NEW HAVEN, Conn. (AP) — When Yale's football team was getting ready to play Harvard in 1900, a student put together a simple, fun-to-sing song to rouse the crowd at the Yale Bowl.
A hundred years later, the song's refrain, "Boola Boola," is synonymous with old-time college football.
And now, the recent discovery of documents from the song's author is helping put to rest the mystery about its origins.
Contrary to popular myth, "boola" doesn't mean anything in Hawaiian, and the song wasn't written by Cole Porter. The author was 1901 Yale graduate Allan M. Hirsh, who adapted the tune from an 1898 song called "La Hoola Boola."
Philip Hirsh, the songwriter's grandson, said a box of memorabilia found under the attic insulation in the old family home in New Jersey included a letter from 1930 explaining "boola boola."
"We do not know what it means," Allan Hirsh wrote, "except that it was euphonious and easy to sing and to our young ears sounded good."
"That was the essence of my grandfather," said Philip Hirsh, a 1960 Yale graduate and a psychiatrist in Lynchburg, Va. "If it sounded good and felt good, let's do it."
The elder Hirsh wrote that he and friends put together the song, taught it to others and posted it on a tree near the Yale Bowl so spectators heading to the game could learn the words.
Yale beat Harvard 28-0 that day — Nov. 24, 1900 — and fans ran on to the field afterward, singing the song.
Hirsh published the song the next year, with permission for the adaptation from the publisher of "La Hoola Boola," said Fred Shapiro, a Yale librarian who is editing "The Yale Dictionary of Quotations."
One campus legend is that "boola" means "good" or "exultation" in Hawaiian. Not true, said Kalena Silva, director of the College of Hawaiian Language at the University of Hawaii at Hilo.
"There aren't any 'b' sounds in the Hawaiian language," Silva said. "Sometimes, with these collegiate fight songs, I think they just made up words."