University of California Berkeley - Blue and Gold Yearbook (Berkeley, CA)

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Both classes pursued pell mell and Enslow ( ' 80) caught the runner just as he sought to dodge under a fence. The fence was shattered in an instant and Enslow, hugging the recovered ball, was thrown down and the two classes rushed over his prostrate form until the going down of the sun. His ear was nearly torn off, but still the Iron Duke, as we afterwards admiringly called him, held on to the ball. The fleeting character of earthly fame was vividly brought home to us later when a delver into the records of the past proclaimed that this same Ora M. Enslow was the first girl to take the engineering course. There were beer busts in those days and also the first attempts at antidoting them. One of these was the Berkeley Temperance Society, the B. T. S. organ- ized by the girls of the Congregational Church then the only church in town to lead the students away from temptation. Some of the girls were pretty and the pledge being to abstain from intoxicants only during the college course, a good many students joined, so many that they soon came to have a large working majority in the meetings. When this was ascertained there came the famous debate on a resolu- tion that beer is not intoxicating. It was bitterly fought, but carried by a decisive vote of the students, and the B. T. S. soon disbanded. It was during this debate that the personalities were exchanged that resulted in the great duel between Pete Riley and Al Painter. The harrowing details of that fierce encounter are too long and fearsome to repeat here, but the intent of the whole thing was to hoax Lowe, the freshman, one of the seconds and the only person who went through the affair in deadly earnest. It was the fashion in those days to perpetrate one such hoax each year, and the victim of this heroic treatment and its resulting Homeric laughter was truly to be pitied. The next year after the duel it was the mysterious Epsilon Gamma Sigma, or E. G. S. Translated this was the Eighty Gulling Society, and it found its victim in a freshman who was led to believe that by certain curious antics as a high sign he could gain release from an awkward exaction in mathematics. The puzzled instructor on whom the signal was tried joined in the laughter when the matter was explained to him after class, but the initiate was so chagrined that he left college for a time. Freshmen were sometimes hazed as well as hoaxed in those days and the first year man who carried a cane on the campus or smoked a pipe, was apt to be awakened in the night by ghostly visitants, who made him do strange stunts and left him shorn of half his hair. It was etiquette, too, for the students to help out the faculty in the matter of examining matriculants on the theory that it was at least as important to the students as to the faculty to have the entering class of the right stuff. So the little faculty was always on duty and its examination questions were of the most practical, if disconcerting, character. Sometimes, of course, such pranks were carried too far and did harm, but I doubt if on the whole their influence was not wholesome, a corrective of the frequent bump- tiousness of the pet pupil of the high school, and a rude but salutary introduction 30