Ran across this booklet in a bottom drawer -- I'd forgotten all about it.
In 1946 -- I seem to remember I was home for some school vacation -- I was contacted LONG-DISTANCE by the DEAN OF WOMEN -- would I, she asked, be interested in copy-editing and updating the (women's)
RULES AND REGULATIONS OF SYRACUSE UNIVERSITY?
I was so impressed to be speaking with that august individual -- in the daytime! before the rates changed! -- so flattered to be asked, that it never occurred to me to ask if there was any payment involved -- so there wasn't.
Of course I did the job, and in time for reprinting before the freshmen arrived that September. Syracuse's Chancellor had promised to take any veteran who applied, and over the summer the student body went from 10,000 (mostly women) to 20,000. Those new students were fresh from at Iwo Jima , the Battle of the Bulge, the liberation of Auschwitz -- and they made short work of the long-standing tradition that new students wore Freshman Beanies for three months.
I have no memory of the work I did on that booklet, though I still have the letter the Dean sent expressing her gratitude. But I came across the old one the other day.
It was dated 1941. Evidently mine would be the first revision -- first reprint -- since The War. Paper had been so scarce -- like most everything else. I have no memory of what guidelines I used, what changes I made, but anyhow, I wanted to show you the sentence that greeted me on the first page I just opened it to --
It was dated 1941. Evidently mine would be the first revision -- first reprint -- since The War. Paper had been so scarce -- like most everything else. I have no memory of what guidelines I used, what changes I made, but anyhow, I wanted to show you the sentence that greeted me on the first page I just opened it to --
There is no dancing or card playing in the dormitory living rooms on Sunday.
The rest of that page makes pretty interesting reading too. Those telephones, for instance, were coin (nickel) wall phones down in the entrance halls -- none of us had individual phones, which were unavailable anyhow like so much else during The War. And while the rules mention leaving the house after 11 o'clock, I remember that freshman girls had 8 pm deadlines, and could sign out for no more than three 9 o'clocks during a semester. As is now obvious from the rest of that booklet, the main concern of that Dean of Women's Office was to see that as few of us as possible, in the days before The Pill, ever showed up pregnant.
The 1941 rule book, at least, suggests to me that SU was still pretty firmly under the thumb of the Methodist Church (which founded the place) at that time. By 1977, when I hit campus as a first-year graduate student, they didn't give a hoot about your morals as long as you paid the bills (or, in my case, showed up regularly to teach freshman English).
ReplyDeleteBut one thing about our SU student experiences was the same: I didn't have a phone in my room in a Skytop graduate dorm, either. (Many of my dorm mates did, but I was getting educated on the budget plan.) So I too relied on the pay phone in the common area--although it cost a quarter instead of a nickel by then. Cell phones were still a science fiction fantasy.