Page 2
University Daily Kansan Monday, Sept. 18, 1961
KU Traditions
Welcome back, KU veterans, and hello to you new students.
You have come to a university rich in traditions, but few students know what they really are.
Perhaps the oldest and most traditional service on the campus is the opening convocation during the first day of classes.
Convocation began in 1866. The chancellor has always given the opening address and administration and faculty members have officially welcomed students to KU.
The name "Jayhawks" itself shows the traditional loyalty students feel for their school and the state in which they live.
There are other traditions, of course, some old, some new, such as carrying the burning torch down the hill from the Campanile to the
stadium at the induction ceremony for new students.
But the most famous tradition at KU is the record for fine professors and excellent courses. And the tradition with students is to make resolutions when school starts, as they do at New Year's, to study harder, learn more and take advantage of what is offered.
Concert series, almost a tradition now, are planned as are lectures and movies throughout the year. Major theatre productions almost fill the nine months. And in the middle of it all is the club or activity suited for each student.
KU is rich in tradition and beauty, but it can be confusing and frightening.
Learn about "your" University. By doing so you will be perpetuating the oldest tradition of all-supporting KU.
—Carrie Merryfield
Welcome Freshmen
Fall is here. Lawrence is jammed to the gunnels and KU is humming again. The freshmen, despite a rainy welcome, seem as eager as ever and the upperclassm just as glad to be back.
THE FRESHMEN HAVE NOW ATTENDED their first (and probably their last) convocation. By now they should also have been exposed to the campus beverage and the knowledge that they can cut classes with impunity in most cases. If they survive the last two, they will probably be around to read this column next fall.
be around to read this book.
In the meantime, the average freshman will find he has a wide range of campus organizations he can take part in. There are sports programs that allow him to be active in any sport he enjoys, religious groups to encourage him in
his faith, clubs for the various departments of the University and an organized group for almost any other activity he might be interested in.
THE INCOMING FRESHMEN WILL ALSO find they have entered a great and expanding university with exacting programs of study. Its standards of excellence in traditional areas of study and the development of new areas such as the recently created Latin American and Slavie study programs will offer them many challenges and opportunities.
In all these things the freshman will receive plenty of advice from his upperclassman friends, most of it bad, but in the best undergraduate tradition.
Welcome and good luck.
William H. Mullins
KU Should Secede
Editor:
Editor:
What is the possibility of the campus seeding from Lawrence to form its own community? In view of the Lawrence citizenry's obvious incompatibility with those of us on the Hill, it's time for us to cleanse ourselves of this group of hayseeds who'd rather hang on to a miserable $3 a year than allow the poor kids in the town to go swimming during the blistering summers here.
Orville Franks
Lawrence graduate student
... Letters ...
Against Birch Society
Editor:
It is beginning to appear that the John Birch Society membership drive is going to be an annual event at KU. Last spring, as you pointed out in your article, the John Birchers tried to form a chapter here; it is a tribute to the sanity of the KU student body that this attempt was a failure.
The John Birch Society is devoted to the principal that the world is divided into two groups, the Communists and people who are in complete agreement with
the Society. Operating on this idea,
the following have been condemned by Robert Welch,
the leader of the society: Milton Eisenhower,
ex-President Eisenhower's brother, Maxwell E. Rabb, Eisenhower's adviser for relations with minority groups, John Foster Dulles, former Secretary of State, Allen Dulles, director of the CIA, Martin Durkin, Eisenhower's first Secretary of Labor, Chester Bowles, Charles E. Bohlen, former Ambassador to the USSR, and, of course ex-President Eisenhower himself.
LITTLE MAN ON CAMPUS by Dick Bibler
"FRANKLY IO RATHER ADVISE FRESHMEN THEY'RE NOT SO SET IN THEIR WAYS."
Michael W. Dunlop,
St. Louis senior
Craig A. Robertson,
Joliet, Ill., special student
Robert R. Redding,
Lawrence senior
The "bible" of the Society, The Blue Book of the John Birch Society, recommends and outlines smear campaigns, and generally follows the lines of McCarthyism at its worst. We can only assume that the KU Chapter would engage in the same activities. Such activities are out of place at a university or anywhere else. As the Kansan pointed out, KU does not need any "fuzzy faced McCarthies."
***
Unhappy with Town
Sir:
Again the townspeople of Lawrence have shown themselves to be more concerned about a few pennies than the well being of the community. By again turning down a swimming pool for the city they have demonstrated that their critics are not far wrong when they describe this host city of the university as a reactionary blot in the state of Kansas. Blessings on all the small minds who voted against the pool; may you simmer in your acrid body juices next summer.
John Wrightson Topeka freshman
Short Ones
Nothing can come out of an artist that is not in the man.—Henry L. Mencken
Books in Review
By Calder M. Pickett Professor of Journalism
THE DEERSLAYER, by James Fenimore Cooper. Doubleday Dolphin, $1.45.
To keep a proper respect for Cooper it would be just as well not to read Mark Twain's "Fenimore Cooper's Literary Offenses." Such offenses were numerous, said Twain, so numerous that there is no justification for Cooper or his books.
Well, if one is in a cynical mood, or if the weather is hot when it should be cool, or if other unpleasantnesses are in the air, the thesis of Mark Twain holds up. But I choose to ignore all the contrivances, the snapping twigs, the unreal dialogue, the fantastic situations, and see "The Deerslayer" as an important depiction of what many people still believe the American frontiersman to be.
Deerslayer, as Natty Bumppo is called in this first of the Leatherstocking tales (though the last to be written), is the noblest cuss who ever lived, and about the most loquacious. He has an opinion on almost everything, and he is as full of platitudes as Edgar A. Guest. But we still see The Deerslayer in the form of any movie Gary Cooper made, or the Matt Dillon of "Gunsmoke."
He's a real good guy. He's an especially good guy when you set him off against the chap that Cooper calls Hurry Harry, who wants to scalp all redskins and who possesses none of Deerslayer's forest-based charity. Deerslayer's kind to women and he loves nature and he reveres God and he loves Indians and he kills animals only when he needs food.
Cooper has succeeded in writing an almost interminable novel that takes place in just a few days on one little old New York state lake. Indians calmly sit by while Deerslayer and his Delaware pal, Chingachook, move in on their camp. They torture Deerslayer for so long that a rescue by the English becomes possible. And those death scenes—the lingering death of Hetty Hutter surely inspired Louisa May Alcott when she killed off Beth and Margaret Mitchell when she did in Melanie.
But I digress, and I carp. For basically I don't belong to the Mark Twain anti-Cooper school. I did once, but I have mellowed, and now I can get annoyed at times but still basically enjoy this big overgrown story of the frontier.
By Calder M. Pickett Professor of Journalism
MY FATHER SITS IN THE DARK, by Jerome Weidman. Random House, $5.95.
One of the most capable chroniclers of the American vernacular offers here a large volume of short stories. Their theme is wide-ranging, and they provide considerable illumination into the America of the last 30 years or so.
Weidman, though not a front-rank writer, does possess a remarkable feeling for language and for situation. His stories are simple, and many are mere vignettes. He is especially good at describing his own people, the Jews of New York City, and giving us pictures of the tiny frustrations of life that frequently grow into pressing problems.
pressing problems.
The title piece is hardly a short story, but it gives a good picture of the relationship between a father and his son, and of the puzzling circumstance that the parent loves best to sit alone at night, with the lights turned off, and think. "And Everything Nice" is the story of a marriage that begins with deception, the bride having determined that she will quit work and the bridegroom having the opposite view.
groom having the opposite view.
"My Aunt from Twelfth Street" tells of a little boy and his Aunt Tessie, who, though she is somehow out of the pale as far as his family is concerned, does provide a good place to dump him when there are new babies and other such family crises. "The Bottom of the Mountain" is a story of World War II (as are many of these tales), of an expatriate American who has become an English band-leader and of Air Force men on leave.
One of the best is'a rather frightening piece called "The Horse That Could Whistle 'Dixie.'" It describes a brute of a father who forces his terribly frightened little boy to ride a pony at a pony track. Its probing into a mind and a temperament are surprising for a story of such limited scope.
Daily Hansan
University of Kansas student newspaper
Founded 1889, became biweekly 1904, triweekly 1908, daily Jan. 16, 1912.
Telephone VIking 3-2700
Extension 711, news room
Extension 376, business office
Member Inland Daily Press Association. Associated Collegiate Press.
Represented by National Advertising Service, 18 East 50 St., New York 22,
N.Y. News service: United Press International. Mail subscription rates:
$3 a semester or $5 a year. Published in Lawrence, Kan., every afternoon
during the University year except Saturdays and Sundays. University
holidays and examination periods. Second class postage paid at Lawrence,
Kansas.
NEWS DEPARTMENT
Managing Editor
Tom Turner ... Managing Editor
Linda Swander, Fred Zimmerman, Assistant Managing Editors; Kelly Smith, City Editor; Bill Sheldon, Sports Editor; Barbara Howell, Society Editor.
EDITORIAL DEPARTMENT
Ron Gallagher ... Editorial Editor
Bill Mullins and Carrie Merryfield, Assistant Editorial Editors.
BUSINESS DEPARTMENT
Tom Brown Business Manager Don Gergick, Advertising Manager; Bonnie McCullough, Circulation Manager; David Weins, National Advertising Manager; Charles Martinache, Classified Advertising Manager; Hal Smith, Promotion Manager.