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University Daily Kansan Monday, April 24,19
Fate of the Floats
The parade last Saturday morning was quite an affair. Floats, pretty girls and drill teams rolled, smiled and marched their way down Massachusetts Street to the delight of everyone. The Lawrence townsfolk enjoyed the parade—they have since the now-annual event was first held. The students get a big kick out of the parade, too. Many of them spent long hours in preparation for it. A lot of hard work, a lot of good fun, a lot of happy memories—except most of those groups that entered floats aren't too happy with the way things after the parade worked out.
IT SEEMS THAT A BAND OF LAWRENCE children appointed themselves members of a clean-up committee to take care of the floats sitting in Zone X after the parade—they did. That was unfortunate. Some of the fraternities and sororites wanted to save parts of their floats to use again. Others wanted to at least give their entries a respectful dismantling.
Still another set of floatbuilders had been approached by a member of the Lawrence Junior Chamber of Commerce who wanted to use their float to carry Miss Lawrence in the centennial celebration in Topeka. That will be impossible now.
THIS GROUP IS ESPECIALLY UNHAPPY, and they have every right to be. But circumstances just seemed to work out that way: The Lawrence police didn't want the floats sitting on city streets where they would block traffic and cover the area with crepe paper. The campus police didn't want the floats sitting on campus streets where the same thing would happen. The Lawrence police didn't see why patrolling the
area around Zone X couldn't be handled by the campus police. The campus police couldn't assign one of their number to spend all of his time watching the floats. The Lawrence mothers and fathers whose children were responsible for the destruction apparently didn't ask where their kiddies were going to be playing—and what they were playing.
AND, CIRCUMSTANCES HAVE WRECKED at least one float that wouldn't hurt either the prestige of the city or the University were it entered in the Topeka parade.
The whole affair is just one of those things. Neither the Lawrence nor the campus police want to see streets blocked. Neither can afford to detail a man to cover so small an area as Zone X when things such as traffic control are a greater problem. Sticks are made to be swung by children at crepe and paper mache figures. High things such as floats become the challenge of Mount Everest to a small boy on a warm spring day. No one can really blame anybody else for what happened to the floats; the whole affair was just one of those things.
STILL, THE RELATIONSHIP OF STUDENTS and townsfolk is "just one of those things," too. It's kind of a mystical equation that can depend on variables like mischievous children. Anything like the fate of the floats is a specific example of circumstances that worked, in a small way, against good will between the townsfolk and the students. Unfortunately, things of this nature may become a major consideration in judging either group.
Dan Felger
Where'd They Go?
How Will They Be 50 Years Later? -1911 Grad Looks to Reunion
By Louis LaCoss
Editor Emeritus of the
St. Louis Globe-Democrat
Class of 1911
I WAS SEVERELY shocked a few days ago. I received a letter from the Alumni Office at the University of Kansas, cheerfully decorated with Crimson and Blue Jay-hawkers, advising me that my graduating class of 1911 will hold a reunion next June, celebrating the 50 years that have passed since we marched on stage and received our diplomas which were proof that we had met all the requirements for a degree and were entitled to all the "honors, rights and privileges pertaining to that degree."
That was 50 years ago, a half century. My cane, please, and my bottle of vitamins as I plan the happy return to meet friends and accomplices who, no doubt, are as bad off as I am but won't admit it. The moment of Grand Disillusionment is approaching.
**
I HAVE NO DOUBT there will be a contagion of Grand Disillusionions. Over the years I have met a number of my friends of 50 years ago, and I can report that changes have been made by all parties during that extended period. . .
What with my bifocals to which I have never become accustomed and an embarrassingly poor memory for names, I anticipate some difficulties when I meet the old classmates. Perhaps, I should advise them by an item in the Daily Kansan that my identification will be a frontal pauchiness, a slightly bald head and a pink rose in my coat lapel. But how can I be certain who they are?
The Jayhawkter Annual is a school tradition. My sister in Lawrence resurrected the one for 1911 and forwarded it to me. So I have been taking a refresher course and although the experience has been rich in recollections, there are overtones of sadness too.
The committee in charge of this year's reunion has sent me a list of the "eligibles," men and women who have survived the years. But checking this list against the names in the Annual, I discover that many are dead or "lost," the latter meaning that they have lost contact with the University. Curiously, the deaths among the Pharmacists were the highest on any list.
But here and there I found faces I recognized. I wonder how much they have changed.
☆ ☆ ☆
IT HAS BEEN my good fortune to have visited many of the campuses of the United States, and in foreign lands. I have never seen one that is more attractive than KU in scenic beauty and natural setting. In my days on the Hill—and I believe this applies now—there was not much evidence of campus planning. By that I mean the growth of the University plant was a somewhat haphazard, a building here, a building there with no attempt at conformity in material or architecture. I believe this has much to recommend it.
We had numerous buildings in those days, all along the brow of a high hill that formed an ellipse with an outlook across two river valleys. Down one side was a wooded glen which was an invitation to amours as well as clandestine beer parties. McCook Field where now stands an elegant stadium — and Potter Lake where a drowning or two always ushered in the spring season.
I am convinced that this year's shindig, as applied to me personally, represents a deliberate effort to effect a rendezvous between two venerable structures, one of them stone, which is Fraser Hall, the dean of all buildings on the campus, and the other representing ossification in another form, which is me.
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FRASER IN my days was in the center of things. Of course, we had Uncle Jimmy Green holed up in the
Law building where he remained in dignified seclusion except when he emerged, happy and in bristling defiance to make his annual optimistic football prediction that we would lick the daylights out of Missouri and Nebraska. In those days, Oklahoma was the conference Cinderella, a status which many of the present generation may regard as inconceivable...
For recreation, what did we do?
Much more simple than now. I believe the first student-owned automobile on the campus appeared about 1811. There was no traffic congestion, no parking problem.
When we went to a dance—and the Annual reminds me of many of the palpitating "dates" I had with fancy two-stepers and waltzers — we walked or staked ourselves to the extravagance of a cab. I wonder if the girls still carry their dancing slippers in those dainty bags they used in my day.
The best place to dance was downtown — at Ecke's Hall, first floor above a furniture store. This hall was really distinguished. It had a spring floor which swayed with the dancers, and no little acrobatic skill was required to negotiate the turns while the floor was in motion.
The big dance of the year was the Junior-Senior Prom, held on the Hill. For a man to attend one of these affairs attired in anything except a blue coat and white trousers, plus the normal accountrements, just wasn't being done...
Nostalgia comes easy when one thinks about the good old days, days that were eminently good but we probably didn't appreciate the fact.
\* \* \*
As I have said some of my old friends have gone on the long journey, and may God grant them peace. Many of the class of 1911 have gone to the four corners of the earth; many are still around, able, I hope, to join me come next June. I'll be there even if I have to go in a wheelchair.
(Excerpt from the Saint Louis Globe-Democrat)
By Harry G. Shaffer
Assistant Professor, Economics
THE NEW CAPITALISTS, by Louis O. Kelso and Mortimer Adler.
Random House, New York. 1961. 109 pp. $3.50.
Every once in a while there appears a book which proposes some kind of political or economic gimmick as a short-cut solution to all the problems of suffering mankind. Such a gimmick-proposing book is The New Capitalists.
KELSO AND ADLER (WHO PREVIOUSLY co-authored The Capitalist Manifesto) are utterly dissatisfied with the direction American capitalism seems to be taking. Ninty per cent of Gross National Product, the authors proclaim, is produced by capital. But this capital is owned by but five per cent of all households. To give this minority, in whose hands is concentrated the ownership of our means of production, as large a share of national income as they deserve would result in the destruction of capitalism, as Marx had predicted. So, labor receives more than two thirds of our national income. But this, in fact, amounts to the socialization of capital. Thus, concentration of ownership will lead to "socialism in the end, but through a slow and painful process."
Full employment policies, no longer necessary in a world in which an ever smaller proportion of labor will be needed in the productive process, are but part of the philosophy of socialists who, "from Marx on down, worship substance toil." Welfare measures and redistribution of wealth, as practiced in the Western world today, are not acceptable solutions either as they are but steps towards socialism. And socialism must be guarded against because "totalitarian control ... necessarily exists in any socialist economy."
UNDER SUCH CIRCUMSTANCES, WHAT are we to do? The solution is obvious (to Kelso and Adler, anyhow): All, or at least most of us, must become capitalists! This, Kelso and Adler tell us, can be achieved very simply. All we need is an agency which would insure loans for investment purposes, thus performing functions similar to those performed by the FHA in the field of real estate loans today. Companies would apply to have their stocks accepted for CDIC (Capital Diffusion Insurance Corporation) loans. Any individual whose "eligibility requirements include the possession of sufficient economic knowledge wisely to husband, manage and preserve a capital estate, or at least the aptitude and willingness to acquire such knowledge during the pledge period of the loan," could borrow money for the purchase of corporate stock and live on the income of his insured investment.
Only the ones incapable of presenting evidence of their ability to be capitalists would have to work in order to live. This proposal, Kelso and Adler proclaim, would shift unemployment to those who can afford it and who would benefit from it (after all, "most of our cultural and scientific heritage is the product of ... men of leisure"), it would provide us with "a limitless . . . source of new capital formation," and, in international relations, the East-West struggle would boil down to a "rivalry . . . between a totalitarian technique of forcing industrialization by mandate upon a propertyless and freedomless people, and a capitalist system of simultaneously creating a high level of wealth production and consumption along with conditions of maximum individual freedom and maximum personal incentive."
TO THIS REVIEWER THE NEW CAPITALISTS appears full of economic fallacies, such as a confusion between money and capital, a misunderstanding of the economic function of savings in the process of capital formation, and an unawareness of the necessity of allocating scarce resources between consumption and investment goods. No proof is offered for the contention that the collective ownership of the means of production must necessarily entail political dictatorship. The proposed all-powerful CDIC (via loan eligibility approvals or disapproval) would be able to determine which business enterprises are worthy of continuous existence and which individuals deserve to be capitalists. How such a setup would bring about "maximum individual freedom" is incomprehensible to this reviewer. Indeed, the case for this newest in a long line of solve-it-all political and economic gimmicks seems to be a weak one.
Daily Hansan
University of Kansas student newspaper
University of Kansas student newspaper
Founded 1889, became biweekly 1904, triweekly 1908, daily Jan. 16, 1912.
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NEWS DEPARTMENT
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