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University Daily Kansan Thursday. April 20, 1961
Engineers Show Off
The 41st annual Engineering Exposition opens tomorrow, and from the looks of things the exhibit is going to be another fine one this year. The lights blazed late last night in Lindley, Malott and the engineering labs. The same thing will probably happen tonight. One would be hard put to find a better way to raise the prestige of the University for the few dollars that will be spent on the extra kilowatt hours. There just isn't a better deal around.
THE ENGINEERS DESERVE A HEALTHY pat on the back just for the veteran way they are performing their tasks. A quick check of the students in Malott today and tomorrow would probably reveal few without bloodshot eyes. The work on the exposition is demanding, and so are the engineers' professors—just because this is an engineering exposition, don't think the tests and quizzes have been neglected this week. At least, that's what the students say, and they ought to know.
The work is being done on a purely voluntary basis. One student, in fact, isn't even taking any classes in his department this year. He's only a sophomore. He says that he won't be taking any courses until next spring; still, he's down in the basement of Lindley scraping and measuring and sawing with those students about to graduate who might be doing something else with their time. Call it pride or interest or anything else like that—it's still pretty nice to see.
THERE ARE OTHER MOTIVES. THE engineering Council gives each department $60 for its project. What they do with this small amount is a wonder. Of course, the money takes a back seat to ingenuity and hard work, and the petroleum engineers say that they aren't going to let the electrical engineers walk off with honors again this year. Chem engineers, civil engineers and aero engineers agreed. Then too, the slide rule set likes to show off to the public. It will be easy to understand why when taking a look at some of those exhibits tomorrow.
The whole thing seems rather incongruous in a way. Here are the engineers, a group that's kidded as much as anyone about living only for the books, spending their evenings in much the same manner as a small boy with a tube of glue and a model plane kit. The effort pays off. Anyone who drops over on that side of the campus tomorrow and Saturday certainly isn't going to be disappointed. They will be seeing something that does every bit as much to raise the prestige of the University as the Kansas Relays or a Big Eight football champion.
Dan Felger
Destroyers of Culture
They say the cowboy is a dying race, and they are probably right . . . not too many of the old bronc busters left anymore. Those that are still around would be saddened to hear that there are some groups today who would deliberately obliterate the memory of the cowboy, too—even on a centennial celebration. They would shoot the memory of the cowboy from the saddle, kick it in a shallow grave and leave it without even a headstone to protect it from the coyotes of the future.
THEY SNICKER AT DRESSING UP LIKE a cowboy on a day when the cowboy should be honored while hiding behind a false facade of cosmopolitanism. It's enough to make lovers of sheriffs and marshals cry. The debunkers attempt to say that dressing up cowboy style is a slur on the past because the past lives no more. That's bad logic. The past lives again, for at least these next two days on campus.
To listen to these guardians of the nation's history would be to forsake the days of American childhood. Remember those days when we used to line up outside the theater on a Saturday afternoon when a Roy Rogers' picture was in town? Or buy a cap gun instead of a regular old "click-um" revolver because the cap pistol had Gene Autry's signature on it. Not real cowboy stuff, these modern saviors of culture scoff. They are right, but we were doing the best we could, and one of these "real" oldtime cowboys would be proud and pleased because we at least made the attempt.
QUITE PROBABLY WHILE WE WERE downtown at the show, glorying in the manner that Hopalong or Six-gun Pete rounded up the bad guys, these characters were at home reading the latest science fiction. Then they got mad because most of us said that a cowboy could lick a Martian or a Space Ranger even if the spaceman had 20 ray guns. Group opinion is a powerful thing. These "progressives" probably developed an inferiority complex over the cowboy question that they are still trying to work off. Who knows whether we should be mad at them or pity them?
In any event, it's still hard to keep from getting a little hot under the collar when someone tells us that dressing up on centennial days just doesn't have it. And then to say that it's a slur on the cowboy is even worse. If someone told a cowboy on his deathbed that this sort of stuff was going on, he would become so shocked that he would forget his lifelong creed and die with his boots off.
Dan Felger
Daily Hansan
University of Kansas student newspaper
Founded 1839, became biweekly 1904, triweekly 1908, daily Jan. 16, 1912.
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Member Inland Daily Press Association. Associated Collegiate Press.
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$3 a semester or $5 a year. Published in Lawrence, Kan., every afternoon
during the University year except Sundays and Sundays, University
holidays and examination periods. Second class postage paid at Lawrence,
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NEWS DEPARTMENT
John Peterson ... Managing Editor
Bill Blundell, Carrie Edwards, Lynn Cheatum and Ralph Wilson, Assistant Managing Editors; Tom Turner, City Editor; Bill Sheldon, Sports Editor; Sue Thieman, Society Editor.
EDITORIAL DEPARTMENT
Frank Morgan and Dan Felger ... Co-Editorial Editors
BUSINESS DEPARTMENT
John Massa ... Business Manager
F. Mike Harris, Advertising Manager; Tom L. Brown, Circulation Manager; Richard Horn, Classified Advertising Manager; William Goodwin, Promotion Manager; Marlin Zimmerman, National Advertising Manager.
Letters
KU Volunteers
I think you were underestimating the students of KU when you said in yesterday's editorial that only one person applied for the "Peace Corps" — Bill Wright and I wrote directly to J.F.K. for applications and I'll bet there were 100 more who did the same! KU students may be a bit apathetic but they aren't dead yet...
Editor:
Jim McMullan New York, N.Y., senior
Short Ones
Jim McMullan
America and defeat cannot be made to rhyme—Eric A. Johnston
Evolution is not a force but a process; not a cause but a law.— Rousseau
***
...
Nn man can climb out beyond the limitations of his own character.—Robespierre
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Millions for defense, but not one cent for tribute.—Charles Cotesworth Pinckney
... Books in Review ...
By Calder M. Pickett Associate Professor of Journalism
Though it has appeared in other paperback volumes, "Pride and Prejudice" acquires a bright new look in this Laurel edition that has a cover like an 18th century valentine. It also has an introduction by Mark Schorer that appeared as well in Laurel's "Persuasion" and "Sense and Sensibility."
PRIDE AND PREJUDICE, by Jane Austen. Dell Laurel. 50 cents.
As for the famed novel itself, its story needs no retelling. It is the most familiar and most influential of Miss Austen's writings, and it contains some of the brightest wit in the language. It is, in addition, a series of portraits of country society in England of 150 years ago, particularly the Bennets, their lovely daughters, especially Elizabeth, and the dashing and arrogant D'Arcy.
Mrs. Bennet and her zealous efforts to find husbands for her daughters forms a comic tale that will continue to entertain and serve as an inspiration to young writers.
*****
THE LEGACY OF THE CIVIL WAR, by Robert Penn Warren.
Random House. $2.75.
Here is a fine, thoughtful essay that dwells little on the episodes of the Civil War but treats instead what the war has done to us as a people, what it has left us. Warren subtitles his volume, "Meditations on the Centennial," and it is in this centennial year, when a glut of war writings is overwhelming us, that we should consider what it was all about.
Warren reveals here a pretty strong shift from Southern Agrarian. He is no longer the embattled southerner, fighting the encroachment of industrialism. He says, in fact, with Allan Nevins, that one important thing the war taught both sections was that it would be impossible to retreat into the placid existence of 1850. A new generation and a new world came out of the Virginia countryside in April 1865.
THE AUTHOR ALIGNS HIMSELF WITH THE RALPH McGills, Hodding Carters, Harry Ashmores and Ellis Arnalls who have rejected the mythology of the Old South. He is assured that a Robert E. Lee, were he living today, would not likely be a crony of an Orval Faubus.
He is harsh on the unyielding "higher law" men of the North, the Garrisons and the Summers, for to Warren they too deserve blame for the "irrepressible conflict." Emerson's Transeendentalism had come home to roost. Warren seems to say; the exalted doctrine of self-reliance had produced, for one thing, a John Brown.
In 1961, a hundred years after old man Ruffin sent the cannonball into beleaguered Fort Sumter, we still have not solved our sectional problems, Warren says. Quoting Melville's "Battle Pieces," which said, "Let us pray that the terrible historic tragedy of our time may not have been enacted without instructing our whole beloved country through pity and terror," Warren says we have not been so instructed.
BUT THE WAR REMAINS OUR PRICELESS HERITAGE, something which cannot be driven from us no matter how many unneeded books on the war appear in the next four years. It is the conflict with which we can identify ourselves, the conflict that produced no real villains, that had heroes on both sides, that gave Lee to the North as it gave Grant to the South, that made Lincoln the president of all the people.
Warren observes that there was an inwardness, a deeping, a soulful searching in Lincoln that produced the Gettysburg Address. We feel a compassion about the events of 1861-65 where the events of 1776-81 only impress us with their coldness and righteousness.