Unedited photo credit: UMass Amherst
- Amherst is to Boston as what Pueblo is to Denver
- Bill Cosby holds a UMass-Amherst degree. To this day, local bars serve all their drinks with lids.
- The Mount Holyoke College girls nicknamed them ‘the egg timers’ until they formally adopted ‘Minutemen’ in 1972.
- While diehard Patriots fans at UMass-Amherst fueled a Super Bowl campus riot, Tom Brady and Giselle have only flown over Amherst.
- UMass-Amherst started playing hockey in 1994 – the same year Bay Stater Nancy Kerrigan took a tire iron to the shin. Despite the injury, Kerrigan could skate circles around their inaugural 6-28-2 squad.
- Insomniac? You can actually rent Emily Dickinson’s Amherst bedroom for 2 hours and read any of her 1800 poems.
- Date night? Dunkin’ Donuts
- The name Amherst is pronounced without the h (“AM-erst”), giving rise to the local saying, “only the ‘h’ is silent”, in reference both to the pronunciation and to the town folk’s unwillingness to shut up.
- Alum ‘Slick’ Rick Pitino, a former collegiate basketball coach, is a well-known cheat. On a more positive note, actresses Lori Loughlin and Felicity Huffman did not go to UMass-Amherst.
*Editors Note: This is the first time LetsGoDU has used the term iambic pentameter in a feature article.
DU has a very positive memory of the UMass Amherst campus, winning the 2005 Northeast Regional there over Bemidji State (4-3 OT) and the University of New Hampshire (4-2) on the way to winning the NCAA Championship in Columbus that year.