Fictional Fords

By Rebecca Raber

HAVERFORD'S HISTORY is filled with celebrated alums. Eminent scientists, journalists, activists, authors, entrepreneurs, Pulitzer and Nobel Prize winners have all passed through our halls. But there are a few famed Fords who never actually set foot on campus. They weren't in your Customs Group, and you won't meet them during any Alumni Weekend. These are the alums who exist only in works of fiction.

When the Fox TV show Fringe ended its run in January, it closed the book on one such fake Ford: Astrid Farnsworth (played by Jasika Nicole). During the course of the sci-fi show's five seasons, viewers learned that the junior FBI agent and lab assistant to brilliant but disturbed Walter Bishop was a Haverford graduate who majored in music and linguistics and minored in computer science, which explains all the Latin translations, computer hacking and code breaking she was always called upon to do.

Another of television's accomplished crime fighters who supposedly honed his intellect here on campus is FBI agent Dale Cooper, the central character in David Lynch's seminal ABC series Twin Peaks. According to an accompanying compendium to the 1990-91 series, The Autobiography of F.B.I. Special Agent Dale Cooper—which can, to this day, still be found in Magill Library—the character that Kyle MacLachlan famously portrayed grew up in Philadelphia, attended Germantown Friends School, earned an 800 on both his math and verbal SATs, and then enrolled in Haverford. Members of the Class of '77 might enjoy knowing that Cooper would have been a member of their cohort, though he apparently took pains to graduate a year early.

In the 2009 film State of Play, journalist Cal McAffrey (Russell Crowe) investigates the murder of the mistress of his old college friend, Pennsylvania Sen. Stephen Collins (Ben Affleck). The pair's almamater is never expressly mentioned, and Greg Kannerstein'63 wrote in a Haverblog post at the time,“Unless we missed it, there was nothing in the film... that would convey the screenwriter's notion that Russell Crowe and Ben Affleck met at Haverford, as we'd been told by the production designer when they were shooting.” But careful viewers will note a plaque with the College's logo in the background of one scene, so we say they still count.

Several literary characters have also earned their degrees by the Duck Pond. Jonathan Franzen's National Book Award-winning novel The Corrections, which centers on the Midwestern Lambert family and its ailing patriarch, features Ford Brian Callahan, a newly moneyed entrepreneur who hires Denise Lambert as a chef in his hip, new Philadelphia restaurant  venture and then becomes part of a love triangle with her and his wife.“He looked like what he was,” writes Franzen, a 1981 graduate of Swarthmore,“a former Haverford lacrosse player and basically decent man to whom nothing bad had ever happened and whom you therefore didn't want  to disappoint.”

Franzen's fellow Swattie James Michener invented a Haverford-like college for the protagonist of his 1949 bildungsroman, The Fires of Spring, to attend. Dedham, the school that David Harper enters in the fall of 1925, is a Quaker college with a fierce Swarthmore football rivalry, a school“some 15 miles west of Philadelphia” that, write Michener,“was the only American college where the student body could get as excited about distinguished scholarship as it did about football.” We may no longer have a football team, but that still sounds like Haverford to us.