Oregon State University - Beaver Yearbook (Corvallis, OR)

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FROM AN ALUMNUS most of us, that otherwise most delightful of studies, history, was made a dreadful and dreaded thing in our public school days by the constantly recurring dates that our teachers insisted upon our remembering. Few of us ever remembered them long, and if we had little good would it do us at present. I do not believe the memory faculty was strengthened by this early tax upon it. and the stress of trying to keep associated in our minds certain dates and certain events made it impossible to get more than a faint impression of the moving impulses. Books of reference are made for dates and therein let them be recorded. In these desultory recollections, the incidents shall be dateless. For my theme I shall take the remark of a present under-graduate who in commenting upon college affairs of earlier days states There were no student activities in those days.” This young man had reference to organized activities: he understood human nature sufficiently to know, that regardless of period or clime, students arc and of necessity must be, irrepressibly active. When I matriculated at the Oregon Agricultural College, nearly thirty years ago, there was but one college building, it being located on a “down-town block. During this early period there were no college athletics at O. A. C. The only games played on the college grounds at that time were “shinny and marbles. However, some of the boys played baseball, but as members of the town team. The beginning of college athletics was during the administration of President Bloss when his son, W ill. II. Bloss, organized the first college football team in the state. The University of Oregon was persuaded to form a team, and intercollegiate athletic contests were initiated. “Zip Boom Bee was the first college yell in Oregon and I think Mr. Will Bloss was the designer of that classic which still holds first rank in popular favor at a O. A. C. At this time it might be well to state that there was an occasional military drill with either President Arnold or Professor Hawthorne as drill masters, both of whom served in the civil war. This drill was confined to the evolutions, as we had iK) guns. It must be admitted also that there were no student social activities during my time at college. Parties and social gatherings were plentiful, but these were town rather than college functions. When I entered O. A. C. there was one student organization successfully maintained, the Adelphian Literary Society, which met every Friday night. The society had its own assembly room in the college building, and on the regular meeting nights the room was usually crowded. One of the features of the evening program was the reading of the Adelphian Review, a paper edited by one [26]

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or more members. Copies of this paper may be found at the present time stored away in relic rooms of the administration building. A secret society, T. J. S., which initials spelled to the initiated “The Jolly Sixteen,” originally a town organization, became an unofficial and unrecognized college society during my first year at school. It met for awhile in one of the class rooms Saturday evenings: but during one of its initiation festivities, when a candidate was demonstrating his physical fitness for membership and at the same time energetically opposing some of the mystic rites, the stove was upset, window lights broken and a desk or so demolished. The faculty, without unnecessary delicacy, intimated that they would immediately approve a request from the “Jolly Sixteen” to have its lease of the class room terminated. Later the “Jolly Sixteen” figured in a newspaper war with one of the professors, the immediate cause being a minstrel show staged by the members of the society. In a letter to thte Corvallis Gazette the professor condemned the performance as altogether unbecoming. During my second year another secret organization, “The Knights of Justice” was organized. Its list of officers included judge, prosecuting attorney, clerk of the court, sheriff and bailiff, and its province was to acquaint prospective lawyers with court methods. Mock trials were held weekly and the attorneys consulted down-town lawyers, and followed the rules of the real courts. While some of the cases tried were humorous, nothing farcial was permitted and today many of the former members of the “Knights of Justice” (among them Will R. King, one of the prominent members of the Portland bar ar.d a former judge of [27 J