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University Daily Kansan Wednesday. April 22, 1959
Gift Trophy Cases?
Every year about this time it is the traditional duty of the senior class to bestow upon this community a memento of its four important years.
The memento, a token of remuneration for academic, social and any other services rendered, comes in the form of a senior class gift. The trouble is, only a select few have the privilege of choosing it.
Now, we can see where it would be difficult for some 1,700 seniors to make suggestions for a class gift. Therefore, the procedure followed is for a committee of seven or eight interested comrades, more or less, to sit around throwing out suggestions. After a year of deliberation, they choose three gifts. A class ballot picks one.
Usually the senior gift committee recommends one particular gift, watering down the remaining possibilities by selecting two vague or useless items. This year trophy cases seem to be the going things. The vague or useless items are some furniture for the Kansas Union, and a painting to be hung in Dyche Museum.
Obviously, trophy cases is the most vivid of three poor ideas. Thus, seniors are expected to vote for them and so add another horror to the long list of facetious class gifts.
Even the grotesque canopy (Class of 1957) donning the Kansas Union serves more students
than could trophy cases. For 30 feet it protects people from the rain all of 35 days each year.
The future fountain (Class of 1958) near the Music and Dramatic Arts Building holds some functional status also. It could well become a romancing area for inspired couples.
What are the benefits of trophy cases?
The only recent gift topped by the trophy case idea is the beast-like bronze Jayhawk (Class of 1956) which, it is hoped, will be stored in the corridors of Blake Hall.
Well, a few spectators hovering about the Field House may notice our array of brass, although that is doubtful, since most people go there to watch basketball games.
Dusting the cases would be a good chore for field house personnel or scholarship boys earning their $15 per month.
KU athletes would enjoy seeing their hard-earned trophies safely displayed, even though few may stop to admire them.
And other students could laugh and kiss off $1,750 which might have been used to purchase something useful for the University.
Wonder what happened to the ideas for scholarships, fellowships, a class decorated room, braille library books, a new piano for the Union addition? And so on down the list.
—John Husar
Stricter Closing Hours
Editor:
We are deeply disturbed over a rumor that closing hours might be relaxed. What the women of the University need is stricter closing hours. There is not yet enough "morality" on the campus. Closing hours are a healthy discipline for people for the discouragement of unnecessary activities such as too avoid an interest in culture and not enough in football.
What importance has his love life compared with the will of the fifty per cent of the people plus one?
We think that closing hours should be shortened to 5:30 p.m. on weekdays and to 7 p.m. on weekends. After all, what can be done after 5:30 p.m. that cannot be done perfectly well before 5:32?
We believe that the benefits of
Also, what is more consistent with the traditions of American democracy and rugged individualism, than that the will of the majority should govern the actions of the individual?
closing hours should be extended to married students and to junior staff members. Why should these husbands be exposed to needless anxiety simply because they married teenagers?
If living in a university has failed to make their wives mature—will marriage have any effect on them?
Obviously any scheme for the loosening of closing hours has a pinkish tinge and is objectively part of a Red-inspired plot to demoralize American womanhood. Surely every American girl has heard of the insidious dangers presented by the existence of men.
Finally, what is the point of a university encouraging adult-living on the part of undergraduates. Would they be here if they were capable of it? Surely this would lead straight to the demoralization of American citizens.
Denis Kennedy
Dublin, Ireland graduate student
Jim McMullan
Long Beach. N. Y. senior
LITTLE MAN ON CAMPUS BY BIBLER
"YOU SHOULDA BEEN HERE YESTERDAY WHEN THIS
GIRL GINPINED TH' DOLL NEXT TO HIM."
Editor:
Misquoted
I am more than a little angry, and for that I do not apologize. You should. I do apologize for the fact that I did not hold the view concerning the Phi Beta Kappa award, which the UDK staff (whoever was responsible) wanted me to hold. I am sorry that they were forced to print the exact opposite of my view (and then put this completely false statement in quotation marks!!) in order to create a trio of Phi Beta Kappas who "worked specifically for the award."
I made no statement using the following word order—“After I found out about it, it was certainly the end I had in mind.” If the reporter, or the editor who 'doctored' the article wished to use this word order, he should have left off the quotation marks and inserted 'not' after 'certainly.'
Furthermore, I was interviewed by a UDK reporter last March. In the article which appeared in the issue of 24 March, there were three statements which were absolutely false and which I did not make, and, in addition, one distortion which in substance amounted to a falsehood. I would list these statements, column, line, and word, but I understand that the UDK does not like long letters, especially if they are critical.
In closing, in my own future interests and in respect for truth, I must state that I will never again 'be at home' to a UDK interviewer.
Richard A. Kraus Lawrence senior
Dailu 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.
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420 Madison Ave, New York, N.Y.
International Mail subscription rates:
semester or $45.0 a year. Published in Lawrence, Kan., every afternoon during the University year except Saturdays and Sundays, University holidays, and examination periods. Entered as deadline for Sept. 17, 1910, at Lawrence, Kan. post office under act of March 3, 1879.
NEWS DEPARTMENT
NEWS DEPARTMENT
Douglas Parker ... Managing Editor
BUSINESS DEPARTMENT
Bill Feitz Business Manager
Pat Swanson and Martha Crosier, Co-
sultant of Harwil, Associate Editorial Editor.
By Calder M. Pickett Assistant Professor of Journalism
THE SATURDAY EVENING POST STORIES 1958. Doubleday,
$3.50.
The world of the Saturday Evening Post is a world that to many readers is an unreal world. It is a brightly colored middle-class world, a world that considers Norman Rockwell the greatest living artist and Taylor Caldwell the greatest living writer.
It is a world of problems that get solved. No New Yorker ending or New Yorker humor in the Post—they're for the snobs who can buy pieces of crystal that cost $1,450.
There are actually two kinds of people in the world of the Post. One is the middle-class family (like the pleasant young couple on the dust jacket, all dressed up for an evening out, the mother warding off the advances of a dirty-faced son who wants to kiss her goodbye). The other is the low class family, not quite low enough to be out of Erskine Caldwell but low enough to be patronized by the middle-class family.
This lower class, in fact, comes up right away in the 1958 collection, in a story by H. E. Bates called "The Darling Buds of May." (This plot sounds suspiciously like a recently reviewed movie called "The Mating Game," but my life hasn't been brightened as yet by a trip to this one.)
There are Pop and Ma Larkin (now I remember—Ma and Pa Kettle) who have a brood of hungry young-uns and a daughter who is just bursting out in late adolescence (Debbie Reynolds in the movie, perhaps). This income-tax feller comes along and wants them to pay their back taxes, but Pa doesn't believe in such things (come to think of it, neither do some of the Post's editorial writers). But the whole thing is resolved out in the orchard, where the income-tax feller, "his limbs melting once more as she lifted his hand to her bare, warm shoulder," hears the nightingales sing.
There are inspirational pieces, too. If they were non-fiction, or novels, the Reader's Digest would condense them for us (and may do so anyway). There's this boy, Simon, in "Journey in the Dark," who is blind and leads his family to safety when a hurricane sweeps away their New England home. There's this family in "The Conformers" all a little larger than life-size, and none of them really knowing the others.
There's Bruno, a kind of village idiot type, who turns out to be better than the proud and scornful Konrad. He saves Konrad's life and then Bruno's wife, who married him to make Konrad miserable, or something like that, finds that Bruno is really a man of great character after all. Well—something like that.
Science fiction, too. There has to be science fiction these days. So Robert Murphy in "The Shock" tells about a kind of fish-boy who makes life quite horrifying (he's a sort of quiz kid, too) until the hero gets up courage and expels the fish-boy to wherever he came from.
Then there's "Night of Horror," by Joel Townsely Rogers, which as near as I could make out (it was a mystery all right) was about a kind of Hollywood-style blob that goes creeping around swallowing up people.
And oh yes, "Fair Young Ghost," Brockden James is stationed in England in World War II and falls in love with a Scot girl named Alison. They are going to get married, and then Alison has a premonition of disaster. Then Brockden is transferred to the Mediterranean and a V-1 kills Alison.
Years later he comes back with his shrewish American wife, Roz. They stay in the same inn where Alison had her premonition, and there's this crying ghost in the hall, and Roz realizes how cruel she been, and she and Brockden become friends again, and the ghost disappears, and it never again cries in the old inn.
What will the Post have in store for us in its 1959 collection?
It Looks This Way...
By Martha Fitch
Women have a new problem to face. And just because they have a longer life expectancy than in 1900.
Women now can expect to live to the ripe old age of 75 years instead of the 64 that they had to look forward to 59 years ago. And this is a problem!
Surveys show that the mother completes her family at the age of 26 and by the time she is 32 her youngest child enters the first grade, leaving her comparatively free to do as she wishes. But is this the time that being a mother stops when all her children are in school?
Evidently so. Anyway, all this adds up to the modern mother's dilemma: How can she use the next four decades of her life so that they will be of the greatest benefit to her family and to herself?
Authorities are not in agreement on the solution, although some suggest that the mothers can then go to work and help their husbands earn a living. However, none suggest the fact that perhaps mothers might be old fashioned and stay home and tend to some mending, or be around when the children come home from school. This "extra" attention to school children might help cut down on the delinquency problem and help cut down on the problems of a woman in her "last four decades."
Her problems might also be lessened if she would devote some time to her husband instead of joining three or four bridge clubs a week. Or perhaps she might join a worthwhile organization that helps the sick or underprivileged.
It seems like that with a little common sense women could use these last four decades to become better mothers and grandmothers.