Just got my online edition of The Villanovan. Nice work. Needless to say I am enamored to hear that Kelly’s will be reopening this Fall! …even if it does end up being a shiny overpriced yuppie larvae TGIF lookalike instead of the smoky $1 draft pub it is meant to be. Its all fair, though. I recognize the games that Mitchell will have to play with the local community to get this place built and hey, to maybe even make a profit! Still, though, I’m hoping he does remember his roots and keeps around some dollar beer pints, quarter pool tables, darts and maybe even throws in a foozball table for good measure…and of course a kickin’ juke box. Yes, just as Fr. Stack mentioned I didn’t see the place before I was 21 (we’d go to Erin’s for that), but was there just about every night after that…and I stayed on for graduate school. Why stop a good run?

I could go on for pages with good anecdotes on Kelly’s so if you want them for any future article, just let me know. But Kelly’s isn’t even the real reason I’m taking time to email……what in God’s name is up with the Crawl crackdown???? Dear Lord! They have already destroyed tailgating at the school so much so that many alumni do not even come back for games, and the one last event that was truly the student’s they are trying to bring down? That’s wrong and I hope your seniors can find a way to work through it. It is perfectly fine if they have an increased police presence or even monitor bar occupancy limits (if they HAVE to), but please, have them stop short of harassment. I have such great memories of my senior crawl. It was fun for so many reasons and we’d get one last chance to visit all our old haunts and bartenders before embarking on…yikes…real life! Heck, we’d even make new friends at bars we didn’t normally frequent…they were always friendly on crawl day in Bryn Mawr Tavern and Bob’s Mystical Garden (damn good chicken!) even if we did only show up once a year. So make The Crawl happen! You owe it to your alums to keep a grand tradition going and heck, it’s a GREAT time! (just don’t start any fires or loot, this isn’t Iraq ya know.)

Todd Blakaitis’92, ’95