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Volume CXXXII, Number 9 |
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Spirited campus, part II
KID WONGSRICHANALAI
STAFF WRITER
Those days of suffering and separation, however, were in the future-not far in the future but in the future nonetheless. In the meantime there was still the busy business of living. Bowdoin played host to its annual house parties that cold Maine winter by inviting to campus some of the prettiest girls on the eastern seaboards. Along to provide entertainment was Artie Shaw and his band. As the undergraduates danced and celebrated life in the chilly night there was happiness and enthusiasm in the air. In the town of Brunswick there was also celebration that Christmas season as Bowdoin fraternities donated $140 for holiday dinners and gifts-feeding up to 230 Brunswick citizens.
For the Class of 1941, the daily routine of Bowdoin life slowly became habit. They went to Chapel, they went to classes, ate in the Moulton Union, served at the whim of their upper-class brothers, debated issues, practiced sports, and generally tried to enjoy their time at Bowdoin. In many ways life was simpler and easier. Rail communications with Boston and Portland were established and the railroad station was a quick walk away. Laundry was even easier; all a student had to do (if he lived within a few states of Maine) was to drop his dirty cloths in a basket, send it down by rail to his parents and wait for it to be returned. So successful was this operation that the Railway Express could afford to print an ad, complete with photograph, in the student paper. "Whether it's send collect or prepaid" the ad read, "your laundry always arrives quickly, safely, by Railway Express-the favorite laundry route of generations of college men and women." Young Everett Parker Pope from North Quincy, Massachusetts, a member of the Class of 1941, was one such individual who enjoyed this service. "We used to send [the laundry] home to my mother and that had some advantages," he remembers-these advantages being brownies or other such treats in the laundry basket when it returned.
The young men of Bowdoin could thus concentrate on their work and fun. In the spring of 1938, almost a year after the Class of 1941 had come to the campus, they began to try out for Walsh's Polar Bear football team. eighty-four reported to the coach, including a handsome fullback named Andrew Haldane. As the flowers began to bloom, the freshmen rose to fight once more with their tormentors, the sophomores, in a frenzy of rotten fruit and spraying water. The Orient proclaimed it "one of the wildest, fruit slingin' water dousin', panel breakin', clothes strippin' scraps that has met the eyes of Bowdoin men in several years." With these fights and other dreaded events-such as finals-the academic year ended in June of 1938. The seniors graduated into an uncertain world, still trying to disbelieve the obvious truth that another war was swiftly coming. In China the Japanese armies entered, destroyed, and massacred thousands of innocent civilians in what was known as the Rape of Nanking. In Europe indecision amongst the allied powers aided rather than prevented Hitler's armies from marching into Austria and uniting it with the growing German nation. Be aware of international events, Sills warned graduates and returning students alike:
If you think the question of international affairs has nothing to do with you, go out someday and read the names of your older brothers inscribed on the memorial flagstaff. A score of years ago or so, the undergraduates of Bowdoin did not think what was happening in Europe was any concern of theirs.
The generation that Sills alluded to in his speech were on campus later that year. Members of the Class of 1912, feeling that they should give something back to their alma mater, returned to donate a 20-ton Westerly White granite polar bear statue. Sculpted by the famed F. G. R. Roth of New Jersey-the same man who created Columbia University's Lion and Princeton University's Tigers-the 11 foot monument was a gift and as Henry A. Shorey, a member of the Class of 1941 and Orient correspondent put it, "The doners hope, of course, that Bowdoin men past, present, and future will take the Bear to their hearts and look upon it as a definite expression to them of much that Bowdoin means."
The members of the Class of 1941 survived their first year virtually intact. They were no longer the youngest members of the College community and thus with their embarrassing and fond memories of their first years behind them, they went on vacation, knowing that their best moments at Bowdoin College were yet to come.
Elsewhere, men and tanks were moving and a depressed world crept ever closer to full-scale war.
Next Time: Down The Road To War.