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

Page 25 text:

i In the mid ' 30 ' s the tri-colored spirits got a boost when Ernest Duhaime donated Little Black Joe a cannon that would signal each Hurricane football score. Little Black Joe was made off with after a spirited game in ' 36, and the following year Erl Roman donated the now famous Touchdown Tommy cannon. In ' 39 a Miami Herald headline testified that things were back to normal. Said the headline: Necking Still as Popular as Ever; University of Miami Coeds Declare. With the times finally improving, the University was brought back from financial abyss and the young school began to strengthen itself for the growth that wo ' uld begin during the war years. War had come to almost every nation but the United States by that September in 1941 but the students went about their business, hoping that they would not be affected by the fighting so far away. But December 7 did come, with its conflict and uncertainties, and UM students were swept into its tide. The first general move was the cancell ing of all social functions. Sororities required members to enroll in Red Cross courses and bought war bonds with money usually used for traditional dances and banquets. Tires were taken off the market. Sugar was rationed. The Slop Shop put up the sign: Use Less Sugar and Stir Like Hell We D9n ' t Mind The Noise. Frosh still threw upperclassmen in the pond and vice versa, despite the fact that most of those upperclassmen were in uniform and in training at UM. The war was thought of so highly that a War Council was formed. Juke The Japs With The Slop Shop Jive was just one of the slogans used to sell bonds. Back to pre-war curriculum with less emphasis on military courses went the UM as the last V-12 unit graduated in October, 1945 and bell-bottom trousers disappeared from the campus. The best football team in a long time topped the season with a New Year ' s Orange Bowl victory. Veterans and new buildings made UM boom. Classes were scattered amo ng three campuses, North, South, and Main. Interminable griping centered around commuting as the fleet of 30 buses whisked students from campus to campus. Classes were carried on to the rhythm of hammer and saw while construction of the new buildings boomed overnight. Frosh flung rat caps , some 3,516 of them, into the air as Touchdown Tommy roared. More than 1,000 freshmen lived, attended classes, played, griped and joked on the 2,700 acres of South Campus, the reconverted Richmond Lighter Than Air ' Naval Base. The Frosh who entered in ' 47 gained one advantage South Campus became coed. Students gave the University a surge of school spirit which was reminiscent of pre-war days. The base was well equipped for the Navy but not for the student. In 1947, a new modernistic building, Memorial Classroom Building, opened on Main Campus amidst blocks of temporary wooden structures and acres of pine. Students felt UM had finally come of age! Student Activities took a surge with the advent of the country ' s most modern student union and with Dr. Thurston Adams, activities director. The class of ' 48 were around long enough to see the opening of the dorms, nearly 600 apartment units, which gave the students greater freedom and a chance to cook for themselves. The abandonment of South Campus and its extensive facilities was offset by the addition of the Main Campus intramural fields. About this time, a big contest was held to rename the Slop Shop. The winning title?, Slop Shop! The Saturday Evening Post featured UM as Sun Tan U to garner more national recognition by exploring the tropical aspects of the southernmost school in the United States. The realization of almost a quarter of a century of dreams came late in ' 49 when the old skeleton became the Merrick Building. Alumni poured back for Homecoming, exclaimed over changes and were amused by President Ashe ' s leading the Homecoming Parade in a dilapidated jalopy. After the war, the University grew with remarkable speed. Enrollment tripled in 1946 to 6,500. By 1952, with President Jay F. W. Pearson carrying the UM tradition, full time enrollment had reached 10,000. CHEni$TinrOrncE-lJf none ECONOMICS SCIENCE RADIO TV- PI 1 The University, now is one of the youngest major complex universities in the country. In a brief 41 years, it had undertaken certain educational chores which Henry King Stanford, now president, is defining for our future development. UM is a phenomenon which heeds some interpretive mementoes. It is big. It has a bouncing vitality. The subtropical setting involves more than the mere fact that ivy won ' t grow on its walls. Strange dream-like things happen to it. An alligator decimates the white ducks in its campus lake. The football team shoots meteoric to the level of the rarer stars. Nationally important research develops from ideas, skillfully caught with shoestring lassoes. The lily pond reflects the figures of many students seriously contemplative and intent on theirs, and the University ' s future. Copy by Judith Spitz; photographs of north campus by Sandy Levy and Richard Sherman. 21

Page 24 text:

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.

Page 26 text:

TIMELESS TRADITIONS OF A YOUNG UNIVERSITY