Wesleyan College - Veterropt Yearbook (Macon, GA)

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VETERROPT, 1923 A Page twenty SITE OF GREATER WESLEYAN

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VETERROPT, 1923 The Spirit of Wesleyan ELL, yes, for one family it does seem that there arc a good many of us, but I wouldn’t have it any other way, would you? I rather like large families, and there are just enough of us to keep this the jolliest as well as the oldest family in all the world ! Can you ever forget how we were received when we first came into the family, and climbed up the old stone steps, struggling desperately to keep our numerous articles of baggage together, and even more desperately to keep our falling spirits together? It war. just as if they said to us, “Come into the lire, little sister! VVe have been waiting for you !” Oh, of course we had heard long before about the wonders and advantages of this Wesleyan. We knew that it was the very oldest woman’s college in the world, that it was a member of the Southern Association of Colleges, and that its future promised to surpass even the wildest dreams of its loyal alumna . But we’ve learned, since we became a part of the family, that a Wesleyan girl is not thinking of these things when she declares: “There’s just not another college like ours anywhere!” We have discovered, too, that neither its treasured traditions nor its standing among colleges of the South had anything to do with that other adjective that some- body added, back in the past, to the sum of its merits — the best! The oldest college — and the best! It was the spirit of Wesleyan which prompted that, and, deeply as you and I feel it, we find it almost an impossibility to say just what makes it. Perhaps that first year, with its delightful little-sistcry feeling, had the most to do with it. What a happy-hearted, blundering bunch we were ! How we were teased by the sophomores, petted by the juniors, and forgiven by everybody else for an endless number of mistakes, because we didn’t know any better! How we could almost feel ourselves growing in importance on Thanksgiving Day, when we swung our new banner aloft with the others on the basketball field and experienced the first real sensations of class spirit! With what wide-eyed amazement at the unheard-of privileges of juniors and seniors we watched the junior prem from the roof of third fioor main, and gazed from our far corner in the dining room upon the Rotary banquet! What a queer feeling of thankfulness was brought to us, as we watched our older sisters go out into the world at commencement, by the realization that there were other years Page nineteen

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at the oldest and best in store for us! And with what a traditional sense of our own greatness did we come back in the fall — sophomores! Perhaps it isn’t that at all. Perhaps the secret of Wesleyan’s spirit lies in the wide-awakeness of everyone of us. We’re a hustling family, and somehow we’ve man- aged to he in the midst of everything without being in each other’s way. The score of a Thanksgiving game is every hit as important to you as it is to the captains of the respective teams, even though you are only a very hoarse “rooter” on the back row. The Glee Club’s success thrills me just as much as if I had been the chief member who had helped to make it. There is not the least doubt in either of our minds that our Student Government Association is the best that could possibly be found or that there could ever be a task too difficult for our Y. W. C. A. to perform! We are, everyone of us, interested in everything that happens at the oldest and best, and we have found that it keeps us all busy most of the time making things happen! And then, you may say what you will, there’s a whisper of long ago days in the midst of present joys that we would not forget if we could. All the old-fashioned towers and time-worn buildings breathe a memory of the days of hoop-skirts and leg o’ mutton sleeves so real that we can almost clasp hands with those sisters of ours from the days when our mothers and their mothers were young! Somehow we have never felt quite so close to the little white-haired lady whom we call “grandmother” as on that day when we discovered her maiden name cut deep in the desk where we study. The knowledge that the first sorority in the world was founded here more than a half a century ago adds to the charm that enfolds every one of us Wesleyan girls. Somehow the bell in the old tower rings with a new note when we think that Harry Stillwell Edwards listened for it years ago, and married one of the very girls who rushed to classes at its summons. The shadowy halls give us a feeling of reverence as though we stood on holy ground when we remember that the poet whose “Marshes of Glynn” and “My Springs” have made the world recognize him as America’s greatest poet wooed here the girl who afterwards became his wife. Somehow there is always a strange tenderness in our hearts when we stop in the midst of our busiest day to inquire after the health of Uncle Johnson, that faithful servant of all the “mistisses”, and hear him say, as he has said “for nigh onto forty year” now: “Ma health am in a state ob distication mos’ compoun procific, thankee, mistis!” Somehow, to those of us who have felt the faint suggestion of yesterday that hovers over our campus, there comes a touch of sadness at the fear that perhaps this may be forgotten in the splendor of a newer and better camous. But then comes the reas- suring thought that a past like the one the mother of colleges has had can never be forgotten, and we pledge ourselves in our hearts to hand down the rich heritage to our daughters so that they, in turn, may give it to theirs. We’re the queerest kind of a family! We’re not quite modern, we are certainly not old-fashioned. We are said to be conservative, but how some of the privileges Page twenty-one