer to the following question at any time during the course an immediate "A" and they would not have to attend any further classes. The question was "why is blue the color for boys and pink the color for girls?" This was way before the Internet and even though I did give a small amount of time trying to research this question, neither I, or any other student, ever came close to locating an answer. He never gave us the answer and I thought about it numerous times over the 35 + years, even researching it some on the Internet, without success. It seemed that only he had the secret answer and I even planned to ask him about it if I ran into him again. Immediately after reading Dr. Cooledge's obituary last week I did a search on the Internet again, and there it was...

According to the website "Gender Specific Colors" assigning color to gender is mostly a 20th century tradition. Early in the 20th century, pink, as a watered down red, was considered more of a boy's color while blue was considered more delicate and dainty, and was therefore for girls. It did not really change until after WWII, and the website suggests that Nazi Germany had something to do with it. The German concentration camps had a complicated system of colored symbols with the best known being the yellow star of David for Jews. As many people also know, they used a downward pointing pink triangle patch to identify male homosexuals. This site suggests that the pink triangles began to be associated with the feminine, so only after the 1930's and 40's, was pink associated with girls. Blue became the masculine color, partly by default and partly due to many military uniforms for men being blue. Dr. Cooledge spent a year in Heidelberg, Germany as part of an exchange program during the early years of Adolph Hitler's regime. When I read this theory, I knew that this was the answer he wanted. Finally, the week of his death, the answer is revealed to me. This information was his and it was important to him and he wanted to pass it on to us. But more importantly, he wanted us to want to know "the why" behind our small worlds. And it worked--for over 35 years for me. Thank-you, Dr. Cool.