University of Miami - Ibis Yearbook (Coral Gables, FL)

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A NEW LOOK AT A YOUNG PAST UM was born during the Miami land boom. It was certain that somebody would suggest building a university .... Miami in the mid 1920 ' s was sleek and sassy, feeling its oats, rarin ' to go. A war had been won. Coolidge prosperity was shifting from second gear to high and in South Florida a wonder had happened. Some few had long known that along a stretch of water known as Biscayne Bay the winters were warm, the air salubrious and the sea full of fish. Once get that idea into the minds of snow-weary Northerners and you could start a stampede. George Merrick did just that. There was the land. He had the imagination. The time was ripe. The unbroken cover of Caribbean pine became a checkerboard of sidewalks, streets and canals. Across the Bay a mangrove swamp was pumped full of sand to make Miami Beach and its satellite islands and causeways. America ' s last frontier really had disappeared. William E. Walsh tossed in the idea of open-air schooling, a revival of the natural setting. George Merrick saw a towering Spanish Rennaissance palace of education. Concrete flowed into foundation molds and the building began to take shape. When the massive structure was partially completed, dedication ceremonies were held. George Merrick stood atop the mass of steel and mortar and formally dedicated the new institution, the modern open-air university of the South. The new beams and white, freshly -poured concrete of the University building sparkled that day. The Ijoom was on, prosperity was the keynote of the times, and the University seemed destined to mature rapidly- But fate deemed otherwise. Howling off the Atlantic, the terrible 1926 hurricane swept across South Florida. When the wind diminished, the Miami area was in shambles. The economic chaos which followed the destruction soon made shambles of the planner ' s dreams. The University ' s future was not to be realized yet. The University opened on a schedule that fall, not on an artificial hill 200 feet high which will be the highest spot in Dade County - in an unfinished abandoned hotel. Pupils who were to woo the muse in ducal splendor whipped together an orchestra in the resounding corridors of the Cardboard College. Ahead of the new University of Miami was a decade of recurring crises which can only be summed up as pioneering in the roughest sense. And perhaps that was all to the good. The important ideas had been there from the beginning ... a college of Pan-American scope which would use the location as the crossroads of the Americas for an interchange of students learning goodwill. Bowman Foster Ashe, who conceived the basic ideas in 1926, was given the chance to build them into reality. 20 The life of the University following the great hurricane of 1926 was a period fraught with despair, setbacks and curdled dreams. When the doors were open to the first students, 275 of an expected 5,000, the school was strapped with a $500,000 debt and classroom facilities limited to the triangular building known as the North Campus. What is now the Main Campus was then a sandy waste surrounding a windswept skeleton of hoped-for grandeur. Social activities began at UM in an era when the primary aim of American society was to have a good time. But despite the fact that roaring good times were enjoyed at the University, a Miami Herald headline in the early days read: Liquor and Fags Barred at Miami. Whenever a new fraternity was formed on the UM campus during the period of ' 20 ' s, the shingle-bobbed coeds celebrated the occasion by rolling their three- quarter length socks down to their ankles. Miami men, barred by the balmy weather from wearing the stylish raccoon coats, blew off their college steam by dashing about the streets in multi-colored and sigh- bedecked Model T ' s. The depression days saw the University in bankruptcy and at the lowest point in its history. Students were forced to scrape by on practically nothing.