Muhlenberg College - Ciarla Yearbook (Allentown, PA)

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191T CIARLA REMINISCENCES By Dean George T. Ettinger, Ph. D., ’80 A S THE one alumnus in continuous connection with Muhlenberg College for forty- three years, I have been asked to contribute to this issue of the Ciarla an article on the tempting theme of “Remini scences.” Although well aware of the risk that a writer runs when he once begins to deal in such “Ancient History,” I did not have the heart to refuse the present generation a glimpse at the Muhlenberg of long ago. In September, 1873, I was brought to President Frederick A. Muhlenberg, who promptly conducted me to the regions below in the old building that has just been demol- ished at the comer of Fourth and Walnut Streets, where I spent three busy and happy years in the Preparatory Department, fitting myself for college, which I entered in the fall of 1876. As the first President of Muhlenberg and many of the early students came from Penn- sylvania College, Gettysburg, naturally the rules and regulations of the new college were largely modeled after those of the older institution. It will, no doubt, interest those students who now find it difficult to turn up promptly at 8.40 in the morning, to learn that in those good old times of long ago chapel services began at 7.40 A. M., with recitations from eight to twelve in the morning and one recitation from four to five in the afternoon, with a second chapel service, in earlier years, in the evening, and, somewhat later, immediately after recitations at five o’clock in the afternoon. And there were no electives. For four years I enjoyed a sinecure as tutor in the Academic Department. The tutor with but the slightest sort of authority was expected to maintain order among the college students in the building, and, in the evening it was his duty to go from room to room to see that the boys were in; for at eight o’clock, when the bell rang, the theory was, that the boys should be in their rooms and at work. Think of the delightful times a conscientious tutor must have had in maintaining order among a set of collegians on a floor with twelve to fifteen rooms opening on to a long hall resembling a corridor of the Lehigh County Jail ! Many a night the tutor was awakened by the rumbling noise of rolling cobblestones as they traveled the full length of the aforesaid hall, set in motion by some late-comers, returning probably from the hospitable “gast-haus” of “Pappy” Bickel on South Sixth Street. Those were the palmy days of student life, when the boys took their physical culture as an elective at twelve o’clock at night, when a heavy coal wagon was taken apart downstairs, its various component elements quietly carried up to the fifth floor and there on the afore- said fifth floor just as quietly put together again for the delectation and the employment of the janitor next morning. The entire proceeding was a beautiful illustration, in the concrete, of the processes of analysis in taking apart the said wagon on the first floor, and of synthesis in putting it together again on the fifth floor. Although no one was ever openly accused of this Herculean feat, yet suspicions sufficiently strong to have enabled a 109

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New Allentown High School in the Distance

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- i 9 1 T CIA II LA Sherlock Holmes to bring the culprit to justice, pointed to at least one young man, whose light summer trousers from that time forth bore divers marks or stains of axle grease. But Synod week, when the President and the ministerial members of the Faculty were absent, was a carnival season for the students. I still count as one of the greatest achieve- ments of my official life as tutor the capture of a large military drum, which an enterprising town student had, out of the fullness of his heart, brought with him one evening, wherewith to lead the procession through the long halls of the college building. The appointments of those earlier days, when compared with those of the beautiful and commodious college plant now occupying its magnificent site of seventy-two acres, were decidedly primitive, although they may have been ever so conducive to the formation of firm moral fibre. The bathtubs were buckets, in the natural hardwood finish or hand painted as the aesthetic taste of the students dictated ; our electric lights were lamps filled with coal oil at eight cents a quart at a time when the blighting tyranny of the Standard Oil Company had not yet developed to lower the price of oil ; and our steam heat was furnished by a stove in each room, often standing on three legs with a brick in lieu of the fourth. What a miracle that no serious fires ever occurred under these primitive conditions of heating and lighting ! Wh ile to the pampered collegian of today these accommodations may appear to have been decidedly crude, yet they also had their advantages. To be sure, the students were obliged to carry their own coal up to the fifth floor ; but think of the convenience of dumping the ashes down the winding stairway and the added gratification of the janitor. Think of those janitors, each of whom was sui generis ! Engelbert Zenger, the German ; Frank Dent, the cockney Englishman, and Adam Rau, the Pennsylvania German, who indulged in verba sesquipedalia because he was the janitor of a college. I need not tell you which one of this trio, having been sent to the lumber yard for a hitching post, asked for an ’itching post. Even if the fly specks on the ceiling indicated the location of Aldebaran and the Dipper on this improvised celestial map, yet the ideals were lofty; the efforts of students and teachers were earnest; the distractions were less numerous, and the things of the spirit were still considered of greatest worth. While we justly glory in the present and hopefully look into the future, let us not forget the past and, above all, the men in that past that have made possible the present. For, to the scholarship and the character, the loving loyalty and the self-sacrificing services of Frederick A. Muhlenberg, Benjamin Sadtler, Theodore E. Seip, Davis Garber and Matthias H. Richards, Muhlenberg College owes a debt of gratitude that eternity alone can pay. 110