University Daily Kansan, August 21, 1985
Page 12
Memory lane Decade by decade, alumni recall 70 years of KU's past
By Loralee Saxon Staff Reporter
Staff Reporter
Take a drive down a dusty road north of Lawrence until you come to a green house, shaded by large trees. It's the starting point of a winding trail into KU's past, seen through the eyes of its former students.
Ed Griffin, who lives in a green house on Route 3, can remember when college men of means took their dates to parties in horse-drawn carriages, when students were expected to attend chapel in Fraser Hall and when mid-terms and finals were called "ouiz week."
Griffin was graduated from KU in 1912, the year the first residence hall and the "Men's Student Union" were only dreams.
Lawrence was much smaller when Griffin was a student.
"The town was country beyond about 14th Street," he says. Southeast of 23rd and Iowa streets was his cousin's farm.
"There was really nothing west of the University," he says.
Griffin, 95, stands erect, hears and sees well, and tends a garden large enough to provide him with squash, beans and corn that he freezes for winter. He often dries obliquely flinging walk and reddened eyes seem concessions to his age.
He sits in a beige chair in the house that he and his wife built, and remembers what KU was like in those days.
"There were no counselors up on the hill; you got in there and sunk or swam," he recollects. He paid no tuition to attend school, only a registration fee of $10 a year, he thinks. His major was chemistry — but with a special twist.
"At that time," he says, "you couldn't study chemistry and go very far in it without being able to understand German. The Germans were the top chemists at that time."
He laughs about a KU football game of long ago: "My brother and a friend went to their first football game they'd ever seen down on McCook Field. In those days, there were no forward passes in football. And it was a case of stand up there and fall down.
"After about 15 minutes, one of 'em says to the other, 'You know, I think it'd be more tum gettin' our guns and goin' up huntin' rabbits up in the bluffs."
For recreation, Griffin liked to go to an occasional movie. He says that other students gathered at the Rock Chalk Cafe, 618 W. 12th St., although he didn't. He said that he wasn't really a part of the KU social life.
Griffin has no words of wisdom for today's KU students. "They wouldn't take it anyhow," he says.
"I think I was sort of a maverick in the way I studied," says Griffin, who was elected Phi Beta Kappa, an undergraduate scholarship society, while at KU.
"When it came to quiz week, I never studied at night," he says. "I don't think I ever tried to cram for it on the theory that if I got myself all
bailed up trying to cram, I was worse off than if I went ahead on what I knew. And so, quiz week I usually went to the movie or something of that sort."
Griffin may be the oldest living KU graduate, but there are several others from later years living in Lawrence. Dorothy (Decker) Anderson, an elegant woman of 77, is a 1929 KU graduate.
She pulls her chair up to an antique table in the condominium, 2608 W. 24th St. Terrace, where she lives with her hair. Her hair is pulled back stylishly with a comb. Her voice is husky, with a trace of a Southern accent.
One of her memories from going to KU is wearing short skirts, high heels
student, first as an undergraduate and later in law school.
Allen remembers the hard work that he and other students had to do to get by. On Saturday nights he usually worked at Watson Library.
While Allen was in school, the bus replaced the street car. Allen lived in a house at 12th and Rhode Island and walked to school and home for meals.
"It was pretty tough," he says. "Some of them waited tables, some worked in restaurants, some of them did whatever they could. The fellas would wait tables for their board."
Today he lives in a 120-year-old farmhouse where he and his wife have lived since 1940. Their five children grew up there.
"When it came to quiz week, I never studied at night. I don't think I ever tried to cram for it, on the theory that if I got myself all balled up trying to cram, I was worse off than if I went ahead on what I knew. And so, quiz week I usually went to the movie or something of that sort."
1912 KU graduate
and hats to class, along with her knee-length possum fur coat.
"Two secrity sisters of mine and I had identical coats, and we looked like three fur tubs walking down the street," she says with a laugh. "Everybody lived in the sorority houses then, and it didn't cost very much — $45 a month."
A glance through the 1929 yearbook reveals that the sorority houses of the day were all medium-sized, wood frame houses, nothing like the buildings of today.
For Anderson, the Kansas Union,
originally planned as a meeting place
for KU men, was the scene of the
weekly variations, or college dances.
Dances were the main social activity,
as she remembers. The enrollment
was 3,000 or thereabouts, she says.
"You knew practically everybody."
Classes were enjoyable for Anderson, but she does remember one disturbing experience at KU.
"My speech and drama classes were all in the basement of old Green, which was right across the street from old Fraser. So all the senior laws (law students) would sit in front of me while whiste when the girls went by. It was quite an ordeal to pass the steps of Green Hall in those short skirts."
She says senior law students carried canes to denote their status.
She advises students nowadays to take advantage of every opportunity at the University.
Anderson left KU in 1929 with a degree in English and a teaching certificate.
When Allen went to school, the men wore corduroy trousers and leather jackets, and the women wore calf-length skirts and bobby socks, he recalls. Marijuana was used by some KU students, Allen says.
Allen doesn't smile much, regarding the world solemnly through clear blue eyes. He is a big, stern-looking man of 71 year; He wears jeans and work boots; all morning he has been farming. He has the deep, resonant voice of a lawyer, which he is. This year he is closing his practice.
The next year, 1930, George Allen,
340 N. Michigan St., began what would be an eight-year stint as a KU
"I can recall that I thought if I could ever get out of this place, I could go home at night and do what I wanted to do, instead of study," he says. "You see. I worked about 44 hours a week and carried about 13 hours. It took up all your time."
He doesn't want to give advice to today's students. "I can remember how glad I was to get out of there," he savin's in his slow, rubbing tones.
"I don't look back on it with any kind of fond nostalgia at all, so ... oh yeah, I'd go back and do it all over again."
Allen may have been glad to leave KU, but Milred Cooper, 2009 Learnard Ave., regrets leaving when she did. After attending school from 1942 to 1944, she quit and married her husband, who was going into the service. She came back later, but had a baby before she could finish her degree.
"But it probably kept me out of a lot of trouble.
Her memories of KU include pleated skirts and bobby socks, and big bands playing tunes like "Cuddle Up a Little Closer." Those were the days when crazy college kids would dress in revealing themselves into phone booths, but she says she never did anything like that.
"I didn't mean for them to grow the big," she says with a straight face.
Cooper, 61, a tiny, pixylike woman,
stands in what used to be her son's
bedroom. All around her, house
plants reach from the floor to the
ceiling. She has had to move the
furniture out to make room for the
gargantuan plants.
While at KU, she lived one year in the Jay Coep Co-op, 1541 Kentucky St. Coop living was a little like an extended slumber party; all of the women slept on mattresses in one big room. In those days, it was a big deal if a man wandered into your living quarters.
"If any man was on second (floor)," she says emphatically, "they screamed at you 'Man on second!' "
By the time the 1950s rolled around, the men were wearing white back shoes with thick, red rubber soles, says George Duerksen, 50, professor of music education, who received his bachelor's degree in 1955.
Cooper's advice to KU students: "I suppose to spend your evenings studying, and maybe confine yourself to weekend going out, and pick a major that will lead to a good career — prepare for something particular. And it would be nice if it would pay good."
Duerksen, who has made his career in music, can't remember
People who lived in rooming houses, like he did some of the time, ate in cafes and restaurants, not fast-food joints, he says. He remembers one friend who went from one restaurant to another to catch the days when they served Swiss steak, his favorite dish.
Duerksen is a cheerful man, youthful-looking and vigorous. His advice to students is the same as that given to him years ago: "Take advantage of the opportunities that are here."
Also popular were brown and blue suede zipper jackets. "That basically was the standard uniform, about like blue jeans are." he says.
what tunes were popular while he was at KU. Rock 'n' roll was new then, but big bands were still popular, he says.
Charles Cornwell, 125 E. 17th St.
46, slender and soft-spoken, left KU in 1965, the year old Fraser Hall was razed. Narrow ties, short haircuts,
the Beatles concert in Kansas City,
Mo., characterized his time at KU.
He grins, saying, "I think my class was the last of the short haircuts."
He had served in the Army before going to KU. Most of his classmates hadn't. Just after he left KU, the war in Vietnam heated up.
"I knew a Jella that got married so he wouldn't be drafted," he recalls. "I knew some who went to Canada."
He says attitudes toward the war shifted over a period of a few years: "I had a political science course in the fall of '64, and the teacher did a poll on what would you do about Vietnam, and there were about 35 or 40 kids in there, and only one said 'Pull out'. And so, all of the rest of us said either, you know, do what we're doing now, or step it up.
"And, of course, if he'd have taken that poll four or five years later ... "
He relaxes sideways on the couch in his house, notable for its polished wood floors and lack of clutter, and considers some advice for today's KU students.
"Back when we were in school, I think anybody that got a college degree was pretty much assured of a job," he says. "And, of course, that is
not now true. I think it's best to select an area, if you have any kind of aptitude, so at least you can get out into the working world."
When Diane Cooper, 1600 New Hampshire St., a 1975 graduate, began at KU, the violence of the late '60s had begun to die down, she says. But she remembers some problems during her senior year at Lawrence High School.
"A lot of the trouble that was going on filtered down into the high school," she says.
Cooper, 32, sits curled up in an old easy chair in a little brown house. As she talks, she tries to keep her 11-month-old daughter from sticking her fingers into the electric fan.
"Of course, Vern (Miller) was around a lot. The drugs were big then," she says.
Vern Miller was the Kansas attorney general who led a pre-dawn drug raid on Lawrence in the early '70s.
As she looks through a 1975 Jayhawker, she shudders. "I can't believe I used to wear my skirts so short!" The pictures of young women with long, straight hair brings back memories of trying to straighten her hair.
It became so bad at one time, she recalls, that her father wouldn't allow her to go to school after he had heard that tear gas was being used in the high school halls.
Cooper, a working mother, gives this advice to KU students: "Enjoy it while you can. There are days when you wish, 'God, I was just back in school again.'"
Students have come and gone since Cooper left, each with his or her own story to tell. Some attained their goals in a straightforward fashion; others found that life held many surprises.
Someday, maybe, a student of today, like Griffin, Anderson, Allen, and all the rest, will lean back in his chair, scratch his head, reminisce a little and drop pearls of wisdom for those to come.
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