Tuesday, October 31.1967
UNIVERSITY DAILY KANSAN
3
Fall is a wishy-washy time of year
By Will Hardesty Kansan Staff Reporter
Fall looks like a time when weather can't make up its mind. One night the temperature drops near freezing. Frost covers cars. You certainly can forgive your car for being hot during the summer, when, months later, jumping in your frost-covered car, your shirt pulls up, and bare back touches what seems to be a frost-seated cover.
Puddles are covered with cat ice. Rose leaves turn dark brown. Procrastinating students declare, "When I get home from class this afternoon, I've GOT to get out my winter clothes." You exhale, wonderingly, on first stepping out the door, "Is that all cigarette smoke, or CAN you see your breath this morning?"
The next night the weather acts like it wants to turn warm again. T-shirts and bermudas are the uniform of the day again. For some reason, colds seem to be one of the "in" things to have.
No matter what the night weather's like, the day almost always turns out nice. By 8:30 or so, it's pleasant even if you only have on a light coat. By 11, you've taken it off. By mid-afternoon, you're kicking yourself for wearing the sweater, too.
Fall speeds up some activities like building construction. Contractors rush to get outer walls up and a roof on, enabling them to continue working inside during the winter. After-dinner football games are speeded up because darkness sets in earlier. Even the autumn sun's movements are different. After rising later, it races across the sky to set earlier.
Some activities slow down, drop from sight. Potter Lake acreage is deserted at night. Convertibles stopped on farm roads now have their tops up and the engines running. Hay rack rides, barn parties and woodsies are given up by everyone but the ultra-
hardy for an evening at the Red Dog or an apartment party.
Clothing styles suffer, becoming a motley collage of yearround fashions. Girls are forced to wear knee-socks and sleeveless dresses or kilt skirts, tights and sleeveless poorboys. Sweaters often end up matched with light summer blouses. Guys wear heavy jackets and short-sleeved shirts. Only the "hard-core" continue to wear sandals. The rest of the populace switch back to shoes and socks—or at least shoes.
Nature mixed up
Plants lose their sense of what's right and what's wrong come fall. Trees get a new hair-do and tint and b come more beautiful than they have been in a year, only to pay for this flamboyancy by turning into monstrous hues, ugly enough to scare children on dark windy nights.
Fall is a time when death over the countryside becomes wishywashy. Grass turns yellow and
brown and seemingly gives up to the winter, only to stage a brilliant green come-back with two days of sun and a half inch of rain before the week's end. The breeze gently shakes leaves off trees. Buildings and Grounds men go out in droves to rake these fallen leaves into neat little piles. Then, overnight, the breeze decides to change into a genuine wind and re-scatter all the neat little piles.
"It sure is getting cold," they moan and groan. Yet, come Saturday and Sunday afternoon, they all flock to large oval cement structures with grass in the center, and cheer and yell and forget the cold while they watch 22 men knock each other down.
It's fall when the air is clear one day and filled with a pungent smoke of burnt leaves the next.
Fall is the time sweat freezes
in the warmups of Kansans such as Jim Ryun.
In fall students make rash promises of all the studying they will do—and, surprisingly, they often do it.
DANGEROUS FIDO
SAN FRANCISCO —(UPI) The most dangerous beast in national parks, according to the National Automobile Club, may be the dog.
BABY, THE RAIN MUST FALL Students stand waiting for a bus in Monday's all-day rain.
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